2011 - Two Heads are Better than One

Happy New Year, everyone! Another year, another blog layout. I've been blogging for almost a year now, can you believe it?

My New Year's was fairly uneventful, although on Friday, Ella (see link in the sidebar) came over and what a plotting session we had!

Plotting with Ella is great. I've done it on a smaller scale before - if I'm really stuck on something, I'll call her and moan about it until I've worked it out. She has this amazing talent to take my jumble of thoughts, which I can't really see clearly all the time, and making sense of them. (This is, I believe, because during the past ten years we have secretly learned to read each other's minds.)

But I've never done this with a whole plot before. Up until Friday, our collaborative graphic novel, Preposterous Things, had a couple of characters and a vague premise, but never anything more. And then on Friday, we sat down, I showed her the Three Act Structure and the idea of Goal, Motivation, Conflict and zoom! We were off. A couple hours later (hours that, of course, involved looking up random Doctor Who references), we had a fully fledged plot, the summary of which can now be found in my blog sidebar under "The Novels."

Plotting with another person is a wonderful thing. I cannot tell you how much time I've spent trying to plot out the werewolf novel (which still needs a new title), but it's a lot longer than a couple of hours. Friday was really a fabulous example of how great it is to be able to bounce ideas off of someone else. Next time you guys are stuck, I recommend talking to a crit partner or a friend. Maybe they'll be able to point out something that you're missing.