Breaking the Website, Breaking the Book

I've spent a lot of time the past few days fixing the website.

It all started a few weeks ago when I decided to try a new email provider. The one I used for me@davidgane.com had never felt the most solid (I'm sure some emails weren't even making it to me), and I had heard good things about Fastmail.

However, this decision broke my website and left me dealing with a mess. I ended up changing my domain registrar and my email provider, and deleting the costs of things I didn't use. Although it was a pain in the butt, I moved on to services that make it better to use.

Yet, as things wrapped up and almost returned to normal, I broke something else—our fourth book.

For the past few weeks, the word count has been progressing nicely and as I mentioned the other week, the stress has been lifting.

Unfortunately, we've been sorting out a critical moment between two characters which slowed us down. Angie and I have had many phone calls as we try to discover the meaning and intentions of the characters.

As I'm apt to do, I went for a walk yesterday to think about our story problems, and I tumbled down a rabbit hole. First, I came up with a new backstory for a character, which led me to revisit the clues that lead our heroes to him, leading me to rearrange the second half of the book in my head.

By the time I got home and put it on the page, I saw the whole thing unravel, and my meeting with Angie couldn't come soon enough. Humorously, the look on my face staring at the screen, wondering what I had just done, was the same Angie had when I told her about it.

The exciting thing, though, is that, like the website, things are a mess now. But doing the hard work to organize and clean things up will make everything more efficient and focused.

Sometimes we have to break things to make them better.