Before anybody asks, no I haven’t cut Act Two yet.  I’m fairly happy with Act One, and Act Four is going to need very little rewriting and no cutting because it’s already short, thank god, so it’s Act Two and Act Three that I have to cut anywhere from seventy to eighty pages from.  Each.  As Button would say, Crap.

Act Two is going to be the real bitch, so I skipped ahead to Act Three, thinking it would be a piece of cake since it could be divided into the Three Faces of Nick: 1858, 1934, 1981.  And if it were Nick’s book, it would be easy. But it’s Nita’s book, which means that even though I can keep those three divisions, they have to be about Nita, not Nick.  I even broke the damn act on the wrong turning point.  I had it the scene where Nick collapses from being poisoned, but Nita doesn’t find out about it until several scenes later.  So the scene where Nita realizes Nick isn’t Nick any more and she’s alone again, is the turning point.  Except I never really wrote that scene, at least not that way.

So now I must rethink this act.  

Crap.

The rest of this post is me thinking out loud, and you know how that goes: disjointed and boring.  Feel free to stop reading now.  

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