Realized there aren't two sequences causing me trouble. No, there are at least four. Hmm.

I don't want to try moving any of this to the first "chapter," because that flows so nice and smooth right now. I scribbled a potential outline on the back of a grade report at breakfast this morning, and will dig a little deeper into that thought.

This is familiar territory for me, having a bunch of scenes and no clue what order they go in. It hasn't become any easier to fix, but it's not a new problem. At least this time I can move things around without as much hassle as if it were normal prose; I f*cking hate having to move things around over and over after between-scene transitions are set up. Even thinking about it gives me a sour feeling--you've got all this nice smooth lead-in to a scene that makes sense and you've spent a lot of time describing interim stuff so it's not choppy. And then you have to chunk it all, rethink the time frame, maybe forget what you realized about one of the characters or try to work it in elsewhere, and of course you have to go back and make ten bazillion little changes all up and down the ms because now everything's different. But there's no way around it because you didn't know it wasn't going to work until you put it together and smoothed the transitions and then saw that it sucked.

Thank G*d that's not what I'm doing here. Shudder.

The weird thing is, I think I do better writing like this. Sometimes when the ms seems to dictate that I write in a certain order because it makes sense, I feel like I'm on a leash, or in a harness pulling a plow down the rows. This is probably part of the problem with the swordfighting ms; I get frustrated because I know certain things have to happen in a certain order and I feel like an old mule whose day is going to end with a mouthful of hay and a barn wall to stare at.