Day 23: Splat!

Crap! Crap! Crap!

Just hit a wall. Okay, not so much a wall as a giant fork in the road and I just realized I took the wrong fork. Fuck!

I've been working from the assumption that my main character's boyfriend for lack of a better word....Okay, wait, for the sake of explaining this, these people need names.

So, I've been working from the assumption that Lisa (my main character) is involved in an affair with Bart. Lisa knows Bart is married. Now, Lisa has had a strained relationship with her father, Homer, since her mother committed suicide several years earlier--strained to the extent that she knows very little about his life since her mother's death. Lisa doesn't know why her mother, Marge, committed suicide--she had a hard enough time dealing with her mother's death that knowing why wasn't something she wanted to know. But her father does know why--Marge found out about Homer's affair with Selma, and Marge did leave a note. One reason Homer put distance between himself and Lisa was because he kept his relationship with Selma going after Marge died. He's trying to "protect" Lisa from the truth.

Now this gets complicated (not that it isn't already) when Homer dies unexpectedly and Lisa is confronted with what she didn't know about her father and what she doesn't know about Bart. See, Bart is Selma's son, and neither Bart nor Lisa have made the connection until Homer dies. (No, they are in NO WAY related, so get your head out of the gutter!)

I'd been working from the assumption that Bart had never met Homer, but now I've realized it might be better if he had. I was also working from the assumption that Lisa's mother hadn't left a note explaining exactly why she killed herself, but now I think Lisa finding that note after her father dies opens up so many more doors.

Some of this goes back to the original ideas/premises I had been working with before I started this draft with NaNo. And I think what works best is to bring them back in, which essentially means that the last 38,000 words I've done need to be heavily tweaked/rewritten if I continue from this point on to the end with these changes to the story.

Seriously, didn't see this coming. I thought I'd coast into 50K and finish out December writing the rest. But now, I think I'm just going to have to move forward with the changes to win NaNo and then December 1 go back and start tweaking the beginning chapters so I can then move forward to finish the novel.

I'm still not entirely sure if these changes are right. I still need to think them through: what exactly will change in the beginning and where does this take me? What I really want is to put Lisa in a position where she has to rely on Bart and Selma to get answers about her father; and at the same time, I need Bart and Lisa to work through what is really going on with their relationship because before Lisa finds out that her mother killed herself because her father was cheating on her, Lisa had never had a problem being the other woman. Now, she feels guilty knowing what it did to her mother, but at the same time she has to deal with her feelings for Bart.

Like my homage to The Simpsons? I'm not giving up all the details in this blog. Feels wrong to reveal their real identities yet.

Okay, off to ponder. Got to figure this out before I get behind. So far have done 668 words for the day. Want to hit 2,000 by midnight. We'll see.

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UPDATE (5:45 PM): I'm FUCKED!!!! Spent the last hour trying to figure this out and I'm stuck in a corner that I can't figure a way out of. Taking the rest of the night off to think this through. I'm still ahead for the day, but that's little consolation at this point. THIS SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fucky, fucky, fucky!!!!