I have a plot!
This morning while in the little boy’s room the plot for Sixteen Permutations suddenly hit me like a bolt. Like I was telling Amit later in the day, perhaps the removal of unncessary matter from the body allows for new, mental ‘good’ matter to be ushered in from the cosmic ether. Or, looked at another way, all good ideas are bartered for in shit.
(Click ‘Read More’ for the rest, including a short excerpt from the new novel.)
Anyway, I have a plot(!) which makes this task much more appealing now. I said before that while NaNoWriMo may have the motto of “no plot, no problem” I refuse to write without a plot; even the flimsiest one will do, because I need to tell a story and not just do it as a competitive exercise.
Now, you may ask, what has changed since the last time; didn’t I have a plot back then too? Well, sure, I had a premise for what could have been a plot, but it wasn’t working too well, and now it has thankfully segued nicely into a plot I haven’t tackled yet, but was on the agenda.
It’s nice to have an extended timeline in from which to pluck your plots, especially when you are expected to write 50,000 words in… um, 20 days. I have around 3735 years of Savant timeline neatly packed away and waiting to be told, and with quite a few general events already decided it’s more a case “Which should I write?” rather than “What should I write?”
The new plot is not a particularly exciting one on the surface. I’d say it’s 100% better than my ‘guy in forest school’ premise I had until yesterday, but only around 50% of what I would consider novel material. The other 50% will come in the telling of the first 50%. This is pretty much the position I was in four years ago with Tale of a Thousand Savants: I had 50% of the plot — i.e. Savant meets up with army of Savants, fights evil enemy, the end — but once I started writing it the tale became the background for a number of plot points and issues I had worked into the timeline as being a part of the greater Savant narrative.
If none of this makes sense, then good.
I’m up to 1075 words. Part one of chapter one is done. Part two, Xaria’s perspective, is in the works. I’ll leave you with an excerpt of the former:
“As I was saying,” I told the bird, “I suppose that if I were a bird and the survival of my species depended on the pecking of a rival’s sperm then I — that reminds me, have I ever told you about that time I actually was a bird? Physically, I mean; it was nice. Matter transfer, it used to be all the rage at once… probably still is if you go out a few parallels. That’s the thing with the multiverse, everything is happening everywhere at once. The first time I actually thought about it I was overwhelmed by it all. Like that time I saw a horde of marauding… marauding…”
Just listen to yourself, Savant.
“I…”
You’re stuck in a tree with one and a half legs, a headless cock and you’re rambling on and on to a bird you just encountered three minutes ago.
“They were marauding and I…”
Has it all come down to this? Dodging traps and telling tall stories?
I looked down at the bird. It looked at me.
“All I have are my stories.”
I jumped off the branch.
V