Plots! They're not just for evil masterminds!

I've got about 60,000 words, which works out to some 235 pages or so in a trade paperback, and it's a mess of epic proportions.  The plot is broken, and I'm trying desperately to fix it, a gargantuan task let me assure you.  Characters are being cut, combined, split apart,  I'm ditching entire scenes, re-ordering things, and creating all sorts of new scenes to fill in gaps.  

The goal? 

To create a cohesive, well-paced, page-turner worthy of letting someone anyone read.

I think it's going to make me lose my mind, which should improve my writing significantly.  I've spent most of the past few evenings bridge-of-my-nose deep in a mind-map where I'm sketching out a plot that I hope is good enough to see me through a full redraft.

I do have some concerns though, mostly to do with working out the timing of some of the events in the book, as so far my characters aren't going to have enough time to really develop the way I want them to, so as I add some detail to the outline I hope to stretch some events out a bit, without making the space between boring or disjointed.  We'll see how that goes.

The main point of all this blather?  I'm not going to give up on this story until it's done at least to a first full cohesive draft start to finish.  Then I'll have some people act as Alpha readers who are willing to throw me to the ground and give me a good kicking (metaphorically), then I'll see what I can do with this one and go from there.

In a somewhat related note, both Game of Thrones: Season 1 and Mass Effect 3 come out tomorrow, and I've ordered both.  Game of Thrones I might get to dig into in an effort to refresh some of the differences from the books before Season 2 airs April 1st.  Despite how much I really want to play ME:3, I know it will be a black hole where my time is concerned once I get into it, so I'll be holding off, holding it in reserve as a reward for actually achieving a working plot and some serious work on the rewrite.