No writing yet today. There probably won't be.

I'm cranky now because I remembered how it took me years and years (no kidding; years and years) to figure out what NR was about. I remembered how a writer friend shared her plotting/character worksheet, one that helps you define your characters' goals and use those to sort out your story. I must have used it at least three times over the years before the info I wrote in it (and I wrote the same stuff down every time) finally sank in. It took that long before I absorbed it, and was able to join the inner story to the outer one and bring it all around to the ending that had been on paper all that time.

Well, I had to figure out other stuff, too, but that was the last thing I figured out. The last huge thing, anyway.

I don't want to take years and years of sitting around like an @ss with no clue what I'm doing. I just want to write the frickin' book. I. Just. Want. To. Write. The. Book.

It's frustrating, because I'm smarter than my brain is. I know where my brain is falling short, but it won't step up and do its job. I can even lay out what I need it to do, the gaps it needs to fill, and it just lies there like a useless lump. Come on, brain! Get a move on!

But anyway. In what I have now, my MC has no inner journey. It's there, I just don't have it on paper. I know it's there because I know how he is and how he feels by the start of the next book, and it is totally different from how he is at the beginning of this book. The events of this book change him, they flatten him and make him step up to the plate so that he becomes wiser but also less trusting and more cautious, and with a buried edge of bitterness. None of that shows in what I have. So. Now I guess one thing I need to do is figure out how some of the events that happen in this book clearly make him change and show him changing. And if there isn't anything happening that makes or shows it, then I have my answer about what needs to happen as we approach the midpoint.

Here's a concrete, definite task: something my brain needs to do. Let's watch and see if it does it. And not take years this time.