BREAKING: Blaze Tuesday (PI) Undergoes Major Surgery

So I’m back in editing.

This time I’m doing massive surgery on BLAZE TUESDAY AND THE CASE OF THE KNIGHT SURGEON. Major surgery to the tune of about 10,000 words. (Ideally. I’m not *quite* there yet.)

I’m adding stuff to the book  in this surgery, not removing, thankfully.

If I was cutting 10 k words out of this book, I’d be eating my feelings and sobbing uncontrollably on the floor.

So adding isn’t as much of a nightmare as cutting. I have a really solid plan of where I’m going with what I’m adding and it makes the plot of this book a bazillion times more coherent. And I’m just surprised that no one who read this book, in beta mode or otherwise, had pointed out what now seems to be an extraordinary lapse in judgement on my part.

I could sit here and blame this oversight on the fact that this is literally my first noir/crime rodeo, but that’s just lazy.

I messed up the plot, and I didn’t realize it until now. Well, not so much “messed up” as “the ending was so far out of left field that there’s really no logical reason why it should have gotten there without having added something else first.” It isn’t a plot hole so much as it is something that adds to the general coherency of the story, and makes the ending make a lot more sense.

It’s also really good that this is the first in a series because there’s a few people introduced who will be bigger players in the upcoming novels.

 

So, now that I’ve gotten the ranting and bitterness of my failed publishing deal out of the way, I’m back, ready to perform some major surgery on my book baby and get this thing out into the world of actual publication.

By the time I’m done, this isn’t gonna be quite the same KNIGHT SURGEON that was out there before, and I hope that it’ll be more widely accepted and loved and picked up so that I can join Stephen Blackmoore in the ranks of kickass noir writers with awesome book deals.

Did you read KNIGHT SURGEON? Are you interested in reading it again? Did you like Blaze?

Have you ever had something that you thought was 100% complete only to have your “muse” punch you in the face and force you to add or do a major rewrite? How did you cope with that?