It’s hard (I mean EXCITING) to be rewriting the first half of the book I’ve slaved over for intense periods during the last five years. Not that I’m bitter, exactly, it’s just that I thought I knew how the story was supposed to go four years ago. (Hey, I think Adrift… turned five this week!)

Okay, that rant’s behind me. On to the new thing I’ve learned in the last few weeks.

The ghosts knew a lot and were telling it as flashbacks. Now I’m dramatizing those scenes and the story is changing. I’m seeing options.

Look back at your first love affair. You think “He and I were in love from the first moment.” But were you? What about the first time he farted…were you so in love with him then?

And don’t you remember all the miscommunications that happened? The arm stretch that you thought was going to be the first hug but it really was just an arm stretch? Or when he turned to you and said, “I’d really like to…(long, loving gaze)…watch the football game tonight.”

So I have an opportunity to be evil. To not make the path of romance so true. (Okay, so maybe it never was that true in this circuitous book.) I can throw a monkey wrench into the works on its first rotation, so that although Sylvia may remember she was in love with Cort from the first time she saw him and that love never waivered, we know that he passed a little gas along the way.

This post was originally written February 7, 2008 for the private blog of my writing group, Novel-ties.