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I really goofed things up yesterday. I needed to add a couple of scenes that changed the timing of one event involving Jane and her father Andrew. As I wrote I realized I needed to expand these scenes a bit and include Jane’s kids. The entire mess turned into another chapter.

So I began renumbering all chapters that followed, got confused during the process and overlaid one chapter on another. Now I’ve got to figure out the mess.

Luckily I have backed up everything on iDisk so I didn’t lose the data, but I was also cooking Indian food yesterday. Each dish has about 10 different spices that you have to either grind or smash or toast or saute, and my brain was so fried — subconscious metaphor intended — that I simply could not straighten out the catastrophe.

This goes to show how important it is to plan one’s story before actually writing the darn thing. I’m laughing at myself because this is a continual theme. I am a terrible outliner of “plot,” “character” and “scenes.” Ideas simply come to me as I write or take a shower or grind fennel seeds, and I madly write them down anywhere I can. I wind up with little bits of paper which I then record on my lengthy “Ideas for Chapters” pages.

How I wish I had the talent of some great story tellers to KNOW their story beforehand, rather than waiting for it to unfold while smashing cardamom pods.