You-all saw the gory picture from yesterday, right? I forgot to mention that I needed to resort to the backup red pen because the first one ran out of ink. And, last night, I was thinking, well, ok, Carolyn, you deleted some crap chapters and other stinky stuff, and yet 14 chapters held together pretty well, all things considered. But I went to bed with no freaking idea where I was going to go with the story. All I knew was that poison wasn’t enough. A big fat drats.

As Chris Keeslar (Dorchester editor extraordinaire) once said to me: Where’s the MacGuffin? I’m not a big enough Hitchcock fan that I didn’t need to google what the f he was talking about. Oh. But now I know (it’s the thing everybody’s after, like the Maltese Falcon, that keeps the action going, or like the Subtle Knife.) Last night I went to bed knowing that poison had turned out not to be the MacGuffin and that therefore, Magellan’s Witch was MacGuffin-less. My characters were looking out the pages at me saying, Now what do we do? This is not a happy place for a book to be.

This morning at the gym, I found my MacGuffin. I was getting all sweaty (no tattoo boy, no jaguar man, early am at the gym is all too often a visual disappointment) and with nowhere else to look but at my notebook, I figured it out. I have it and it quickly snowballed into the theme of the damn book. I feel much better.

I’ve now started tackling my red-penned pages and giving the story this new layer of complexity and right now I am a darn happy camper.