RW chapters 5 - 7, or progress that isn't.

Quite frankly, I'm frustrated right now.

Why?

I hate not making any progress, and right now I'm deleting more words than the word count bar at the side is gaining. And it's not only writer's block I'm talking about.

Fact is, re-orienting the characters has been a lot of fun, to see them all grown up and acting like independent people, live different lives. It gave me a boost that got 20k words written almost by themselves. The stage was set, all is well, things will just go like that until the end!

Yeah, right.

We all knew this was going to happen eventually. Or at least I knew. My usual writing process works in leaps and bounds - 20k in 2-3 days is normal for me, followed by a couple of days of writing downtime. Sometimes that's due to life happening. More often, I get writer's block, as if my brain needed a couple of days to catch up. Maybe it does. I don't know.

Fact is, I've written and re-written the last 3 chapters so often that by now I should be well past the climax of the story. Where I am, actually, is stuck at the downtime after the beginning.

What happens, in-story, compared to what happened, in-fanfic? Well, we're at the first-scene to second-threesome stage. Now, because Erin and Simon are neither star-crossed lovers nor re-discovered soulmates, the bond between them is a very different one than Bella and Edward shared in HBR at this time. No confessions of love, no spending each waking moment together, no sleepovers and sneaky sex in the back of cinemas. Instead, they just resume their lives, for good and for worse, and set out to do more exploring.

Draft 1 of the first playroom scene was painful. Less for Erin to experience, more for me to write. A whole slew of revisions later, and I'm happy with it, and pre-reader feedback is good, very solid, even though I already have a short list of things to re-work there, too. What counts is that the framework fits, and the characters react the way I want them to. Curious, excited, but no one's losing their hearts yet. Firm, confident, with an unexpected twist. They harmonize, finally I've found their balance. Took me almost a week, and that for one lousy chapter! And now 11k words, that's at least good news. Up to 2k of that might get re-arranged into another chapter, but they fit, and will be kept.

Next up, transition to the second threesome - which is, hands down, my favorite scene in HBR. Besides one other scene in ABD, it's the kink part that got the most flak. It got all the "OMG he's not a real Dom!" complaints. It made me want to punch people in the face. It hurt me a lot, personally, because unlike large parts of the story, it cut very close to home.

Naturally, I wanted to keep their little forest adventure in the story. It sounded so good in my head. It worked so well as a plot device to help Erin get more comfortable with her submissive side, and it did a lot to establish the bond between Simon and Jack.

The problem? I can't write it.

Why?

That's been the question I've been pondering for the past week. Normally, I get blocked because I can't settle on the details. I don't "see" what is going on. Here? No problems with the seeing, a couple of insomnia ridden nights have helped me A LOT with streamlining the cinematics inside my head. So why can't I write it?

Last night, thanks to cheerleader #1, I finally pinned it down. The problem is, as usual, the girl.

With Bella, it was easy to get her pretty much everywhere I needed her to be, as long as she was making some kind of progress, got some kind of positive attention, ended up feeling better about herself. The upside of writing a doormat character - you can't do anything wrong. Even a step backward is a step forward, because it gives you another opportunity to push forward.

Erin is not a doormat.

She's a very confident, down to earth character. Chapter 6, the transition, does a great job to establish that she is socially awkward at times, too, that she prefers to let others take the spotlight place when it doesn't concern her domain - the OR. We haven't yet seen her at work, but that will change. Still, she has very different priorities in life - sex, and coming to terms with her sexual desires, is on the bottom of that list. Yes, she's curious to explore with Simon. Yes, if it fits her schedule she's all for another threesome. Yes, if you dangle that carrot in front of her face she will eventually bite. But only if it fits into her work schedule, if it doesn't keep her from doing research, and if she gets her 4 hours of sleep each night.
There are a lot of things that Bella would have jumped on that Erin would barely consider doing. I tried pushing her into the right direction, but she just wouldn't go. She blocked me. A week of tug-o-war later, and I've finally given in.

Scene postponed to book 2!

Now, of course, there's the matter of what to write instead.

The second big issue I'm still fighting with (and now it got twice as annoying as when I set out) is that I really don't want this novel to be just smut. Yes, there is a lot of sex involved, and not just gratuitous sex, it's connected to the plot and character development - but still, it's sex.

I need sex for the BDSM angle - A

I need sex to set up the poly angle - B

I need sex to set up the love angle - C

There's some overlapping, of course, but not that much. Already, there's a lot less sex than in HBR. But I can't do without a limited backbone of:

First time they fuck - AB; first scene - A; 2nd threesome, used to be planned AB, now more firmly B; 2nd scene - A; plot point - C; 3rd threesome - BC; at that point, the B angle gets cut off until book 2, the plot takes over until the very end, with one more AC scene to fluff it all up a little.

If you remember, of that 39/40 chapters of HBR, there were at least twice as many sex-heavy chapters there. And that was okay, because half the scenes were there to give people a more accurate glimpse at what BDSM can be than, well, most fanfic still is. They did a lot to build up Bella's confidence, but really, they weren't essential, and wouldn't fir Erin, at all.

I guess what I want to say is that 6 sex scenes, almost back to back with only a little talk and off-time between them do seem like a lot of sex to me. Can I cut it back? No way. 3 scenes I need to let Erin see that yes, she really is a kinky girl, and liking it. 3 threesomes I need to establish that the three of them connect on a sexual level, and not just E-S or E-J. Having just one no kink, no threesome sex scene between E and S is the minimum to get them hooked up for real - more isn't needed, either, or the plot climax wouldn't work with them.

Why am I still whining? Because we've been watching Leverage with our morning coffee. Now I'm off to re-write chapters 6 and 7 of the re-write. Does that constitute a re-re-write?