On the cliff's edge

One of the major hangups in writing a book is when you have an idea about what is going to happen at a certain point, and you write it, and it doesn't work. So you spend a lot of time trying to make it work. At some point during that process, I go through an existential crisis, where I have to stand back and question EVERYTHING. This is scary. If you question everything, soon nothing seems to work. But it's also a chance to find those assumed story choices that shouldn't be there, wipe them out and start fresh. This crisis doesn't happen for me every book on a large scale, thank goodness. It's an exhausting and frightening encounter with my own fallibility and the randomness of stories and the flimsiness of the idea that a story can or can't work at all. But so far, I've always emerged from them, finished the book, and was able to see it much better for it. The Rapunzel sequel with through this. princess academy. The new grownup book I'm writing.

I really hope I don't hit that with Bayern 4. It's been enough of a struggle as it is. Seriously. Those Bayern books know how to kick my rear. Right now I'm trying to make what I have work. I'm adding much and deleting much, changing events, scrapping scenes and adding new ones, discovering new layers of depth. But so far, I'm trying to let it stand essentially as the story that I began with. We'll see if it works. Right now, this book has me by the throat.