Break Out the Bean Dip and Jello Shots...

...because I finished the Scene of Doom!

I am so massively relieved. I have been working on this motherfucking thing for basically the entire month of March. Empires have fallen in less time than this.

"But Lianna," I hear you say. "How can it have possibly taken a month to write a mere three and a half pages?"

You are right to wonder, dear reader.

First, I had to write crappy version #1. Then I had to get disgusted with what I'd written, and try to rewrite it, resulting in the even bigger rambling mess of crappy version #2. Then came the frustration ("I've been working on this forever and it still sucks!"), the self-pity ("Why does it have to be so hard?"), and finally the Dark Moment: the loss of faith ("What if the whole book is as badly written and ill-conceived as this scene?").

Then, being the tenacious workaholic I am, I said "fuck it" and spent the next ten days reading novels, eating candy, and doing no writing whatsoever.

Then I felt guilty about being such a slacker, and figured if I couldn't actually write the scene, at least I could blog about not being able to write it. I got a few lovely comments (shout-out to LibraryHungry and Joely!) that gave me the courage to just open the damn file, delete crappy version #2, and start over. I was so loathe to work on it, I set myself tiny goals: work on the scene for 15 minutes, then you can go back to outlining Bresher's scenes. Slowly, I made an outline. I realized I was trying to cram too much information into a small space, and that the scene was in danger of becoming an infodump. I figured out what really belonged in the scene, and what lines from crappy versions #1 and 2 could be salvaged.

And then I wrote a fairly decent scene.

Please tell me that all novelists have Scenes of Doom that just about break them. And please tell me I'm not due for another for at least 25,000 words.