"Finished" Chapter 7

Finished Chapter 7 today, but not really.

It's been a bad week for the book for a few reasons, and I'm trying not to feel too anxious about it. First, I'm getting my ass kicked by a spring cold, and I lost one full day of work to that and did very minimal work on a couple other days.

Mainly, I'm hitting some problems with this chapter I didn't anticipate. It's kind of like when I was going through Chapter 5 the first time and there was something incomplete and phony about it that I couldn't figure out. Hopefully I'm not getting into that cycle again.

As of this morning, I did end up making all the changes that I planned, but the result is just a patch job and the truth is that the chapter needs a serious rethink. So it's not really finished at all.

I don't know how I'll proceed but one idea that comes to me is scaling back the ambition of this chapter. It's tempting to take shortcuts, and I don't want to cheat, but the right thing for this chapter might be to do less with it.

On the other hand, it's important to respect the impulse I had to write what I have written. I put all the extra confusing stuff down for a reason and experience tells me that if I can take the time to figure out where I was going and to develop it then I might hit on something very valuable.