It's Wednesday and my first meeting doesn't start for ten minutes. I might as well blog.

I took the day off yesterday. It was Lynn's birthday, so we went out to try and frolic and make a day of it. The attempts at frolicking didn't go well, but at the moment, I'm brooding over something else.

Yes, it's the stupid story again. For the sake of brevity, we will be referring to this piece of idiocy in the future as the SEN or Stupid-Effing-Novel.

When I finally sat down to dabble with it last night, I spent two hours re-writing the plot and making notes, trying to figure out why it's stalled out.

It's a reasonably good case idea, I think. I have secondary characters, all reasonably functional for the parts they need to play. I have the crime that's being planned and it's something possible in the universe of the show but not exactly something they did on-screen, so it fits that way. There's a slight weakness around the story's climax, but I'm pretty sure I know how to fix that.

So why doesn’t the SEN work?

After much heartbreak, I realized I need to ditch my opening and write a different one, losing five-sixths of the original material. The opening is half the germ of the idea I started with for the story, but fine, I'll ditch it.

My one and only slash-related scene is at least three times too long. It loses its impact by the time I milk it to death. Cutting it down to the three paragraphs it should be means I have to lose another two pages of supporting scene for What Happened Next, which wasn't slashy, but was, I thought, kind of funny, but fine, I'll cut the stupid thing. (You want a quart of hearts' blood with that?)

much later....

What I thought of as a Major Plot Point turned out to be, when I diagrammed the SEN, just an action scene, There was nothing actually in it that advanced the plot. I took a look at the other three Major Plot Points and they had the same problem, so I spent an hour figuring out why they were important to what was happening and how they could be used to move the SEN forward.

The How-To Books are all adamant on that point, by the way. You can't have action scenes just for the sake of action, the action has to directly relate to moving the story forward. Preferably on two levels, although if I were capable of that level of subtlety, I'd be writing for a living and not for the aggravation of it.

Anyhow, now I'm trying to think of how listening to someone bad-mouth an appliance repairman can be morphed into Major Story Event that reveals Important Clues about where the story is going.

Ideally these Major P)lot Points should also re-emphasize the thematic subtext of the story but they can forget that shit. I gave up on having a "theme" three days ago. About the fifteenth time I went back to the book to refresh my memory of exactly what constitutes a "theme" I decided I'm not cut out to write that way. (I mean, if you can't even retain the concept, the odds of being able to execute it successfully seem small, you know?)

As much as I love the few books on writing technique that I have, it also occurs to me that most of them are really geared more toward script-writing than anything else*, so now I'm second-guessing their approach to digressions, diversions, and scenes included just for fun. These books insist all scenes should advance a tightly knit plot at a measured but increasing pace, but I'm thinking that's maybe not the right structure for fanfic. Especially the kind I write.

("It's too hard," she whined.)

And then, of course, there are the issues around the massive suckitudiousness of the source material.

Like, on the show, they did stuff because they were told to. On paper, the reader expects to get some sense of how the primary character feels and thinks about the stuff and about how his feelings and thoughts about the stuff change through the course of the case.

Especially when some of the stuff revolves around dropping his drawers and inviting his partner to come on over and party.

Which leads me to my main area of frustration.

The truth is, the guys just don't want each other in this story, and I'm not sure why not.

Last week, Mac was definitely showing some interest but for the past few days he's been staring out the window instead of paying attention. Victor never was on board with the idea and he's gotten more and more distant every time the subject has come up.

I don't have what I think of as the "trigger." The bit of whatever that makes the guys look at each other and go, Hey! How about it?

They're kind of stuck on, get away from me.

The longer the two of them stay on get away from me, the more I feel the same way about both them and this SEN.

I totally ate something that didn't agree with me yesterday. I have no idea what it was but, as usual, the slightest physical upset and my entire world falls apart. I am such a wuss.