Status

[desperance]

One page before coffee and shopping, two since. Okey-doke. I can't go to the Lit & Phil - woe, woe! cursed be Sundays! - but I have still completed my morning's ration. But then, it was fun this morning. I had this new character walk in last night, and he needed exploring. (It is a function, of course, of work-sans-outline, that new characters will just stroll in and demand to be explored; I note, though, that they are doing this later and later. The stand-out example from Outremer is Sieur Anton, who turns up about chapter three and then moulds the whole trilogy about himself, to the point where it is impossible to imagine or remember what the story was meant to be without him; in Bridge of Dreams/River of the World, it's Djago, who turns up towards the end of vol one. And here I am right in the final throes of vol two in this series, and suddenly...)

Oh, and speaking of work-sans-outline, I did just happen to glance through the synopsis I'd put together to sell this series. Umm. Book one stays fairly close, more or less. Book two has now departed so radically from the estimate that there is frankly no book three left at all, or at least no hope of steering back towards book three as described. Eek. Anybody got a spare plot, at all...?

Comments

[pennski.livejournal.com]

Let me see, there's this girl who dresses up as a boy....


...this sadly is why I don't write fiction!

BTW - I think you put Harry's documents back in the bible. I went to look back on your entries to see, but you were too prolific for me to find them!

[maeve-the-red.livejournal.com]

I hope you won't take this the wrong way, but I find it greatly reassuring that a writer so much more experienced than wot I is still finds their Brilliant Plot Plan chewed up and spat out by their characters, some of whom don't even appear in said Plan. If you can survive such upsets, then there's hope for me yet.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Oh, the problem is constant and only gets worse with the years; we write outlines for publishers, not for ourselves.

On the other hand, this particularly dramatic edition of the problem might have been obviated if I had, y'know, actually glanced at that outline once or twice, in the last couple of years sometime...