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            If you didn’t see Saturday’s diary entry on my blog (diaryofanoptimisticwriter.org), you don’t know that I hit a huge plot hole, two chapters from the climax.

    To capture the whole hole in two sentences: my protagonist attends an out-of-town secret meeting with the town banker, mayor, historian, and newspaper publisher. The group tries to figure out where the antagonist, Dr. Rivers, is hiding all the money he’s embezzled from the school district he oversees.

    Problem 1: Rivers, who also owns Bourne Enterprises, has upwards of a half-billion dollars. He wants to build the world’s biggest casino. The current world’s biggest casino, WinStar, down in southern Oklahoma, cost $125 million to build. Granted, building costs have risen since 2016 when the novel takes place, but not that much. Rivers has way more money than he needs. So why is this even an issue?

    Problem 2: Rivers has stashed the half-billion in the savings account of his granddaughter. People forget that Rivers had a short-lived marriage when he was 20. That marriage produced a daughter, who had her own daughter. No one in town recalls any of this (pretty rare for a town of just over 2,000 people). The daughter is in middle school now. With half a billion in savings. And no one knows.

    Preposterous.

    I cut it all, and I wrote a ton yesterday to fill the hole. I was feeling pretty good about it. I truncated two action scenes and came up with a nice, though long, scene that has some real suspense. I finished the scene about 2:30 yesterday afternoon, just as I was hit with a wave of Things Needing to Be Done Right Now. I put off looking at the next scenes of the novel.

    Until right now (Thursday afternoon).

    The two scenes I truncated had more than a week between them. So what happens to the scenes that occur in the week between the scenes?

    I read them over. Reread them. Stuff happens in them. But none of it is noteworthy enough to keep. Out you go, pages!

   Can I really excise like 15 pages and not have further plot issues? Right now the answer is yes, but you can bet I placed all that text at the very end of the novel file, in a section I call “Scraps.”

    Now what do I do? Do I just continue writing away, moving towards some moment near the climax where suddenly nothing makes sense due to the missing text? Or should I reread what I’m cutting yet another time and fret over whether everything will still fit as nicely without those pages (and of course, had things really been fitting nicely, none of this would have needed to be done)?

    I will read everything over one more time, and then let my subconscious work on it tonight. Hopefully in the morning I’ll have a plan of action.

    Kelsey Webb, where are you taking me?