I’ve posted about the trials and tribulations of my second book before, so I thought I’d update you on my progress.
I’ve often referred to my second novel, Divorcing a Dead Man, as my own version of The Empire Strikes Back. You know, the depressing all hope is lost thing, the couple may or may not make it as a couple, and someone needs to die in order for the storyline to be complete. Well, I finished it. At least I thought I had. But something wasn’t right. I picked and pulled at it, and while it was okay, it was just, well, okay.
Then I sent it out for my readers to dissect and an interesting thing happened. They all made the same comment. “I liked it, but I was really disappointed that there wasn’t a …..(I’m not going to tell you this part. It’s kind of a spoiler.) … at the end of the book. My response to their comment was, “I know, but I don’t think I’m going to write that scene.”
Guess what I just spent the last two days going? Writing said scene.
I decided to just see what would happen if I wrote it. It had been in my head for months, but I didn’t think it would write well. My intention was to just get it on paper so I wouldn’t forget it. I spent two nights working on it and discovered I was right. It didn’t write well. It wrote really, really well! As a matter of fact, I thought it might be better than anything I’d written for the second book. So I went back and re-read the manuscript and realized something. The ending of the book was wrong, really wrong. In addition, the right ending was my experimental scene.
So, here’s the update. Divorcing a Dead Man is no longer finished. Hopefully I can complete that sentence differently sometime in the next few weeks.
Really excited for Starbucks tomorrow.