Well, I did it today: I finally committed the murder I’ve been plotting and planning for over a week.

Early mornings, late nights, long drives alone–I’ve been spending them all working out the details: who was going to die, just  how I was going to do it, what the fallout would be. And today, I finally did it.

It was relatively bloodless, for a murder, I guess; I thought it’d be a lot messier to clean up than it was.

Who was the victim?

Chapter Seven.

Two weeks ago, I sat straight up in bed at 2:37 a.m., the death knell for Chapter Seven clinging to my lips as I struggled to regain consciousness. “Chapter Seven doesn’t work! It’s gotta go!” It was all I could do not to leap out of bed at that moment and race downstairs to execute it right that minute (that’s one habit that the arrival of our puppy Loki cured me of pretty quickly–she’d wake up the entire house if she heard me typing).

So I lay there in bed, eyes struggling to adjust to the dark, and started plotting the deed. Sure I could cut out the chapter, but how would that affect everything else? What details would I have to cull and rework somewhere else? What if I was overthinking things, and Chapter Seven actually did work and I was being paranoid? What if it turned out later that Chapter Seven was, in reality, the only thing in the entire book that actually did work and I killed it?

Those were the questions I’ve been pondering for the past two weeks. But today, I determined, pondering had to end. I wasn’t getting anything done on this revision by avoiding doing it. So I dutifully notified the next of kin (Chapters Six and Eight), started pulling, cutting, trimming, reworking (after, of course, having saved backup originals in three different places–I’m not that foolhardy). I read Seven the Last Rites, asked if it had any final requests (it did, as it turns out: It requested that it be remembered fondly in the Dedication Page when the rest of the book is published), then raised my weapon of singular destruction (figuratively, not literally–my keyboard’s not wireless) and struck the final blow: Delete.

And now, the deed is done. The offending chapter is gone, and I find, after all, that this was not really a murder–it was a mercy killing.

The flow of this part of the story is so much better now! That chapter was a huge, behemoth of a block, and now that it’s gone, I can see that it really, really needed to go.

And I must confess: It felt good to do all that slashing. I enjoyed it. Sick, I know.

And for those of you following and wondering, no news yet…will keep you posted.