The current work-in-progress, which is well over half-done at this point, has been a big experiment for me. It’s not the first time I’ve collaborated with my husband. We did pretty well with Supporting Ragnarok, which is now book one of the Bohica series. We’re doing fine together on Transporting Ragnarok, but I decided early on that I had to do something I had never successfully done before: work from an outline.

I’m very much a seat-of-my-pants writer. However, we were not only working closely on this book together, we have to have the plan for a full trilogy – the first book was written standalone, as we had no idea how well it would sell – so we needed to make a map for that. I needed to plan it with him, couldn’t just let it unroll in my head, so we sat down and worked out the outline.

To my surprise and relief, it has been working. Right up until the chapter I was trying to finish this week. Suddenly something in the outline brought me to a screeching halt, and it took me a couple of days to figure out where I’d gone wrong, how it was breaking the world we’ve been building, and what was going to fix it.

And we managed to talk that through while driving for a couple of hours for an appointment. Now, I just have to write the thing.

Sometimes, you have to be able to get it out of your head to look at it from more than one angle, and in doing so, you can see where the structure is broken. Once you’ve found the crack, you can determine if the scene is wrong, the whole act, or possibly the whole book. Highly unlikely to be the latter. This is where having the outline is coming in handy, actually. I have a plan already so I don’t have to worry about the whole thing being busted, scrap it all and start over.

In this case, I’d telescoped something into two characters that will, in the writing, involve three characters. To keep it limited to two created an interpersonal conflict that violated military culture (and we’re writing a military fantasy, me providing the fantasy, him the military) in a way that would have angered readers, I suspect. Having my coauthor and subject-matter expert to bounce it off of helped me get back on track.

I’m not sure I can outline a solo book. But I may try. It’s nice to have rails to go off of!