Last night ended up being a busy one for me. Not only did I finish the chapter I was working on in the Work In Progress (WIP), but I had to get everything ready for my book signing this evening. I'm going straight from my job, so that meant packing up tote bags with everything I'm going to need. By the time I finished with everything, it was nearly 9:30--so much for my plan to go to bed early and be well-rested for my signing today.
Anyway, about that chapter--it ended up taking longer than I expected to reach the point where the fight begins. (I ended it at the top of page 18.) Now I have a dilemma: Do I cut it down and try to squeeze in the fight? Or do I do the fight in the next chapter?
I always seem to have room to cut, but there are some important things that happen in those pages, things the propel the suspense part of the story and the meeting between the hero and heroine. That leaves me with the other stuff and a lot of that was put in to ground the reader in the scene. There just might not be as much to cut here as I'd like.
Putting the fight in the next chapter isn't all bad. It allows me to end the previous one with a bang and lets me have as much room as I needed with the altercation. If I tried to squeeze into the previous chapter, I'd be aware of the page count with every word I wrote and that might make me feel constrained.
Now that I've written this all out, I think I've decided to put the scene into the next chapter and worry about whether or not I need to cut later. The beginnings of my books always seem to take more work than any other part.
Now if I could only keep my eyes open after all these late nights watching baseball, it might be a great day.
