August 2026: Tearing Down Act Five

David has a new saying: "tearing down the shed."

He tells the whole story on his own blog, but here's the short version: he went up to the cabin expecting to shingle the shed roof and ended up tearing down the whole shed and building a new one.

So why bring that up here? Because it's tangled up in how Act 5 got fixed.

Last month we told you we'd hit a wall on the final confrontation. We'd spent a long time reworking it, trying to fix the dead spot where the story kept stalling. We thought we were close.

But we weren't.

Then David went off to deal with the shed at his cabin—and on the drive home, he started turning the book over in his head. He wondered if we'd been trying to patch things up when we really needed to knock it down.

So we started with the killer's motive. It felt overly complicated, needing too much explanation, and every time we hit that scene, we lost momentum entirely. So we tossed it out and came up with something simpler—and that changed everything.

Suddenly the plot holes we'd been patching, and the slow scenes that had been dragging things down, both disappeared.

That let us rebuild something quicker, with more action and more thrills. It's set somewhere different now, not even the original location. But we like it a lot more—and we hope you will too.

Are we close to done?

We're further along than last month, but we're not pretending we're back on the fast track we thought we were on in June. We're rebuilding this section properly instead of patching it. It's slower, but it'll feel more solid once we're through.

Next month, we're hoping to tell you the last act is done, the book's complete, and we're deep into the final rewrite. Until then, fingers crossed.

Thank you for everything,
Angie and David