More outlining and innate fear of crits!

I am a useless, completely unproductive goober. I've spent something like the last two days... including breaks at work... working on outlines and notes. And outlines. And pages of notes. Longhand. When I have a perfectly good Horace (er, a Neo) sitting in my bag all the time, just begging to be used (Horace might interject that he would prefer to be left the hell alone, thank you and get the fuck out, snarlcough).

Brainstorming, outlining, connecting the dots... it's one of my favorite parts of the process. Never mind that I got an awful lot of previously unwieldy detail work pounded out, or that it's brilliant (clearly I haven't read back over my notes yet), or that I even sketched out a new character*. It's all coincidental. The last two days have been about self-indulgence, and that bothers me a little. Even productive self-indulgence feels a little shameful.

*A character with a bee allergy. A character who is an angry, twitching little man most of the time but an angry, twitching, terrified man during the summer. I love neurotics. They are so much fun to write, and it gives the rest of the cast someone to make fun of other than me!

I figured out how I want to catch the guy, though... I'm not wholly in love with it, but I threw the thing to the mercy of the comment box on AW and got a great post with a very useful factoid about incinerators. That information helps a lot, and while the solution still doesn't thrill me, I have an idea with which to add to it that does. I'm going to write it and let it fester a while.

To wrap up the night, I posted the first little section- just under 1000 words- of this particular project in the SYW section of AW. Now I'll sit with my legs crossed to keep in the pee of fear. Or maybeprobably I'll take an Ambien and go to bed. But I'm sure there will be fear pee in the morning. Maybe they won't see it!

Minor (and major) changes to the WIP...

The only thing that hasn't really changed is the avoidance thing. :P

I think I've decided to tweak my ending a little... much as I was looking forward to decimating the happy there at the end, I think I'll let that particular guilt-ridden love interest live and kill the other. The one discovers the identity of the murderer and drags his feet while trying to deal with the reality of ousting the closest thing to a father figure he's ever had... and in the interim, the murderer abducts the MC's son. I thought I might off him due to almost-getting-girlfriend's-son-killed guilt combined with the guilt of having to bring the hammer down on the murderer*... but now I'm thinking the police chief rather deserves it more.

The police chief, after all, has been heading a sub-par investigation concerning the disappearances of the boys... after all, to a certain point in the MS he has proof that they are actually dead, only missing, and the publicity of the thing is drawing donations and publicity for the little town. May have to drag the mayor in on that one. While he is doing that, two more boys are abducted and killed and a third narrowly escapes. I think I'll have fun writing that final scene... sometime after he discovers that being dead is the best thing they have going for them; they were tortured for days, maimed and beaten, before they were finally killed. There is video footage of that due to the murderer's personal psychosis.

* That said, the whole family is a bit screwed up. So it wouldn't be entirely out of place. But I like the idea of there being a bit of hope left at the end of the thing beyond my MC and her son.

Huh. Happy endings- who knew?!

I've also gone back and expanded a little on the McDermont boy's plight in two separate scenes. It's still just enough to let you know where his mind is and not exactly what's happening to him physically... I'm not sure if I have his age nailed, though. That's going to take some thought later, but now I'm going to leave it and push through to the next thing.

It's all a lot of crap writing right now, and that's the hardest thing for me to get through... my self-editor's hat has actually grown into my scalp at this point and it's nearly impossible to stop tweaking this and changing that.