Whoa, friends.
I may be jumping ahead of myself, considering I’m still riding a holy-shit-I-think-I-figured-out-this-plot writer’s high after spending the past two hours outlining, but friends, I really do think I might have figured out the plot for my rewrite.
If you know me, I bet it’s come to no surprise that my standalone sci-fi tragedy has now expanded into a tragic trilogy, with the first two books completely mapped out–not half bad, considering what I had this morning, which was filled with holes, lacking in conflict and making me want to bang my head against the wall. Now, I have a steady base to go forward, a clear understanding of what’s happening, a closeness with my characters that makes me confident I can write them and make their motives clear, plus a revised plot that threads throughout the trilogy that makes my heart accelerate with giddy anticipation and excitement.
Sure, I still have no idea how to wrap up this trilogy, which might seem like a red flag to everyone, because yeah, usually the writer knows the end goal before she’s going to get there. And yep, I have no idea how this one is going to end. It’s set up so there is a lot of opportunity, but at the moment, I couldn’t tell you what will happen. Sure, there is still a lot that might change and maybe I’ll talk to my man about it and he’ll be like, “Babe, that’s actually worse than what you started with originally.” Or maybe I’ll write it and realize that it is complete shit and I’m in over my head and, even though it felt like a breakthrough, it actually was a bust.
But.
This afternoon, I pulled up my outline and then closed it half a dozen times, at a loss of where this story needed to go next or what I was meant to do with it. I went and did some other things, but I hated wasting so much time I had available to write and I wanted to figure this shit out. So I opened it again and kept trying. Half an hour went by without anything to show for it, but I kept going. I kept pushing, challenging myself and writing any idea that came to mind, erasing most of it by the end.
Until I had it.
It’s the closest feeling to an epiphany moment I can describe personally experiencing. One moment, I  was banging my head against the wall and the next, I had a plot twist that suddenly, helped everything else make sense. Reorder a few events in the first book and there the tension I was missing was; there, the opportunity to heighten it and make the first book feel like a real story, even if that cliffhanger ending might want to make readers, if I pull this off right, want to bang their own heads into a wall.
It may amount to nothing, but at the moment, hot damn, it’s a start. And a start is exactly what I’ll take, right now. Because I can run with this. I can create a story around this and, through a shit-ton of work, make this story work. 
So let’s get started, shall we?
Cheers.