I’m really upset right now, not at anyone else but at myself. I screwed up. Now I have to try to fix it. It happens to the best of us but this is the first time that I remember doing it this badly when I should have known better, at least not in a very long time.

It’s all my fault. I just want to vent.

Without going into too much detail since it would ruin the ending of the book, but I was at the end of the second book in a trilogy. There’s a big fight that goes on, in some form or another, for four or five chapters. We just keep coming back to the raging fight going on and it ends in a triumphant victory in the end.

Except I completely screwed the whole thing up.

As most people know, I’m a serious plotter. I have every chapter, every scene completely detailed before I write the very first word. My real mistake was in not paying attention to my outline. I got distracted and that’s where I failed.

Did you ever have a scene in a book that you were really excited to write but it was way at the end of the book and you had to wait until you got there? That’s where I went wrong. There was this one sequence that I came up with in plotting that excited me. It was really cinematic and exciting, I could see the entire thing play out in my head and I wanted to write it right this second.

The bad part was it was at the end of chapter 24 in a 28 chapter book. I don’t write out of sequence. I’d have to be patient. So, I started work on this book a couple of weeks ago, everything was going great. I got into the third act and I started reading ahead in my outline and there was that scene. I could still see every detail. I just had 3 chapters to go before I could write it and those were really complex chapters that set up the entire ending of the book. I started writing, knowing that the harder I worked, the sooner I could get there and just get those words down on the page and that’s where I completely lost the plot.

See, I accidentally ended the book in chapter 22 and didn’t realize it until after I was in the middle of chapter 25. I wrote the ending! The big, climactic ending that all of the fighting was over, I stuffed it in there when I wasn’t paying attention. Then, there was a lot of aftermath, other fighting and that big scene that I’d dreamed of and once that was all out of my system, I went back to check how the last couple of chapters were supposed to go, only to realize that I’d already written it!

I seriously screwed up!

That was this morning. I immediately got up from the keyboard and started to pace. There had to be some way to fix this, right? Either rewrite the ending into something even better or find a way around it or… as I think I knew all along, go back and undo what I’d already done so I could do it again down the road. That’s a lot of work, especially since everything that I’ve done since builds upon my existing writing and I knew it was going to be a serious mess.

I just knew it had to be done. I wasn’t in any condition in the moment to do it though. I just called a mulligan on the day. I only got about a thousand words down before I realized my blunder. I had no time to go back and rework everything, nor any real interest, so I called it a day. In my daily word count tracker, I put down the actual words I did and in the notes, I wrote “I fucked up!” Nobody will ever see that but me but it’s as important to note your failures as it is to celebrate your successes. If you don’t make mistakes, you don’t learn nothin’.

Monday morning, I’ll attack the problem with fresh eyes. I generally know what I’m going to do to fix it. It’s not what I originally planned but it’s the best I can do without completely trashing several chapters and starting all over and nobody will ever know in the end. It might even be arguably better. There are definitely things that I’ll have to write around, like a key piece of technology that I wound up destroying two chapters before I’d intended to, like a dumbass, but there’s really no way that I can undo it because I really like the new sequences as they’re currently written.

This is probably one of those things that, after people read the book, if they come here and see this vague explanation, they might say “oh, that’s what he’s talking about!” Hopefully this is ambiguous enough where nobody’s enjoyment gets spoiled.

This is all just a reminder to myself not to screw up like this again.