Hello, Plot! It's so nice to finally meet you. It only took me three months to convince you to show me your lovely face. Three months of coaxing and cajoling. Three months of mind maps, index cards, multiple notebooks, sticky notes, "outlines," (really just multiple pages of paragraph after paragraph of scene descriptions) and let us not forget the repositionable glue or the trifold, and about 60,000+ words of writing mostly blind on where the vibing hells this story was going!

(Yes. Vibing hells. Welcome to my world. It's called the Republic of Mage Territories.)

I have a twenty-six page description of the plot, and I am completely giddy. If these twenty-six pages weren't so incredibly messy, I'd be tempted to call it the first draft and go fill in all the 324 missing pages with description and dialog in the second draft. But that means I'd have to junk over 60,000 words, some of which are pretty good. Instead, I'll have to go in and fix them, a sometimes tedious and often confusing task that requires all brain cells on deck.

But that's okay.

Because I now know the majority of how every clue gets revealed, the secrets, the climax, the ending…all of it. In my excitement, I've spent today jumping around from scene to scene and writing little bits here and there. Scrivener is a jumpy writer's BFF.

(For those of you who don't know, Scrivener is a writing program that lets you, among other things, create separate documents for each scene and/or chapter. I'd already created a novel's worth of scenes and chapters for this story, although a number of them are still blank.)

Of course, jumping around from scene to scene isn't sustainable. Nor is it the best way to write a novel that flows. So eventually I will have to buckle down and start writing new scenes from start to finish. But for now, I'm jumping for joy!

Onward!

ANISE RAE