Third Book: The Work Begins

Earlier this year I mentioned part of my New Year’s resolution was to fully outline my third book. Yet while I randomly spewed forth a few thoughts and hastily scribbled notes into my IDEAS.doc file, until now I’ve done very little I could call progress.

But that’s all changed in the past few days. Now that one aspect of my resolution is nearly complete, I turned my efforts back to the file I so humbly saved as “Third Book” and began to embellish the few notes from the other document with more specific plot points, hoping to build the over-arcing narrative structure. This gave me a 2.5 page bullet point listing of important events.

Not quite an outline, but we’re getting closer.

Wanting to do more before I temporarily let the story ferment in the dark recesses of mind and hard drive alike, I delved into the physical structure of the book, wondering how I could convey it in a fresh manner while effectively adhering to the arcing narrative I had already developed. Realizing the story, as established, has two markedly different sections, I split the first into its own respective chapters. These I quickly described for future reference, noting what I would like to be addressed in each. Turning to the second half, I stared dumbfounded at the screen and, glancing back at the plotline, simply marked that I needed to conduct more research before I could firmly ascribe a structure.

That being said, there was still more work to be done regardless of the need for research. Though I don’t have all the intimate details to work with just yet, I do know the generic archetypes and basic plot points for each of my main characters. As such, and much like my approach to my other titles, I spent a few hours exploring both obscure Wikipedia facts and popularity lists on baby name sites (why are there so many of these now?) to handpick first names for each character; none of the names were randomly chosen.

Sadly, for my third book, it’s now time for research, which will primarily be focused on closer study of two wildly different books. I’ve already started the first and the other is sitting on my shelf ready to be cracked open for the first time since college.

The work’s only just begun, but I’ve already got the feeling this will be my most challenging title to date.

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