Rewriting

Since I realized yesterday that I was an idiot, my task today was to go back and see if I could undo all the damage I'd done to the current manuscript. The plot fix came first. I went through the manuscript looking for all the places where I'd try to force it to go in a direction it didn't need to go. In most instances the problems weren't too bad. Delete a few paragraphs here, rewrite a few paragraphs there. But in one scene when I took out the stuff that had to come out, I was left with a big gap. I couldn't figure out what to do there, so I put it aside and went to the protagonist problem. Again, not too bad. Mostly I added lines of dialogue and bits of interaction with other characters to make the protagonist's personality a little stronger and to set up some things that will come later in the book. And the work I was doing on him circled back around to the plot problem and made me realize what I needed to do there. So after spending most of the day deleting, revising, writing new material to replace what I'd deleted, and cutting and pasting a bunch of text here and there, I realized that I was smack-dab on the original line of scrimmage. I had the exact same number of pages that I did before I started the repair job. To a page-obsessed ol' pelican like me, that was unacceptable. Now, though, instead of the dead end I was facing yesterday, I could see what needed to happen next, so I was able to forge ahead and add five pages to the total. Doesn't look that good on the stat sheet, to continue the football allusions, but I felt like it was a good day's work, anyway.