Hello, WIP, my old friend. I’ve come to write on you again….
In the middle of working on Dust of the Ocean, I had a plot bunny bite me. You know those annoying things, won’t let you get back to the thing you’re writing on until you’ve chased them and written them down. Well, now the WIP I got back to one has the first draft down, time to look at the other.
Wait, how did this thing get to 30K words?
And why do I now feel like it’s lacking description and needs a heavy edit for visuals?
And who did kill the guy, after all?
I’m supposed to solve that and write it?
Why me?
Hand. Staple. Forehead.
Dramatic swoon!
Cedar is laughing at me.
In the face of this pressure, I did what any writer would… ran away and started reading somebody else’s book. And chatting with Alma via text about recalcitrant characters. I’ll try edits and plotting in reverse tomorrow.
You all have a better day than me!
Mad Genius Club 
Have a great idea for a story, it will be fun to write, you’ll laugh… you’ll cry…
It’ll move you, Bob.
Oh, it will be a good day. Me? I’m working on a story set in someone else’s universe. It’s a bit like wearing a corset, girdle, pantyhose, and… it’s confining. It’s a good exercise, I suppose. Learning to write to order.
:sympathy:
“She did that. So eventually she’ll tell him how! … Um, how did she do that….”
And thanks to Dorothy, the lead up to the climax of the book just changed. For the better, I think, because it “shows” better. But I still have to rewrite a chunk of text.
Someone could make a fortune selling cans of “Plot Bunny Repellent” at cons and writing club meetings.
And what happens if the “Plot Bunny Repellent” actually Attracts Plot Bunnies? 😈
You mean like the Navy’s (in)famous shark repellent?
It ‘worked’ for versions of worked… The dye marker on the other paw… sigh
My plot bunnies will bound up, run away, sometimes bound back. . . .
Yesterday one bounded back and I put in some work on one of my longer running WIPs. It took me something like five stabs to outline it because it was always escalating too slowly or too quickly.
Ouch. Nothing is less fun than the one you turned your back on and now you feel like you have to change everything about it.
Oh, I don’r know… I’m looking forward to picking up my first 2 “completed” books in the WIP series and stuffing them full of better world-building setting detail.
“You get a cobbled street with horse sweepings, and you get a barometer in the front hall, and you get a morning household staff meeting and you get a city directory of firms”, etc., etc.
Current WIP is essentially an attack of the plot bunny of doom.
There were a couple of secondary characters in the original WIP. Clearly they would have run into each other before the start of the story, but I couldn’t quite get a handle on how they interacted with each other. So I wrote how they first met.
Turns out they’re married…