The plot thickens

...but it's not gravy yet.

Last time I mentioned The Second Book, I'd arrived at the synopsis expansion stage, or the bit where I have to get really detailed about the whole story arc. Writing time has been very off and on since then, but I finished Stage 6 earlier this week and then discovered that my character definitions were already (almost) as detailed as they needed to be to put a tick beside Stage 7 as well. All I really needed to do was a little more thinking/finessing about the characters' major story goals and how they would change by the end of the novel (those that do), which only took a couple of hours or so.

The description of the Snowflake method mentions that by encouraging you to work a certain way, it can help to force out ideas for sub-plots, character traits and so on that really enrich the story. I've certainly found that working out very well so far, and was quite excited when I spotted a bit where I could shoe-horn in some of the writing I did last year for my 100 Themes Writing Challenge.

So here I am (already!) at the point where I need to create a detailed scene list. War of Nutrition had 96 scenes in total and I'm working with that as a notional (albeit flexible) target. It splits nicely into three sections and allows each scene to be relatively short but still end up with 80-100,000 words. I'd like to be closer to the top end of that word count this time round, although it's not so much of a driver for eBooks as for print. War of Nutrition started off at 100,000 in the first few drafts, but in the end I couldn't deny it needed radical surgery to give the first half the pace it needed, so it ended up closer to 80,000 in the published version.

To be honest this time round there's one part of the plot that I'm still a little woolly about. If you read that 4-page synopsis you would immediately spot the part that turns from very definite "she does that, he does this" into vague statements of intent. A sequence of events with no real explanation of how they start or finish. In that respect, maybe it's a bit of a cop-out to say I've "done" step 6, but I'm going to let myself off that hook and press on with scene definition anyway. I know there'll be no escape for this stage. When I hit that point, about three-quarters through the story, when I don't *really* know what's happening (well, I know the what but not so much the how) I will have to work it out. You can't know how the scene is set up, how it plays out and how it ends without the how. See? Because there are lots of 'hows' in that sentence. So you have to know. And I don't. Not yet. But by the time I come out of the end of steps 8 & 9, I will.

Money! (It's a gas)

After almost exactly two years, I'm finally getting to the bottom of the eBay pile. Maybe I'm overstating it slightly in the title. There has been money, of that there is no question, but for the most part it's not been a gas. Much of it has been mindless tedium; there's been some rumpling disappointments (that's like a crushing disappointment but with lighter weights) mostly in the areas of postage - either miscalculating the cost of it or fragile things getting broken in transit - but also more general stuff like items not selling for what I thought they were worth, and some buyers being worse than moronic; some dogged determination (it took 22 attempts - almost a year - to sell that damned walker for instance); but there have been some highlights too, some of them even approaching exciting.

I could bore on for hours (or pages, since I'm writing) but to avoid putting you to sleep I'll choose two examples from each side of the eBay boxing match*. In the red (for excitement) corner, the highlights include:

The Biscuit Tin

When my Mum died in 2011 we spent well over half a year emptying her house ready for sale. We threw away loads of stuff, naturally, but I'd already had six months' examples of what would sell on eBay (ANYTHING), so things that I might previously have binned I decided were worth "having a go" with on eBay. Into this category fell the old biscuit tins that had lain gathering dust in the outhouse since my Dad died in 1993. He kept nails and screws in them, and I don't think my Mum ever went near a nail or a screw in her life. She certainly wasn't going to start after he'd gone. I thought there was a chance they might be collectable, so I took a photo of all of them - there were 5 - and put them up as a job lot for £7.50.

The next day I woke up to a message from someone requesting additional pics of one of the tins - a Huntley & Palmers one with a motif of common birds. In the original photo you could only see the lid. My initial reaction (that it was a bloody nuisance) gave way to a feeling that I ought to play along, so I posted pics of the other four sides. My interested party turned out to be a French collector of British biscuit tins:
"In France it is very hard to find good tins. British tins are so beautiful and elaborate."

After exchanging a couple of messages, the lady made me an offer:
"We are interested only in the HP tin (we like tins with birds) and wondered if you might be prepared to accept an offer of 85£ for it plus postage."

I had to read it twice. Eighty-five quid?? For one tin??? Was she serious? Did she mean Euros? No, she was serious and she was bidding in Sterling. Crikey. Later (once the tin arrived safely in France) she was kind enough to send me a photo of it nestling in her collection. It had been spruced up, polished and burnished, and sat proudly on one of the glass shelves that line her apartment (almost certainly a bijou apartment, being French and all). I got £25 for the other four tins in the end too.

The Buffalo Nickel

Word was, this is a very collectable coin. Not being a numismatist I had no idea, but a quick Google suggested it could be worth anything from $50 to $150 (most if not all the sales being in the US). I stuck it on for £14.95 - have you ever tried to take a photograph of a small coin so that a buyer can get an appreciation of the condition? - and watched excitedly as a bidding war started that saw it sell eventually for over £100. I sold an Indian Head penny the same week. Between them these two coins fetched £150. As always with these things, I end up wishing I'd had a few more!

Contrasting with the above examples, in the blue (for disappointment) corner, we have:

The Very First Thing I Sold. 

An early lesson in the black art of setting your starting price. The 14" portable TV with built in VCR that provided the majority of my entertainment in the apocalyptic days post-separation and, later, was all Nikki & I had room for in our first flat. Listed (before I'd learned to wait for Zero Listing Fee weekends) for 99p and sold to the only person who showed any interest for... 99p. So that's 89p after eBay took their cut.

The Ceramic Plaque 

I'd bought this as a Christmas present for my parents during their heraldic phase (a brief period following our holiday discovery that the Beresford family have a crest, and a coat of arms) and it hung on the living room wall for over 40 years. I never really did know whether they liked it or whether it was tolerated because it was a present. One of those things you hardly even notice is there after a while.

It sold for £46.50, which I was pleased with. I was less pleased that having survived 40 years with the Beresfords, less than 4 days in the company of Royal Mail was enough to break it into two pieces, requiring a full refund and a total failure of their "compensation" scheme (yes, I did make a claim and yes, it was denied). I think the guy who bought it was even more disappointed than I - it was the third one he'd had arrive broken.


So there you have it. I'm glad I've done it, but I'm glad it's almost over. The crates are all gone (well, they've reached the bottom of the stairs. They're on their way to being gone) and I took a load of cardboard boxes and other packaging material to the tip this weekend, so the study is returning to a semblance of order. By the time I've sold these last half dozen items we'll have made almost five grand in those two years (although "made" is another overstatement - you can hardly count it as profit when you sell, for instance, three grand's worth of bedroom furniture for 500 quid), which has bought us some nice new furniture for the revamped living room and allowed me to be unusually generous when sponsoring mad friends who walk, run, bike, or grow moustaches for charity.

*See what I did there? Boxing match. Things get posted in boxes. Eh? Eh? Sometimes I even make myself laugh.