On Outlining

Well, I finally finished the outline for Promise Me Paradise. I am very excited about that.

Ridiculously excited, actually. Last night when I finished I told all my friends, ate some gummi candies, and then promptly became so exhausted from how happy I was that I fell asleep for 10 hours.

Yup, I’m old.

Either way, the cold light of day brought to mind something that I keep forgetting. Namely, that Promise Me Paradise is the second book in a series of three. I don’t have the others planned at all. See, when I first conceived of Promise Me Paradise, originally Josie was a much more radical flapper and Leo had some fairly severe post traumatic stress. As the other subplots and character arcs started building up, I noticed I had a lot of characterization I liked but that the plots they were going to be getting involved in didn’t always fit their characters.

Enter Sinjin and Sally. It suddenly hit me that I was writing two separate books, one about a flapper an a war vet with PTSD and one about a rum runner and an heiress. It was actually a perfect solution to all my problems. I had accidentally done the wrong math and had been doing time period research for two years earlier than I needed to set PMP. Problem solved — new book was set in 1923! An article about King Tut’s tomb caught my eye and suddenly it was set in Egypt. The problem is I still had a lot more work done on PMP than on new book, so when it came time to choose a novel for NaNoWriMo I flipped a coin and it came up tails, so PMP won the which-novel-am-I-doing-first award.

Here’s where things get a little sticky. See, I’d like to submit both books for publishing. I really like the work I’ve done on PMP but well, you can’t really publish the second in a series first. So this leaves me in the uncomfortable position of needing to scramble to plot out and outline the first book (which is tentatively titled The Madness in the Moonlight) so I can start it in January. Right now the entire book literally consists of character outlines for Sally and Sinjin, along with the entire plot summary being “boy meets girl…IN EGYPT.” But that’s okay, because I am a writer, damn it and this is what I do.

And for the record, the three book series is so far going to be:
The Madness in the Moonlight
Promise Me Paradise
Another Pretty Nothing

The heroine of APN is not even sort of created yet, but the hero is a character from PMP!

First Post — Who I Am

So this year I’m attempting NaNoWriMo.  In a NaNo, you attempt to write a novel all during the month of November.  I have grown sick of annoying my friends with random trivia about the book as I work on it, so I figured I’d go ahead and start a blog.  And as long as I have a blog, I needed a Twitter!

Regardless of the crazies that are preventing me from actually finishing the outline of my novel, here’s some information about the book I’m currently working on:

Promise Me Paradise is set in 1925.  It’s the second book in a series, but it’s the first of the three that I’m actually writing.  I’ll start the first one later, but I figured out that they were two separate books while I was busy working on this one so I figured I’d just stick with it.

The year is 1925. The Jazz Age is booming in eastern Florida, and at the center of it is Josie Hudson — the only child of the most prominent business man in the area. But with her life of total privilege comes a price, her father has been pressuring her to marry one of his most promising young executives, but Josie has dreams. Dreams which suddenly seem more attainable when the handsome and exciting Leo Malcolm reappears into society.

Leo Malcolm served his country abroad during WWI and carries the scars of that to this day. The war paid for his education and allowed him to see more of the world, but now he’s returned home to Florida to handle his dead father’s accounts and set up a fairly comfortable career as a rum runner. A chance invite to one of J. Charles Hudson’s exclusive parties throws him in the path of Hudson’s beautiful daughter, Josie. But Leo has secrets of his own which could prove deadly to them both.

Watch this space as it gets closer to November for an outburst of insanity!