Sigh, I woke up this morning, turned off my internet, opened my book, got to work, went through half of the first chapter and then…I stopped.

I needed to think about one thing. A little element. The kind of thing that might just be a scene or two, or a few lines, even. But as I thought about it, I realized that the element was intimately connected with another character’s motivations, and that there was something I needed to figure out about her.

So my revision stalled out. I’ve thought of half a dozen solutions for this problem, but all of them feel a little sweaty. You know what I’m talking about: all of my answers had an air of contrivance to them. I know that somewhere out there is a very simple solution to this problem: something that’ll make my story smaller and more efficient, and which’ll tie up a few other loose ends too, probably.

I just have no idea what it is.