More Editing!

I give you....my outline! Condensed to 30 index cards. It's strange...I would have taken as many as I needed, but it came out to exactly 30. Now I just have to decide on if I'm happy the way it is now, or if I need to move scenes, or split scenes, or cut scenes, or whatever in the world else. After that I can paste them together into the new order, read it again, decide on chapters, and then I get to start editing line by line by line by line by line. Fun.

Actually it is quite fun. But now I'm just stuck thinking about different ways to arrange it. I haven't even moved a card yet! I might just be afraid to...but I was thinking about how my heroes had to get this quest assigned to them by the king before they did anything about this quest, and then I thought: Do they really? I mean, what would happen if they stumbled across it and took care of one of these things, then they go see the king to find out what happened and then he tells them to take care of the other five?

Sorry, that doesn't make too much sense if you haven't read my draft, but I don't even know how it helps me with the problem I'm having with timelines. My characters get sidetracked in the middle of something, and I like what the sidetrack did for my story, and I want to keep it, but I don't know if I want it where it is. I'm having a hard time figuring out where actually to put it.

EDIT: I think I've got the storyline I want. But it's going to be really changed. The big sidetrack is going to be turned into an alternate storyline that I introduce some new characters to take care of. I don't think this is actually going to make it any longer, since I'm not adding any scenes in. I'm just making it happen all at once instead of it being so linear. And now I can switch around when people are traveling. But this monster is going to take a lot of work. I wonder what I've gotten myself into...