Good Thing, Bad Thing

Bad thing: realising that the plot took a wrong turn about sixty pages back.

Good thing: at least now I can fix it, rather than staring at the book thinking ‘This is crap! I can’t get on with this book because something’s wrong with it, and I can’t start a different book because my brain is just really not in a world-building place right now, and I will be doomed to writer’s block forever while everyone I know writes books and is happy’.

I apologise for yet another post on why writing Heavy Ice is giving me so much trouble. I’m not even sure whether this book is a particularly tiresome beast, or whether this is just how I work, and I suspect it’s a combination of the two – I got stuck on the Awful Corridor Scene in the early chapters of what is now The Hawkwood War (the one involving the fight where Catha’s wearing her wedding dress, for people who are now thinking ‘But there are so many scenes in corridors!’ in a baffled way) to the point that I couldn’t write anything for months. I suspect that in future years it will be comforting to think ‘I had all that trouble over Heavy Ice, and that turned out OK’, even if it isn’t all that comforting at present.