Tea Bag Potus

The teabag is released from its captive string and sinks softly into the brown swirling miasma in my cup.

There's a metaphor in there, I just don't know what.  I was going through Potus and making sure that every section (or chapter) ties into the next.  The feedback I got from beta readers was that the story was too disjointed and there wasn't a lot of cohesion between some parts.  This is a natural fault of the way I wrote it.  I wrote most pieces slightly out of order and I did not have a full grasp of each overarching theme.  I originally had about five themes in mind at the beginning which eventually became about 15 by the end.  I need to go back and tighten up each theme.

Ideally, I'd distill each thread back to the original five and have a rigorous edit session where I ask detailed questions of each section:  Which theme are you?  Do you have multiple themes?  Which one should you focus most on?

Even more ideally (and this is my plan) I'll choose only one theme and the rest will be sub themes.  They have to tie directly to the main theme in some way or they will be removed.  As an example, the main theme is Potus' hatred of Daylight Saving.  He is also opposed to time zones.  This is a natural extension of Daylight Saving (or vice-versa, I suppose), so it stays.  In one scene, he's meeting with his cabinet.  What's the theme?  Why not make it so he (or someone else) is late due to the time change?  Voilà, instant theme tie-in.

Then, it's a simple matter of taking the theme and sub-themes and tying any scenes together with these.  Then, in between the scenes, make sure that there is a specific glue that holds them together.  For example, after the acceptance speech, we move to the inauguration.  This seems obvious, but we can make it explicit:

Aide:  Good luck Potus.  See you at the inauguration!
Potus:  Fuck you too.  Oh, I mean, thanks.

And so forth.  There are a lot of scenes that I didn't glue together.  For example, he goes from the inauguration to the car to meet Johnson.  That's easy:

Aide:  Great speech, Sir.  Please go this way to the car for the parade.

This writing shit is easy!  I'm done!

Another thing that struck me this morning was a horrifying and stunningly sick trick to try to play.  I was trying on different things for the Potus character and the question of strong female characters was on my mind.  The feedback I got was that the First Lady was abusive or too bossy.  I think that is correct because it reverses the power roles and echos sentiments from 42's reign.  It even applies to the former head of state for 44.  (Look it up.)

But then, I thought, what if HE was a SHE?  And the doors just about blew off the vehicle I was driving.  I thought it would make the scene with the bondage equipment even more funny -- except to reverse the genders, I imagine ShePotus would have to be weilding the whip.  And then imagine the First Husband sort of being hen-pecked the way HePotus is.  That is, that the First Husband would be the residue of the current HePotus character.  The ShePotus would be a new character that took over the qualities of HePotus and combined most of the First Lady into one.  There could be some gaffes where people are used to saying "Sir," and they could call her "Sir.  I mean, Ma'am.  I mean, Sir.  I mean, Madam."

Maybe she insists on being called "Mademoiselle" instead of the offensive and matronly "Madam" or "Ma'am".  But there again, I need to tie this into the time zones/daylight saving theme.  Maybe her period is off by an hour so she forgets to change her diaper so she gets cranky.  Naw, too conventional.

Thoughts, questions, feedback?