Grand Plans Awry

As I said last week, I want to write a short and tidy contemporary romance.  I have my characters (although I’ve changed the hero’s name twice and it may change again).  This time I started with a target market and very strict and clear limitations for myself.

Since I want this nice and tight, I pulled out my old Marshall Plan Workbook.  I thought I’d do notecards, plot the whole thing out very carefully, and make sure that I had enough — and not too much — story.  No complicated subplots, no extra characters, so I really want this to be about 50-60K.

I got out my 40 notecards and numbered them.  I started taking notes on my character development.  This is the heroine’s story, so I spent quite a bit of time thinking about her backstory and how she got to this place.

But I really hadn’t PLOTTED.  I mean, I knew the beginning, middle and end, and I had the 3 surprises (that Marshall recommends) pretty much figured out, but I hadn’t written all those details down carefully.

I had the beginning research completed.  I looked up dressage, the American Royal Parade and Grand Prix in Kansas City, Andalusians, Friesans, and Greek vacation islands (wow, so gorgeous!).

Then Saturday morning we slept in, and in that in-between stage of awake but not quite ready to get up yet, I wrote the first couple of sections in my head.  Needless to say, before I would leave the house yesterday, I made myself write those sections down. 

So much for my careful notecards – I don’t have a single one written up.  But I do have 2600 words and Chapter One.  🙂  Sometimes the story is just ready to go.  Of course in the dreaded middle slump, I may wish very hard that I’d made myself write up all those plot cards…

Tonight while football is on, I’m going to work on Victor’s synopsis.