Second Guessing Myself

I’m struggling with a new proposal I’d like to mail out soon. It’s a revised one, and really it’s my first book remade. It is such a Frankenstein at the moment. I *thought* I was rewriting it and basically doing a new book with old character names. Not so much. My heroine’s motivations are still uneven, and I know my critique partners nailed the flaws. Man.

I’m toying around with ways to steady the heroine, to make her come across as believable and sympathetic, but her emotions are very erratic. I’m starting to turn into Soap Opera Queen. Imagine the brainstorming, if you will:

“Hey! I know. I could make her pregnant with another man’s child. And the hero marries her without knowing it, and she’ll lose the baby, and then they’ll eventually fall in love and live happily ever after.” Oy. Sometimes my bad ideas amaze even me.

One of the worst storylines I ever saw was on “Days of Our Lives” when they actually made one of the heroines possessed by the devil. Okay, at least I haven’t stooped to that. But I do need a way to make her come across better. I’ve ruled out Secret Baby and Possession. That’s progress, isn’t it? My method is to rule out all the bad ideas before the good ones come out.

In other news, my daughter still hasn’t forgiven me for sending her back to daycare. She started in the new room, the one where they begin potty-training the kids. There was major backsliding the first day, which I expected. Today was better–only one accident. But the teacher asked my opinion of Pull-Ups. I told her a resounding, “NO!” If you have a kid who has successfully been trained for going on two weeks, with only minor accidents here and there, you can’t go back like that. Not going to happen. I told her, if I have to do laundry, I’ll just do laundry. Not a problem. But I will not revert back to diapers. (Insert primal scream here) Good Lord, the kid has only been there two days! Cut her a break.

I did have one exciting moment tonight. My son made some major progress on learning to read. He started remembering his sight words, and it went SO MUCH FASTER. Though I love him dearly, hearing him sound out the word R-E-D and D-O-G for the fifteen millionth time made me want to scream. He would read the word on one page. Then the next page, it would be there again, and he’d sound it out again. By the fifth page of seeing the same word, I was about ready to yell, “It’s the word THE! It hasn’t changed since you read it the last time! Gaaaahhh!” But I restrained myself. Tonight when he started to show some recall memory, there was major cheering and screaming and high-fiving. Poor kid didn’t have a clue why Mommy had lost it. But oh, it was so exciting to see him start to recognize sight words and read them without having to sound them out. What a major step. So cool.

Okay, I’ll sign off to try and find another reason why my medieval heroine would not want marriage, but would want the power of being able to control estates. Maybe she wants to be like Anna Nicole :loser: and marry an old geezer. Major ick factor there.