As I whirled through the first draft of Shadow Dance I never let myself go back and fix broken bits, or adjust past chapters to fit my newly evolved plot.

Okay, maybe once or twice.  But I tried to leave it alone and slap my twitchy fingers away.

However, I did create a file labeled ‘notes’, and place therein all my fidgety thoughts for the re-write.  So and so needs to be wearing makeup in this scene.  Change aunt’s van to a sports car.  Have someone sit on a pie.

Yes, that’s right.  I need someone to sit on a pie.  And then serve it to their guests.

I already have an opportunistic party taking place in one of the early chapters, and had written it a bit on the wild side.  But after taking time to process, I’ve realized that the party needed to go much further into bizarre-o land.  The book’s got potential, imho, but right now it’s too restrained, too practical.  I need to be willing to take it over the top.

After all, in the famed HP books you have beans which can taste like buggers and at one point Ron puking slugs.  In the Artemis Fowl books, you have dwarves with that most civilized of all evolutionary developments–the ability to blow newly chewed dirt out their behinds.

I certainly do not need to worry that a bit of pie re-serving will be too risky, given those examples.