Well, in a fit of exhaustion, I managed to delete tonight’s blog entry. I can’t believe it. I need a nap.

Basically what it said was:

Bob was right when he said I had to fix that plot point. I offered a compromise, he tweaked it and made it better (but NOT a tac nuke), and now I have a great ending because of it. So Bob is a hero.

Because of that, the first and fourth acts really pulled together and now make sense. The Mess in the Middle is still a mess, but I’m getting closer.

Trudy has a complete four act character arc that makes sense and will pull the whole novella together.

Nolan has a first and fourth act chartacter arc, and I’m sure there’ll be movement for him in Two and Three once I solve the Mess in the Middle.

There are two motifs for sure: Santa Baby sung by four different artists and the phrase “Maybe it fell off the sleigh.”

The settings are still a structural problem–toy store, street, cab, outside of warehouse, warehouse, outside of warehouse, home–but if I make the transitions tight, I might be able to get a kind of hero’s journey going there, or at least a Red Riding Hood thing, with Trudy trying to get her basket home past all the wolves.

And I’m generally feeling much more optimistic. Except that I just lost this whole blog entry which had much more detail. Definitely time for a nap. Or maybe some time on the treadclimber, that often jumpstarts my mental processes.

I can’t believe I lost an entire blog entry. I was using it for notes for the story, too, so it’s really bad. Must learn to hit “Save As Draft” when I wander off.

Oh, and I wrote nothing today. Not a word. So I have two days left to write 8,000 words.

Argh.