I’m just about done with the next new scene in Secret.  This one serves several purposes.  First, it deals with Lynn feeling a bit cheated about setting up a date in a lot of detail, and then cutting away from it to afterward in the next scene.  It also puts a little more Earth Day flavor into the mix, strengthening the theme in a direct fashion, which she felt was weak in the story.  There’s more, but babbling about it would give away too much of the plot *laugh*

Suffice to say, all of the new scenes are for the express purpose of pumping up elements that she felt were weak in the story, and/or replacing important plot points that originally involved other family members — whom I’m relegating to a much lesser role in the tale.

After that is tweaking a couple of scenes and cutting one with Steve and Gary out of the story completely.  As much as I loved the interaction in that scene, Lynn’s right that there are just too many characters to handle.

I was getting that feeling in SOTM, too.  Part of what’s got me moving again is that I was in just the right place to put a lot of characters in that story sort of behind the curtain for a while, letting me focus a bit more.

But, back to Secret.  I think that I only have one new scene that I’ll need to add after this one, mainly for character development of my female lead.  Everything else will involve tweaking existing scenes.  Not sure that I’ll have it done in ten days for the opening of the contest, but I’m fairly confident that it will be finished in time to enter.

I’m about a quarter of the way through the reworking of Secret, but better than half of that has been reworking already written scenes.  I have several entirely new scenes that I need to get in there to straighten this one out.

Went through and made some decisions on changes to Lowborn, but haven’t actually implemented any of them, yet.  As I said, the changes in that one are pretty minor and won’t take long.

Finished up the ending of Amber, so I just need to go back and write that wild party scene that’s vexxing me.  Also wrote a little on SOTM.  Though I’m giving some priority to Secret right now, so that it will be ready for the contest ( hoping for Day 1 ) other things continue in the meantime.

I got the impression reads back for both Lowborn 05 and Secret yesterday, so I’m working on ironing out those stories.  Lowborn will mostly be tweaking, but there is some major restructuring and rewriting to do on Secret.  That one’s going to take a little while.

Odds are that I’ll pause here and there and drop scenes into Ch. 17 of SOTM.  The story is still flowing in my head, and I’m not going to give it time to stop bubbling if I can help it.

Also put a touch or two onto Amber.  Skipped ahead past the scene I’m struggling to visualize and wrote the biggest part of the ending.  Just a little bit more of it, and I’ll be ready to go back and try that difficult scene again.