Plot Panic

3 days to go until NaNoWriMo! Still don't have a job, and my unemployment benefits are being held back because my last employer lied to the employment commission and told them that I quit (which I most certainly did not). My car got repossessed and I've been sick. That being said, I'm still excited about NaNo!

I'm taking the approach that I want to have a more detailed outline this year. I made a post asking for help with a block I got to, and I got some great feedback. Here's the post I made...

Plowing right along, plotting and outlining furiously before NaNo begins. This will be my 2nd year. Last year I had ideas for scenes I put on notecards and arranged them the way I wanted and wrote from that. Wasn't too terribly happy with it. Have written a few things since then in a "seat of your pants" style, but that didn't seem to suit me. This year for NaNo, I'm trying to have a complete plot outline before the 1st so I can write from that. One small problem; my plot is stalled.

Long story short, the book is Epic Fantasy w/a rough edge. The MC is a female who is going after an assassin that's part of a larger organization of assassins. She worked at a home for unwanted children in a largish village/town, an assassin came in, killed all the kids but one and kidnapped him. Noone would help her, so she took off on her own to find these guys. She came to a village, booked passage downriver to the nearest major city while picking up a teenage boy tagalong. They get to the city and get a room at an inn. He wants to help, she says no. He leaves, intending to try and pick up info anyway. She goes to the library, and when she comes back, there's an assassin in her room that attempts to talk her out of pursuing them (sort of a "it's too big of a picture for you to understand" kind of thing). She summons a trickster spirit (it's the 2nd time she's summoned him; she was warned to only do it once) to get more power. That's where I'm stalled. I have a rough idea for an ending, but I seem to be stopped right there.

Any suggestions? Ideas? Ideas or suggestions on how to come up wih my own ideas? Any help is appreciated.

I got back some very helpful suggestions. Here's what I've been working on this morning (I would have done more, but I was hampered by an hour long search for my wallet).

First, why did the assassin try to talk her out of pursuing them? Why not just kill her? There must be a reason behind that.
I’m not sure that does make sense. Possibly he can be someone sent by Ravyn to try and mollify his grief. And perhaps it wasn't an assassin. Perhaps it was a member of the opposing faction, or one of the good guys trying to help her.
Second, why was she warned to only summon the trickster once? What are the consequences of summoning it more than once? Because it becomes addictive. The more I think about this, the more I like the idea of Mahrna hanging herself after Naoren leaves.

- Why does this assassin simply talk to her instead of killing her? Is he potentially a more moral assassin than the one who killed all the children? Might she be able to get more information out of him or persuade him to see things from her point of view and maybe even enlist his help? What kind of people does this group of assassins kill? Good people? Bad people? Whoever their boss tells them too? the more I think about why the assassin would just talk to her, the more it doesn't make sense. Being a large organization, they're not going to really give a shit. They wouldn’t talk to her. They would just kill her, and she wouldn’t see it coming. As far as what they kill, who they are? They are a far-reaching organization, sort of like the “illuminati”
- Why did the assassin go for that one kid in the first place? Does the kid have some sort of abilities or special parents or something? What are the goals of the assassins or the people paying them? Noone is playing them, they are a branch of an illuminati-like organization. The kid is important to their goals, he may have some powers or something to do in the future, maybe a “golden child” type thing.
- The trickster spirit- what will the repercussions of her ignoring the warning be? How will she get out of whatever the consequences are? Jack gets his claws into naoren.
- When will the teenage boy show up again? Can he help her get out of whatever crap she brings down upon herself by summoning the trickster? Will she then accept him as a companion? He is the “golden child” of the opposition, or maybe a counter to the trickster
-What other characters might she meet that will help or hinder her on the journey? Who can she go to for information about who the assassin is, what he wants with the child, how he can be stopped etc? What does she expect to do when she finally meets him? Does she have any sort of training/power/skill that will help her face him or will it be more about having a ballsy personality and extreme will to succeed? She’s going to meet someone in the library that will help her in more ways than one. She doesn’t quite know what she’ll do when she meets him (and I need to illustrate this in the book). she has no training, it's gonna be a ballsy personality bolstered by insanity and power that she has no idea what to do with.

