One of the projects I’ve been spinning my wheels on for a few months is a novel, tentatively entitled The Trickster Entanglement. I’ve completed 7 of a planned 20 chapters, have much of chapter 8 drafted, and numerous scenes meant for later at least partially finished. (And I’ve had a rough draft of the climactic battle in chapters 18 & 19 done for a looooooooong time)

However, Entanglement is a sequel. The first novel in this planned series, The Trickster Apocalypse, has been in rewrite for a while. I had a short list of things I knew I still needed to fix, and then I need to go through the whole thing once more to track remaining loose ends.

So, I spent most of the weekend doing that. And then, in the middle of the day Sunday, I suddenly knew what the missing part of chapter 8 of the second book needed to be. A scene I hadn’t previously thought of that 1) moves one subplot forward, 2) ties said subplot quite firmly to the main plot and two other subplots, 3) points the way to chapter 10.

I think this trick has worked. Now I need to find one for each of the other stalled projects…