truepenny | Cover me, I'm going in.

This argument scene in Chapter 10 is definitely a Sisyphean hippopotamus. The harder I push, the more the ground falls out from under me.

I know I need this damn argument because it's resolving things from Mélusine and setting up things for the third book (tentatively titled The Mirador), but I've utterly lost track of what it's doing for this book, i.e. and to wit, the one I'm writing right now.

Which means I have to go back to the ur-manuscript and figure out what in the nine levels of Hell I thought I was doing to begin with.

Mélusine and Kekropia started out as one book, which we will call the ur-manuscript because I hate the title I had for it with a fiery vengeance. I started writing it in 1994. (No, that's not a typo. Eleven years. Eleven years. Dear god, no wonder it feels like the walls are closing in.) The last time the ur-manuscript was state of the art was 2000 (when, to be fair, it got me an agent, so it probably can't objectively suck as much as I subjectively think it sucks). I started rewriting, ground up, white-page, in 2001. Four years and over a thousand pages later ... well, it's like somebody could take time-lapse photography of the evolutionary process. Here's Mélusine and Kekropia all Cro-Magnon and shit, walking erect and using tools and making little doodles on the walls of their caves, and then there's the ur-manuscript, which is back there sometime between Australopithecus and Homo: Fire bad, tree pretty.

I try not to look at it any more; I really do. Because it just makes me want to crawl under a rock and cry.

And I know it's good that I feel that way--progress and growth as a writer blah blah Gaia blah blah moon, menstrual lifeforce power thingy--but it really doesn't make the prospect any more appealing.

I just hope consulting the ur-manuscript (not unlike consulting the Cumaean sibyl in her bottle) helps, rather than leaving me even more confused than I am right now.