For big stuff, I always outline, at least as far as "Before X can happen, Q and R have to happen, so I'd better get Person A and B into position." I generally know what I want the big end piece to be, so I need the "outline/road map" (once an Excel spreadsheet) to make sure I haven't left the bad guy 50 miles behind the county line when all the good guys are drawn up for the Final Battle.

I've never let an outline nail me down if the gates of heaven open before me and the Scroll of Universal Understanding suddenly unrolls and presents the perfect plot complication or character twist. The outline lets me see where it'll fit, or it shows the places where events can stretch to allow the development can occur.

(It's a sort of geometry, but I'll avoid the mathy comparisons)

I've never let an outline nail me down if the gates of heaven open before me and the Scroll of Universal Understanding suddenly unrolls and presents the perfect plot complication or character twist. The outline lets me see where it'll fit, or it shows the places where events can stretch to allow the development can occur.

Definitely. Inspiration has to trump the outline.

In related news, I'm wrestling with Anna's motivation toward the end of the book. I need to have her initially balk at the prospect of marrying Jack. At first I was going to have it be all because her first marriage made her risk-averse and unwilling to remarry anyone ever, and I think it's OK for that to be part of the reason. But I think it's implausible as her main motive, because if she's not thoroughly convinced Jack is a different sort of man altogether by this point in the book, she's too stupid to be a heroine of mine.

Which leaves me with the class difference, which certainly makes a plausible motive, given that I'm trying to make Anna a realistic woman of her times rather than a 21st century American in fancy dress. And it gets added strength from the fact she knows damn well marrying him would mean giving up all contact with the vast majority of a close-knit and well-loved family.

I think it works, I'm just afraid it makes her unsympathetic. But I should probably stop worrying about it and just write it the way I think is most believable.

Right?

Could someone guilt her about a specific relative she is particularly close to? Her aunt who nursed her through Scarlet Fever when she was eight or something? "Everyone will be heartbroken about this of course, but your Aunt Sophia will never recover."

Susan, is she pregnant by that point? What if you couch her resistance as fear/sadness that her brother won't get to part of her baby's life? Or that he won't be part of her life? If she's motivated more by strong emotional connections than simply losing a more upper-class lifestyle, that would be a more sympathetic motivation, I think.

Also, you could make her realize that she is being weak about it, that she fears she's not strong enough to risk everything for love, especially when what she thought was love once turned out so horribly. After all, Simon was pretty cool until they actually married, right? So she might even recognize that it's an ungrounded fear, since Jack is so different, but still have that irrational doubt, "What if he changes when we're actually husband and wife?" It might make her willingness to choose him, for better or worse, in the end that much more heroic, too.

And with those two cents, I am for bed.

Susan, is she pregnant by that point? What if you couch her resistance as fear/sadness that her brother won't get to part of her baby's life? Or that he won't be part of her life? If she's motivated more by strong emotional connections than simply losing a more upper-class lifestyle, that would be a more sympathetic motivation, I think.

Heh. Baby Arthur Horatio is four months old at that point. And it's not her brother she's worried about. It's a set of relatives that didn't even exist in the draft of Lucy you read--an aunt, uncle, and cousins who took her in when her father died after her brother was grown but she was just 13. They're a likeable bunch--anyone would regret giving them up. When she thinks of home she thinks of them first and her brother second. And at least one of the cousins is an important and highly sympathetic secondary character. He wouldn't be on the scene for this part of the story, but he'd keep the cousins from being mere abstractions.

Could someone guilt her about a specific relative she is particularly close to?

Definitely a possibility. One of the cousins could even be visiting.

Anyway, it's not so much that she'd be thinking, "I can't do this because it'd involve giving up my upper-class lifestyle." It's more like she was brought up with the attitude that it's maybe OK to boink the Lower Orders on occasion after you've given your husband an heir and a spare (and here Anna's Great-Aunt Flora would've sighed reminiscently over the handsome and lusty gamekeeper they had back in the 1760's), but that it wouldn't have even occurred to her as a possibility to marry more than a step or two out of her class in either direction. I'm even planning to have her fantasize earlier about being able to marry Jack, but with all those fantasies either involving him as a long-lost duke's heir or her not actually being an earl's niece and baronet's sister.

And then when it does occur to her that there's absolutely nothing to prevent her from marrying him if she wants to, since she's over 21 and can make her own choices, she'll have a few understandable regrets over giving up her family before she decides to be brave and propose to him.

Susan, what about the realisation that, if she marries Jack, they'll need to go elsewhere because of the class structure of the time being what it was? Literally, distance from James and Lucy, from familiar things, from the England she came to miss while she was with the Army, as a motivation. But she can also have the realisation that, as it is, she has no place to call home.

Memememe stuff:

1. I just got an email from my editor. FFoSM made The Independent Mystery Booksellers Association's Top Five Picks for January: "(IMBA) announces its January 2005 selections for Killer Books, five mysteries to die for this month. Current and past selections can be found at www.killerbooks.org." This is a huge, huge deal if you write mysteries, and happy-making.

2. Can I request a wee bit of "go, Deb!"-ness? Still Life With Devils is being seriously considered for trade paperback by a huge, huge name among editors, at a major publishing house. He asked Jenn to ask me if I'd consider a pseudonym for it, because - this is worrying me half to death - "the Bookscan numbers on the St. Martins series are a bit low, and might be a stumbling block."

Dude, I have no problem with using a pseudonym, I wouldn't want it to clash with the series anyway, but I'm damned if I know how to push the series more than I have been. I've been working my ass off to get it out there. On the sunny side, he's asked for copies of Weaver and FFoSM, so maybe....and I've asked Jenn to pitch the vampire book, as well.

Wow!

Go Deb Go!

Go Deb!!!

Go, Deb, go! Much publishing~ma to you.

t not here Lots of go-Deb-ness t /really not here