Yesterday I wrote about Travel Plans, the presumptive third book in the Plans series, which is my series of interactive novels. After I wrote that post, I sat down and started working on new words for the book, since I’d only finished about 20 percent of it (20 percent of the total number of pages, anyway). I got about 5000 words in when I realized that I’d made a mistake in my outline.

A big one.

I won’t say it was as demoralizing as getting rejected for jobs for six straight months, but it was pretty heartbreaking to see that I’d done all this work and I had a couple of pages that were completely wrong. Instead of dealing with the trip to Wyoming, they were about the trip to Georgia, which are two very different paths in the book. My original goal was to write the entire trip to Wyoming first, and then come back and do the other path, but now I’ve hit a wall.

I tried to write a bit more, but it came off as rushed, like I was trying to muscle my way through the story. I guess when you have 326 pages to write, and you keep adding on new ones to make up for mistakes you’ve made in your outline, things get difficult. The percentage complete goes down instead of up. And who knows? Maybe if I write everything else then I’ll find the missing or mis-numbered pages and not have to redo the entire outline. That’s something I really don’t want to do. I did try to start redoing it, but it seemed like a waste of time when I had all these other pages that I could be writing instead.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen next. I did come up with a couple of ideas for a sequel to Lessons — I don’t know if they’ll work or not but I can try to outline them and see what happens. Maybe I’ll write that next. All I know is that I’d better get some more writing done before the end of the year, because my new job starts on January 6 and it’s going to take up a lot of my time.