Creed's Complications

I am having so much fun with this plot!

Believe it or not, with three novels under my belt, I did not pre-plot any of them.

Well, that's not totally true.  I had a good idea of what would happen in all three, and figured out the details on the way.  I had a vague outline for Children of Rhatlan.  I did the NaNoWriMo thing for the first draft, and this was pre-NaNo.  At that time, a few of my contemporaries were doing what they called "Novel Dares."  Yes, the dare was to write a novel in a month.  It took me about 40 days to write the first draft of CoR, but with about 50,000 words done in the first month, I would have been a NaNo winner... if NaNo had existed.  The draft had so many problems that I essentially used it as an outline, and rewrote the book from the beginning.

In Tamshi's Imp, there are a lot of twists.  I knew what was really going on from the beginning, and generally the direction the story was heading.  With Amber in the Over World, I don't remember what I did in terms of plot.  I had characters, a world, and a concept, and wrote.

So, Bodacious Creed is the first novel I'm doing an extended outline for before I sit down to write it.  This continues to be an amazing process.

For instance, I made an important setting change last Friday.  I realized that something big didn't make sense, so I thought about how it needed to be different, and took notes on it.  Then, I started going through the outline with this change in mind.  I made the necessary changes.  As I've been going through it--and I've been working more on it today--I started to think of things I hadn't considered.

The trick is to answer those questions and add new plot points wtihout totally derailing the story.  In other words, there are things that still need to happen for it to be the story I want to tell.  So, I need to make the new details fit into that context.

Todays are important details, too.  I now know how Creed was killed.  There's more conflict and drama happening in town than before.  There are several new characters, and some of the existing characters now have a richer backstory.

Time to get back to that outline.