For those who don't know, a sled pull at a monster truck rally is where souped up vehicles with massive torque are hitched to special sleds. Each sled is arranged with a wedge shape, the tall end having the hitch to which the truck is attached. A (obviously) massive weight is attached to the sled, at the rear and lowest part of the sled. Trucks typically face off in pairs and at the start punch it to see how far they can get. As the sled is pulled, the weight is cinched to the higher portion of the sled, driving the wedge into the dir and making it more difficult to pull. Eventually the trucks can't pull it any further and their distances are measured. Longest one wins. Er...right...so anyway...

I finished chapter 15 and it was rather like some act of masochistic literary flogging. It wasn't pretty and what I had felt, looked and smelled much like I would imagine my back would if I had flogged myself in the style of the monks of yore.

Part of the problem is the particular tack I chose to write this story. I had been putting of actually writing anything until I found software that I could use that would be suitable to how I wanted to plan things out. Eventually I realized that I would probably never find just the right software and decided I should just sit down and start writing.

Well, that worked as far as it went. I was writing. The first few chapters, while not necessarily mighty strokes of the pen, at least were telling a story. Editing will have to make the story readable. Hopefully it is already enjoyable. Philosophical issue there. Anyway, when I sat down to write chapter 15 I realized I had several problems.

First, the character who is ostensibly my main character isn't interesting. I'm an inexperienced writer and even I can tell that much. In the introductory chapters, you don't get much of a glimpse into her life. You don't know what she is like, what her weaknesses and strengths are. There is no indication of what will challenge her. Instead, I use her like a plot device to introduce the reader to another character who I intended to make significant, but as part of a pair.

Also, I found that several of my characters have now been written into situations where I had no idea what they were doing or what they would do next. What was their motivation? What about current events mattered to them and what it would make them do? Thankfully not all of my characters are in such a circumstance, but enough of them that I had to spend a substantial amount of time figuring that out. By chapter 15, I would have thought I would have had that figured out.

Plot holes. You know, those things that make a reader go bump in an otherwise smooth story? Well, I've got a few and I fear that working them out in editing is going to cause massive headaches. Before, I was so proud of myself, letting the story flow, the characters do what they wanted. They seemed so alive (some of them anyway). Then I started to ask myself, "Okay self, how are they going to actually fix the problem? How are they going to save the world?"

Self had no clue. Bad self, bad! So I also spent a bit of time working backwards, like in a maze. So I want them to get here, well how to do that? What if this happened, okay, but what justifies that? Okay, what if this were necessary, and so on. That was like a punch in the gut. Mind you I hadn't even written chapter 15; that came after this soulless hacking.

So I finally set myself to writing the chapter. And now, in order to progress down the path my oh-so-logical-and-dry-like-a-tinder-about-to-catch-fire mind had decided was the optimal path, the writing took on an even more pained forcedness. I felt like the characters were no longer alive, but just puppets.

Ugh.

But I'm going to finish this. And I want to polish this thing, even if there is so much crap rolled around it that when I'm done polishing it, I've taken a 10 ton rock and polished it into a 2 ounce gem. Even if it is just quartz.

So when does the bleeding stop?