Other ranking ‘m’ words that almost made the list today:

• Money
• Motivation
• Manipulation
• Max (who is still pissed off at me for changing her name to Rae. Sorry, hon, but I already spent an entire book explaining how one gets Ronnie out of Uriel. I’m not going to spend another delving into why someone named Lorraine goes by Max. Besides, Max and Mackenzie in the same book? That’s just awkward)

I’m in the middle of a waiting game. Waiting for things to move forward. Or movement of any kind, but backward movement would be double frustrating at this point. I’ve become the messenger for my own future. And I’ll tell you right now, I’m not so swell at negotiation. I’m all apologetic and stuff. “I’m sorry I have to ask you to give me something better. I really am. But that’s the way it is.”

And having never done this before, I have no idea if I’m going about it the right way, or if I’m completely fouling things up.

But either way, I’m tired of waiting for movement. While I wait, though, I’ve been pondering my characters’ movement. Pacing in my novel. I’ve been looking at individual scenes and deciding if the move the story forward, if they need to be moved to a different place in the story, if they make the story movement stop altogether.

I’ve decided I’m at about 33% with each of the above. My story needs movement, and only has some, and not all of it in the right places. The best way to fix it that I know of is to examine each scene individually and evaluate based on how it contributes to the overall.

I guess you could call it patience and pacing, but today is ‘M’ day, so it’s all about movement.

How do you deal with things moving slowly?