What stress does to writers…

So, last night I vowed that I would beat my Victorian romance novel into submission. The last third of the book has been giving me fits because the romantic conflict was off. I couldn’t place exactly what the problem was. So yesterday I focused on only the scenes that directly contributed to the romance between the hero and heroine (leaving off the subplots and the suspense plot). That’s when I hit paydirt.

Once I wrote down each scene and whose point of view I was in, there were gaping holes. I wrote entire scenes where I gave the viewpoint of one character but not the other. :loser:

Then came the bigger challenge. It’s one thing to find the problem and quite another to FIX the problem. I found that a bar of Hershey’s Crunch chocolate helped inspire me quite nicely. I nibbled bits here and there while I sketched out filler scene ideas, places where I could reveal the other character’s growth and so on. I looked over at my bar of chocolate (and yes, it was one of those monster-sized bars of chocolate–I won it in my local chapter’s conference last weekend). Um, the chocolate was almost gone. Not good.

Bad Michelle. Bad, bad.

Did you ever do that? Look over at some munchies and find that you’d consumed the whole thing without realizing it?

I think I hear a treadmill calling my name. Sigh.