Five tough hours, only about 300 words or so in productive moving forward.
I have done a lot of thinking through motivations of the “big bad guys” here today, though. The problem here stemmed from me asking myself a fairly simple “what if” question about an AI element of the world I’m creating. The answer brought me up pretty short. It was essentially the classic “why is your bad guy bad?” kind of question. In my case it was more along the line of looking at behavior of the AI. Why was it interacting with humanity in such a passive fashion when it was obviously in its best interest to be more aggressive?
There are answers, of course.
Now, anyway.
The end result cost me a couple thousand words–some actual cuts and some I had to redo. And it annoyed me to have to make these changes as I was going back over things. It’ll cost me a little more thinking time in a day or two when I get to some mechanics of moving the main guy to a particular scene–and probably cost me some work in the front third of the book, too. But I’m happy with the decision at this point.
Welcome to first draft, eh?