The Terror Begins

I've begun reading the Taxidermy manuscript. It isn't all bad, I suppose. But a lot of it is, well, you know when you have a massive bonfire and people burn plastic cups and tin cans and in the morning you have these funny lumps of what might have been, and you try to decipher what they were? That's how I feel right now reading this. And I have to take these lumps, pull them apart, and try and stitch them back together into the story that I only now feel I understand. I have my work cut out for me.

Also, I have to write this all into 1998. Why, you ask, would I write a contemporary YA novel for readers who have no ties to this year? Meh, it was a good year. And I refuse to change my main character's birthdate, even though I'm changing her age in the story so I don't have to send out querys for a YA novel with a character in her mid twenties.

The most difficult part I'm finding so far is unsticking all the subplots which glommed together in the first half of my book, and stretching them into the second so I don't have such a bloody long beginning.