I was feeling smug. Fourth revision pass. Plot matrix built. Columns for chapter, scene, POV, date, time, location, word count, and emotional arc – because I’m that kind of monster. I even added colour-coding.

And it worked. Mostly.

After pruning and polishing, it finally felt ready to ship. Just a couple cosmetic tweaks. A trim here, a varnish there. Run a lint roller over the dialogue. Call it done.

Except.

The matrix – traitorous little bastard – exposed a structural fault so elegant I’d almost admired it. The problem? Pregnancy. Not mine, the protagonist’s. (Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)

Turns out, I’d compressed over a decade of real-life events into two years of narrative space. Bold. Efficient. Reckless. I’d wrung out the filler, reshuffled a few puzzle pieces, and declared the thing plausible.

Only it wasn’t.

When I sorted the scenes chronologically, the matrix coughed. The story broke like a cheap lawn chair. There she was: visibly pregnant while also, somehow, gallivanting about in scenes that would’ve required a different physiology entirely. Not an Olympian, but the metaphor holds.

And that’s when it hit me: time may be a flat circle, but gestation is not. No amount of POV tricks or narrative backflips can make a third-trimester body do first-trimester things. Biology, the ultimate killjoy.

So now I’m doing surgery. Not delicate surgery, either. I’m sawing out whole sections, rebuilding connective tissue, and laying down scar tissue where the timeline used to be. I’ll need new plot scaffolding to support the pregnancy and its repercussions. It’s fine. It’s good. It’s hell.

This is revision. We go in thinking we’re buffing up the finish, only to discover we paved over a sinkhole.

Lesson of the week: spreadsheets don’t lie.

They just lie in wait.