Writing Checks my Style Can't Cash

This is one of those wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night things.

This week, Len said to Cave of Bean: "He'd jump off a cliff if I asked him to." I thought this conversation was setting up the plausibility of Di's hiring Len to train Pegasus to be "a lady's horse," since Bean demonstrates her ability to turn out a calm and tractable mount. But it's also a promise to the reader that at some point Len and Bean will have to jump off a cliff. Why it took me till the middle of the night to realize this, I don't know.

This all implies a much more action-heavy climax than is normal for me, or than I'm confident of delivering, and reminds me that despite all my attempts at Di-style planning, I still don't know a lot about the second half of the book. The half I'm coming up on.

The kind of book in which transvestite and horse are desperate enough to jump off a cliff together is a lot more exciting than the kind I normally write; or than the first half is setting up, in fact. If I go there, I'll also have to do some heavy revising of the first - criminy, I'm on the 16th chapter and still feel it's all set-up. This is an intimidating amount of work, not just for the revising, but for my individual style. I've never been an action writer. In order to justify that single tossed-off boast, I'll have to become one.

Or, I can delete the sentence.

Hell, no. If you're going to fail, fail big. Excuse me while I look for a cliff.