Craft Refresher Course

Rockefeller Plaza

FREE on Smashwords until July 31: Eorwulf and The Soul of Sharah. Use coupon code SSWSF

I didn’t blog yesterday. Mostly because I didn’t have much to talk about. We had a nice weekend, just the two of us. We ran some errands, did a little shopping, and cooked on the grill for Sunday night dinner. I also discovered a great new app for my iPhone: Smule Magic Piano. I played and played and played until my wrist and elbow hurt. If you’re musically inclined, check it out. It’s a lot of fun.

Yesterday I spent a good port of the day reading up on characters and plot. I think I have a fairly good idea of these two things but it’s always good to do a refresher. I read through my Heroes & Heroines book and picked out the core archetypes for my H/H in book two of my Knights books. I actually had a lot of fun doing that because I had to stop and think really hard about my characters, who they were and what their story arc was going to be. Then I picked out a second archetype for them to layer it on.

After that, I pulled out my 20 Master Plots book and read through that. I’m trying to decide on a specific plot type for the book. I want to write a bare-bones synopsis to give myself a roadmap for when I start writing. Because I don’t want to wander aimlessly, get stuck, and then throw out pages because I went in the wrong direction.

I know…it’s shocking that I’m actually doing some pre-planning on a book, isn’t it? Fear not. I’m still “pantsing” my paranormal erotic. The good thing about that, though, is I do know where I’m going with that story. I know it’s actually three books instead of one and I know my heroine’s story arc will span the three books. She goes from WAIF to SPUNKY KID to CRUSADER (if you’ve read the archetype book, then you know what that means). It’s a seriously big arc, but she goes through major changes to get from the first to the last and it spans three books, so I think it works.

So I didn’t get any actual words down, but I DID do a lot of reading/planning. I think that’s good progress, too.