Week 10 • September 19, 2026
Dear friends,
I did it again.
Last week, I cut my novel, Good Girls Cry, Bad Girls Mourn, in half. This week, I restructured the whole story.
It’s by far the most challenging thing I’ve done with it. It feels like performing surgery on my own baby: cutting it into pieces, moving them around, stitching everything back together, and praying that by the end it will be okay.
No.
Not just okay.
Really fabulous.
Here’s what changed. The story used to move in a straight line, from the good girl slowly becoming the bad girl. Now it opens with the bad version of Lalita, bold and confident, then flashes back to the innocent version, the good girl she once was, then comes back to the bad version again. From there the story goes back and forth between the two.
It all started after I watched The Odyssey. Christopher Nolan tells Odysseus’s journey home in a complex, intense way, leaping from one scene to the next, one timeline to another.
Nothing is linear.
But I didn’t watch the movie and suddenly decide to change my story. That night I had a terrible headache on top of a sore throat. I spent the night feeling like I wanted to hit my head against the wall.
My mind kept recirculating scenes from the movie, even though I was trying not to think about them.
I was sure it had nothing to do with my story. It was just sickness and a three-hour movie.
But a few days later, when I finally felt well enough to sit in front of my computer and open the story again, something had changed. Somewhere in that headache, a new pathway had opened in my mind, and it started pulling the story in a new direction. The fearful voice was still there, saying,
“You are going to make it worse.”
But I couldn’t help following the new idea in my head.
Boom.
I did it anyway.
There’s still more to do, and honestly, I’m not sure how it will end.
But yeah.
This is the road of no return.
I’m going to keep going until my story find its end just like Odysseus’s journey coming back home.
Tell me if you’ve ever done something like that.
And please pray for me too.
With love,
Lalita Janette