The Gordian Book-knot.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon and evening transferring my book into the Scrivener program.

I couldn't find a simple, easy but totally necessary first step and flailed around for a couple hours. Linda came home and listened to my blustering frustration for awhile, and then figured it out. A simple thing that seemed utterly unintuitive to me.

I think the problem I have with lots of computer stuff is that I can't see the forest for the trees -- that I want a few simple things, and they give me hundreds or thousands of options.

Anyway, I finally got the book into the program -- in roughly the format I want.

However, it seems like a bit of an unwieldy mess, right now. It goes from A to G to B to F to M to C to....something like that.

I think I need to work out the organization of it before I start doing the second draft.

The actually sitting down and writing I don't think will take that long.

This may seem like a lame example, but when I was in college, I'd often assemble the elements of term paper without being sure what the final form would be -- and I'd worry about it for awhile, but almost always it would come together in the end.

I need to immerse myself in it, struggle with it, and eventually it will take shape. I hope.

I ended up with 26 chapters, and about 68,500 words, which is actually bigger than I thought. It's maybe already big enough for an e-book, especially if we add visual and illustrative elements as we intend. I want it to be a "fast" read.

I usually add when I rewrite, so it may very well end up the size of, say, Star Axe, which for a fantasy wasn't a large book, but large enough to tell the story. Besides, personally I'm kind of tired of overblown fantasies.

I wish I wrote in more tidy way -- but that's just not the way of it. My creative impulses aren't tidy.

I'm just going to thrash out the structure this weekend and see if I can't find a way to get it all to fit.