The plot bunnies settled down after their crazed antics a few days ago. I'm getting itchy to move on to the actual drafting process, but there's a mass of bunnies/scenes near the beginning that still need to translate onto index cards before I can get going, and a thread or two I still want to weave in.

[Much of the climax and ending is still unplanned as well, but I think that, as long as I have the right stepping stones in place leading up to it, I can let it unfold organically once I get there and with the knowledge of what I've discovered during the drafting process, something I'm sure to do.]

Those beginning-bunnies have been kind of sleepy, but today they started to have energetic spurts between bouts of get-me-my-snoozy-pillow moments. I'm hoping to get the majority of this sorted out tonight! Yays!

I know some writers use the term 'plot bunny' to refer to an idea for a whole story, but I also use them to refer to ideas for scenes within a story. I've been trying this weekend to corral my plot bunnies into some semblance of a plot for Winter's World, and, while some settled cozily onto index cards, others have been, well, sleepy. Or hiding under rocks/vegetation/whathaveyou.

Um, until tonight. I had read a total of four pages of a Victorian mystery novel when the previously-comatose plot bunnies in my head started to act like this:


Wish me luck!

I don't think it hit me exactly how drastic this rewrite of Winter's World would be until I:

a) printed out the last draft I have
and b) looked at the revision checklist I made months ago

I'm about a third of the way through reading that old draft and (besides cringing at introduced threads I know I dropped or didn't follow through properly) I kept thinking, Won't use that ... no, that's not applicable ... hah! Not in a million years is THAT part going in. I did know and had already decided that this draft would need to be a complete, from-scratch rewrite, but this is like looking through a different window on the wreckage.

Rather than feeling overwhelmed, though, I felt inspired. The plot holes and character inconsistencies that I saw in that draft and noted on the revision checklist are either being worked out, snarl by snarl, on my legal pad/in my notebook/in Microsoft OneNote, or just don't matter anymore. Changing the setting from pseudo-medieval to nineteenth century England means that most of the epic questy stuff is kaput. This also means that one of the biggest and (so I thought) most exciting parts of the old draft has ceased to be, just the first of many slashes! However, I get a perverse kind of joy out of cutting plotlines/characters/etc. when needed, so all's good there.

I did have a few minutes of panic yesterday when all the snarls were ganging up on me, and I wondered if I'd made a mistake and if this book really is meant to be in a drawer, but almost as soon as I wondered that, I knew the answer was no.

Sometimes I attack the snarls with a finetoothed comb. Sometimes I work them gently with a brush. And slowly, slowly, they're loosening.

This NaNoResFo I've embarked on has a dual purpose:

a) research the era
b) comb through the plot-and-world-building snarls

I'm feeling much more confident about (a), or at least I'm getting to the point where I feel like I'd be comfortable starting to actually write and do research as I go, but (b) is still rather tricky. The biggest snarl I've been gnawing at [eww!] is how exactly the MCs' elemental power works, which I really need to know to be able to figure out how they can learn to utilize it. The characters, obviously, won't and can't know everything I need to know, but I still have to figure it out.

My main character has an affinity with fire, so I finally decided that maybe I should go right to the source: physics. I found a couple of basic explanations of heat and temperature at Encarta and this page, and decided to delve more into the concept of kinetic energy.

Well, yanno, once I get that far, I have to run the whole gamut. I've spent the last hour or so watching videos on YouTube from an old science show called Eureka! [this one on kinetic energy is my fave so far] and they ROCK! My mind is buzzing with pieces of the puzzle wanting to click into place, but it's one of those cases where my mind will blow up if I try and type as fast as I'm thinking, so I'm going to sit down with a legal pad and piece together what I know so far.

During the course of this NaNoResFo, I also get to figure out more superficial-but-fun things, like what kind of car Gina has (I settled on this one). This might be superfluous to some people but, for someone who really needs visuals to encourage her to be visual in a story, it was a definite accomplishment!

Final note, and then I'll pick up that legal pad, I swear! The actress in the icon for this post (Eve Myles, better known as Gwen Cooper to those who watch Torchwood - which I have yet to - and Gwyneth in one memorable episode in the first season of Doctor Who - which I adore) is my current casting choice for Gina, the MC. I think she'll be sticking around for a while ...

As per an excellent suggestion by 2skippingstones, today marks the beginning of my own personal NaNoResMo (National Novel Research Month). I'm going to slice it in half, though, and make it two weeks. No fancy name for that, so I'll just refer to it as NaNoResMo. ^_^

The idea of NaNoResMo is to spend a relatively short period of time doing concentrated bouts of research for a project - in this case, a historical fantasy set in an alternate version of nineteenth century England. I've already watched various period films, so this time will be spent more with reference books and novels, books like The Last Days of Newgate [mysteries are apparently brilliant for absorbing atmospheric details] and The Jane Austen Handbook.

As of right now, this NaNoResMo is set to finish on September 4th. If anyone is interested in doing something similar, I'd love to hear how it goes!

ETA: NaNoResMo has been rechristened NaNoResFo (fortnight! how cool is that?)