The end of the sagging middle....

Is to do lots and lots of crunches.

Or, if you're a writer, to plug through it, even though you're positive it's the worst garbage you've ever written and would rather chuck the whole thing.

I am at the dead middle of this rewrite. The trouble is that when I started the rewrite, this guy who was firmly dead in other versions of the book is now ALIVE. And a part of the story. Well, he was part of the story before, but he was a dead guy, so he didn't take up a whole lot of my precious white space. But here he is. Alive. The trouble with fiction is that when you kill people, they don't always stay dead.

Anyway, I have been working on this chapter since Friday, and it's been piecemeal, trying to get decent words out of me. I finally gave up, wrote a summary paragraph of the rest of the conversation and got her out of Dodge. End of paragraph. End of chapter. We're now at the place that needs to happen next.

And maybe that's been my problem. This whole mess of struggling with the words happened Friday at Panera when I was happily typing along and realized, um, there's two scenes that have to happen first. Crap. I put on the brakes and went back to write those two scenes. I should have kept plugging forward. But no... I was too afraid I'd forget. Well, I paid for it. Two days of writing and all I can show for myself is one measly chapter.

Now on to the next. But I think this one's going to be fun, because I'm about to blow up part of my heroine's universe and I really love doing that...

Anyone have any good tips for getting through it without violence?