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I’ve spent a lot of time the past few days fixing the website.
It all started a few weeks ago when I decided to try a new email provider. The one I used for me@davidgane.com had never felt the most solid (I’m sure some emails weren’t even making it to me), and I had heard good things about Fastmail.
However, this decision broke my website and left me dealing with a mess. I ended up changing my domain registrar, my email provider, and deleting the costs of things I didn’t use. Although it was a pain in the butt, I moved on to services that make it better to use.
Yet, as things wrapped up and almost returned to normal, I broke something else—our fourth book.
For the past few weeks, the word count has been progressing nicely and as I mentioned the other week, the stress has been lifting.
Unfortunately, we’ve been sorting out a critical moment between two characters which slowed us down. Angie and I have had many phone calls as we try to discover the meaning and intentions of the characters.
As I’m apt to do, I went for a walk yesterday to think about our story problems, and I tumbled down a rabbit hole. First, I came up with a new backstory for a character, which led me to revisit the clues that lead our heroes to him, leading me to rearrange the second half of the book in my head.
By the time I got home and put it on the page, I saw the whole thing unravel, and my meeting with Angie couldn’t come soon enough. Humorously, the look on my face staring at the screen, wondering what I had just done, was the same Angie had when I told her about it.
The exciting thing, though, is that, like the website, things are a mess now. But by doing the hard work to organize and clean things up, it will make everything more efficient focused.
Sometimes we have to break things to make them better.