Reaching the plot spot

It's about six weeks since I wrote that I'd completed Snowflake Stage 3, and now I've moved on past stages 4 & 5. That's taken a little longer than the method itself estimates, but it's still phenomenal progress in my world. To reach this point in developing a novel took me well over a year the first time round.

Now, it gets harder. Stage 6 requires the expansion of the 1-page synopsis from Stage 4 into a 4-page synopsis that contains all the story elements. As the method puts it: "Figure out the high-level logic of the story & make strategic decisions". So here is where I have to knuckle down and work out exactly what I want to say through these ten characters that populate the worlds I have in my head.

As you might imagine, I'm pretty much down with the main events. The start. The end. What the major "disasters" are, even if their details are a bit vague right now. Each of these ten people has a story too, that needs to be woven in among the main plot, stitched together in the rich tapestry of the story, hopefully in non-obvious and utterly compelling ways (*vbg*). But the main difference between this and War of Nutrition  is in its depth. I want to put more into this story than just the story.

Yes, WoN had a message - messing with yer food: A Bad Thing - but it was an overt, slap-you-round-the-head-with-a-wet-fish kind of message. I'd like my second novel (working title "Touchwood") to have a bit more about it. A little bit allegorical. More thought-provoking. A dollop of "what is he really trying to say here?" And that, I strongly suspect, is going to prove a whole heap harder than last time.

Cat man do.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, our cat man promised to send loads more pictures of New Kitteh (name still being debated) between my first visit and the day he's ready to come home. Four weeks later and there hadn't been much evidence of promise fulfilment on the photo front. OK, no evidence. A prompting email provoked a blurry shot taken with a phone along with the promise of more pix "when I get home", a couple of days more nothing and then a brief whinge that emails "weren't getting through."

However eventually, this arrived:

and I think it's true to say he's even cuter now that he was when I first saw him.

Anyway, since we're fetching him home the day after tomorrow, it's suddenly become quite urgent to tidy up all the non-kitten-friendly parts of the house (i.e. ALL of it) and make sure all those tools, boxes, bags, screws, nails, pots of paint, piles of wall plugs, etc, etc, are either put away, thrown away, or behind a closed door.

Good job I finished all the wrapping yesterday!