Too Early for Boston Baked Beans?

I had to ask myself this morning, is 9:00 a.m. too early for Bush’s Best Boston Baked Beans? And then I opened a can and heated them up in the microwave and ate a bowl of the delicious molasses and brown sugar flavored legumes and said, no. 9:00 a.m. is probably too LATE for them. I should have had some at 7:30 a.m. when I started craving them. Meanwhile I ate two bowls of Strawberry Awake cereal to stave off the Boston Baked Beans craving. That NEVER works, you know. You can’t kill one craving with a different food. It just doubles the calorie intake.

These beans came from WalMart. So did the picture of them.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting down today to begin the thinking process for my rewrite of my next novel. I finished the draft about a month ago, I’ve let it sit on the back burner while I did IMPORTANT things (like mop underneath the microwave cart for the first time in who-knows-how-long-oh-my-gosh) and caught up on kid projects. Can an Eagle project happen this spring? I certainly hope so.

This is my plan for the rewrite: I will not go back and look at the draft. I will simply retell the story, scene by scene from memory. This would be actually pretty ineffective if I had a good memory. But because I have a pretty useless memory it’s going to be AWESOME. Counter-intuitive, I know. However, the big advantage of a terrible memory is I’ll only get the highlights. The best scenes, the most memorable moments will be the ones I can recall. Everything else will fall away. I can reconstruct the plot (which I didn’t do so well in the beginning as it was a NaNoWriMo book with no prep-time) from the scene level, and then I’ll probably start with mostly fresh pages, possibly a bit of cut and paste from the original, and start fresh. It needs a clean start. Some novels just do.

I did learn a great thing about myself doing this wacky NaNo dash. I’m not so much of a “pantser.” I don’t do my best work writing by the seat of my pants. I’m so much happier as an outliner. This way, however, I get the advantage of surprise elements in the story (from this first draft) and the outlined version with a plot that actually hangs together. So it’s not all bad.

And now that I have the sustenance of the legume version of a warm gingersnap in my belly, I can get cracking on this outline!