Plot Anxiety

As I've mention recently, I've begun to reanalyze the plot of The Decoder. For the past twelve hours, I've been working almost nonstop on this. I now have pages and pages (no exaggeration, I have ten pages, front and back, so far and I'm not even halfway done) of notes on what needs to be reworded, reordered, completely changed and, worst of all, removed. I'm not resistant to change, but it does stress me out when I have to delete 1,000 words at a time. Those sections will be replaced with better things, but it's still scary to to see huge blank spaces on my word documents. I've found some really helpful blogs and guides on how to accomplish what I've set out to do, but it's slow going. I feel like I've assigned myself the online course from hell.
Luckily, I'm discovering that I already understand and have been utilizing the inner workings of plots and 'grabbing the audience' techniques, etc., I just haven't been thinking about it in that sense. I've been thinking of it more as "How can I make this not suck?". Let's just call the not sucking method High School Plot Planning, and the other one How to Make Something Awesome and Sound like a Professional. Yeah. I think that's good.

The Decoder has gone under serious changes before, but those were mostly because I didn't have any idea where I was going with the story. About six months into it, I finally realized that this was legitimate and began taking it more seriously. That's when the first plot overhauls started, and mostly consisted of removing the stupidity. At this point, I don't see any major changes in store for the plot; instead I'm focusing on making sure everything is fluid, and everything that occurs has a reason behind it.

While most of this has been difficult but doable, there is one overwhelmingly frustrating problem I keep running into. Most of the things I'm reading about plots and the like apply to stand alone works, whereas I'm writing a series. Not all of the questions brought up in the The Decoder are going to be answered until The Second Book That Still Doesn't Have a Solid Working Title, and even then some of the story arcs won't be complete until the third book. And that's just stuff brought up in book one. I haven't been able to find quality advice on writing a series of books, so I'm kind of teaching myself about it by studying the techniques my favorite authors use. Which is what I was doing in the first place.
Another, smaller, concern I'm having right now is that The Decoder doesn't exactly follow a traditional sort of narrative map. It isn't wrapped up in a neat little package like most of the other First Books in series, and instead is kind of open-ended. The denouement of The Decoder is the last chapter, but the actual end of the first part of Tammie's journey is in the second book.   At this point, I'm considering this a strength, but I'm kind of freaking out about it as I continue to work on it.

Also, I don't usually like spin-offs, but I am beyond thankful that Rick Riordan has written the Heroes of Olympus series. It has helped me more than I ever imagined it would. I need to see about getting that man a gift basket, because he is owed many thanks.

On a side note, I'd just like to mention that my classes are awesome. I get grades for talking in class and disagreeing with others, editing papers and making everyone pay attention to me while I educate them on what I think is most important. Everyone is getting a good dosage of Nikki this semester, and I'm not going to apologize. That makes me sound incredibly cocky and self-absorbed. I just really like to communicate, and I feel like my opinion matters. I mean, that should be obvious, otherwise I probably wouldn't be a very good author.

-- Nikki