A couple of months ago, I was so excited about being finished with my thesis novel, the contemporary romance Happy Endings, Inc., so that I could concentrate on writing the first part of my historical trilogy, Ransome’s Honor. I have several people who’ve been reading it as I’ve written it—each bugging me for another installment. But even though I’ve had some extra time on my hands, I just couldn’t bring myself to sit down and continue writing “Part One”—what I thought was going to be the first half of the novel focusing on Julia and William as children and what shaped them to be the adults we meet in 1814 (where I originally started writing the story).

And I finally admitted—even I’m not that interested in delving into all of the minutia of the first trip to Jamaica, what happened on the ship, or what happened once they arrived in Jamaica. I’ve worked out in synopsis format what happens, because that’s important to who they are as adults twenty years later. But trying to weave 10 year old Julia’s and 15 year old William’s stories together in 1795 is making it harder and harder for me to figure out how to have Julia feel nothing but animosity toward him in 1814.

Because I’m a “seat of the pants” writer, one of the hardest things for me is to have people reading my writing as I’m doing it—especially right in the beginning—because I’m never sure until I’m about halfway through exactly where I’m going. But I’ve come to the decision that I need to scrap Chapters 2 through 4 (well, the three pages I’ve written of Chapter 4) of “Part One,” and just use the first chapter as a prologue. Then, with everything I have learned about Julia and William from this back story/character exercise, I will revise the existing nine chapters of the part starting in 1814 and just move forward from there.

I can tell this is the right thing to do—I’m excited about getting started and have been thinking about the story all day as I’ve run errands around town, and that’s something I haven’t done in a very long time!