Why does this always happen?

I sweat and worry and bang my head against the wall until I have a story/chapter almost completely finished - and then I wake up in the middle of the night with - THE SOLUTION!

As in - why this story/chapter is a piece of shit and how I can fix it.

I was ready to finish the long short story for the contests (deadline March 31) and it was... adequate. But the spark just wasn't there and I didn't know why. I was blaming it on the fact that there's a romantic element to it - which I don't do well - but that was bullshit. A cop-out.

About 2 AM, I woke up with this screaming in my head - "If you don't care about the characters, why should anyone else?"

And it was true - I didn't invest in my characters. They were just that - characters. Characters going through the motions. I didn't have people living through an emotional event.

Soooo...

Not tossing the story - too late for that. But I've printed it out, cut the different sections apart and started rearranging, editing, tossing, adding... Akin to what I'm doing with Tess, but in a shorter version. And every sentence - new or old - is being looked at as if these were my neighbors, my friends, my family.

No more characters. These are people. People I care about.

Talk about getting one's mindset straight...