The Plotting is away! (Hooray!)

I may have to give up only talking about my personal life on weekends... because otherwise these days I have little to talk about. It's been like this most of the year, and I think it's because I've been working on my novel so much all year. That tends to put me in Fiction Mode. When I'm in Fiction Mode, nonfiction thoughts fall out of my head.

So the epic plotting of my novel is finally over. It only took 8 months! Well okay, part of that was spent doing research. I felt pretty triumphant when I finally hammered the durned thing out last night. And it's a pretty good combination of elements from the original version, from Austen's Persuasion, and from Dickens' Chuzzlewit--which every pass, these elements came more and more together.

I've only plotted it as far as the climax, because I don't want to be too hemmed in when I write the first draft. In the past I wrote a draft, and then went over it several times. But some writers and writing teachers advise rewriting your book completely when doing the second draft, that it makes a big difference

I intend to write the first draft in a Nanowrimo kind of way--not in 30 days, but in the "write and don't think too much" way. New ideas always come when you write in a hell-bent-for-leather manner. And then try this whole Rewriting It All thing.

Plotting to the nth degree is also something new. I've been writing stories (outside of school) since grade 2 or 3, so I always just came up with a premise and then ran with it. But a premise isn't a plot, so it can only take you about 1/4 of the way and then you have to come up with all new ideas. Needless to say my books weren't very even. ;-) And tended to include kidnappings.


Mind, most of the time they didn't need to be (even, that is--the kidnappings were very necessary!) cause I wrote them about my friends. I've been re-reading one I wrote in the late '90s about my friends at the bookstore. It was the last of my full length books written about friends--after that I started thinking more about publication, at which point one has to make up characters. But sigh, they were SO fun to write. And were often metafictional with intrusive footnote humor.

This one I'm reading is a Regency mystery, starring a pair of amateur sleuths who are in a marriage of convenience. I envisioned a 5 part series, with them falling in love by book 5, but I had to stop when one of the protagonists turned out to be dating someone else in the store--other than the woman he was married to in my book, who was just one of my buddies. It would have been a bit awkward to continue. Maybe I'll rewrite them one day with made up peeps.

Here's a scene I enjoyed. The Regency language is spotty, and I had to resist correcting mistakes as I retyped, but I think I do a good job of describing the state of the castle without long, boring description. ;-)


Marcus looked doubtfully at the crumbling tower sitting barren on a crook of the river Spey. The morning sky cast a gray pall over Rothiemurchus Castle and the craggy Highlands pushing up around them. Rachele's own medieval castle sat on the North Sea, at the English border, and it was a sprawling and dismal place, but Romantically so. This place looked like it harbored bandits and the sheep carried knives under their wool.


"You live here?" Gilbert raised doubtful eyebrows.


"Is it safe?" Marcus asked.


"Is it habitable?"


"Was it built by humans?"


"I don't like the look in that sheep's eye."


Miss Melinda ignored them both and made her way expertly up the decrepit steps and tugged at the heavy wooden door. Both men cringed, afraid the movement would bring the whole place crashing down about her head. She disappeared into the dark interior and, afraid to stay out there alone, Marcus and Gilbert followed.


[Later they try breaking into a trunk.]


Several implements later, Lord Marcus stood frustrated before the elusive trunk. The tools were so rusted Heather may as well have been storing them in water; the head came off the axe, the pick axe snapped in two, and the hammer head crumbled to dust.


"Luncheon is ready, have you found anything?" Miss Melinda stood in the doorway and eyed with distaste the scene before her. 


They explained the situation to her.


She went to the trunk, pulled a pin from her hair, and picked the lock.