So that's where I'm at now. The nice thing about coming into outling from a sort-of "seat of your pants" discovery writer perspective is that I dont' feel like I have to adhere to the outline religiously. It's fluid and adjustable. And with the software I'm using (liquid story binder, well worth the $45.95 pricetag), it's very easy to do all that and have it in one place.

I'm fucking ITCHING LIKE FUCK to start writing. You can bet that unless my pregnant girlfriend needs something, when the clock strikes midnight and the month turns to November, I'm going to be typing away!!!

Hello Again!!!

Hey all. Sorry it’s such a long time since I made a post (yeah, like there are 2,354,453 people who are like “Goddammit, when’s he gonna post again). A lot has been going on in my life, and I lost my way for a bit as a writer. Feel like I’m back on track now, so it’s all good.

Last year I did NaNoWrimo completely differently from the way I’m doing it this year. Last year, I didn’t decide to do NaNoWrimo ‘till November 5th. I had a draft of part of my book already written (probably 5500 words or so, I forget exactly how much), so I started with that and rewrote it completely, changing a lot of it. Once I had gone through that, I was pretty much flying by the seat of my pants. There’s not plotting, note taking, or anything else during NaNo; there just isn't time. I had a beginning, the start of a middle (though that wasn’t very good, most of it), and I knew what I wanted the ending to be. I had a list of scenes on index cards that I rearranged until it looked good to me (I did this on Nov. 5th), but the plot quickly drew away from that. Part of that was that I had never tried to write anything longer than an 11 page paper for a class (in high school) or a short story (in college), and that I really had no clue about the writing process. Not that I'm an expert now, but I have learned a few things.

After NaNo was over, I left the story completely alone for 6 or 7 weeks. When I started trying to edit it, I was hit with a terrible case of Writer’s Block. There was also this weird self-loathing that would come up when I tried to work on it, so I stopped. I played around with a short story that I had written back in high school. That actually went fairly well, though I stopped working on that after 2 or 3 revisions. It still needs a little more, but it’s a lot bette than it was. But every time I went back to my NaNo book (the title of which is “The Rope of Death”. Those of you who partied with me in 1995 may remember that), I hit a brick fucking wall. I got a job in March so I had much less time to write. I soon stopped trying to do much but piddle with it every once in awhile and got more heavily into video games than I intended to. I began to despair that I would every amount to anything as a writer, or as a person for that matter. I took a vacation with my girlfriend in June to the Mountain Lake Hotel in Pembroke, VA (the place where Dirty Dancing was filmed), and started writing a lot there. Though I wasn't writing anything for The Rope of Death, I was writing. About a month and a half or two months ago, I picked it back up.

My favorite living author, Brandon Sanderson, came out with The Way of Kings, and I picked up The Rope of Death again. I was less discouraged now. I had some new ideas, and I was pretty excited about them. I went to a book signing with Brandon Sanderson and got some suggestions on how to come up with a new beginning if I was stuck, but my girlfriend gave me the idea that I eventually used. Now that it’s almost time for NaNo to start, I’ve put The Rope of Death away. Probably I will pick it up again in December, after NaNo is over. I will probably be working on that book for years before it’s ready to be published in any way, shape, or form. I’m at peace with that.

I also started to get really excited about NaNoWrimo this year. I had been piddling around with an idea for an epic fantasy for awhile, so I decided to go with that. I brainstormed and freewrote and came up with a barebones plot idea and some characters. I updated my copy of Liquid Story Binder and started using it. I now have some of the major characters and a detailed outline that stops part of the way into Act II (using the 3 act concept to write it). I’m a bit bogged down in act II, so we’ll see what I’m able to do in the next 5 days. As I said earlie, there’s no time to do more plotting or outlining during NaNo, so whatever I get done, I will start with that. I can always fix it later!

So that’s where I’m at now with everything. It’s not a bad place to be. I’m looking at NaNoWrimo completely differently this year. I do NOT expect to have a finished manuscript that will be ready for publication with a few minor tweaks here and there. What I hope to have is a finished first draft of a Novel that will provide a good starting point to be rewritten later. My expectations are pretty low this year. If I can complete it and have a decent story (even if the execution is kinda shitty) when I'm done, I will feel like I did well. I’m going to try and update regularly during NaNo, but we’ll see how that goes. Thanks for reading this. When I get some finances straight, I plan to get a website of my own to put all my writing stuff on. I hope all of you will go there. Ciao for now!!