R. Jean Mathieu's Innerspace

SF/F, sociology, some recipes. Updates most Fridays.

Tag: how i did it

Ringo Starr, 1964.

Three Tools of Writing: Introduction

2 February, 2024 /
Ringo Starr, personal hero, 1964. Seen here with Paul's grandfather. He's a very clean old man, inn'e?

REPORTER: “Are you a mod or a rocker?”

RINGO: “Er, no, I’m a mocker.”

Are you a plotter or a pantser?

A shower or a teller?

First-person or third-?

Are you a Shaker, a Quaker, a candlestick-maker?

The whole damn writing community defines ourselves by our strictures. You write fantasy, I write science fiction. She’s literary, he’s genre. Are you profic, antiship, a twit, a bookstagrammer?

Let’s us draw lines in the sand and pick a side, it’ll be great sport!

Except…

I write science fiction, fantasy, horror, and under other names, romance, Westerns, erotica, mysteries, thrillers, and men’s pulp. I take great pride in it. Each genre strengthens the others.

QUERY: Are you a plotter or a pantser?

ROSCOE: I’m all three.

Welcome to R. Jean Mathieu’s Three Tools of Writing.

Over the next few weeks, I’d like to walk you through some of the ways I write stories. I say “some of the ways,” because no two stories are the same, and because the tools are always the same. I don’t scream on Twitter how all you need to fix a bed is a hammer, or how all cabinets should be built with screws only. (I scream about other things on Twitter, thank you very much.) Instead, I look at the job, pick the tool I think is right for the job, and try it. If it doesn’t work, I’ll try a different tool – and a different way of approaching the story.

I have three tools that I come back to again and again, well-worn and fitted, after twenty-five years of constant use, to my hand. They are:

  1. Bradbury’s lists (and Goldberg’s free hand)
  2. Dent’s Master Pulp Formula
  3. Card’s MICE Quotient

I’ll be going into each in detail over the following weeks, but here’s the short version.

Ray Bradbury’s free-association lists, in my mind, are bound forever to Natalie Goldberg’s free-writing notebooks. Ray conjured out of the air lists of nouns, nouns that became memories, or notions, and which burst forth into characters or conceits and finally into stories. Many of his classics still bear the stamps of their birth – “The Veldt,” “The Pedestrian,” “The Long Rain.” And Natalie Goldberg, a poet of my mother’s generation, believed in the truth of freewriting, of allowing the words to race across the page without censure from our conscious minds. Hell, I’m doing it right now. Both believed in the bones of stories, letting these hard, firm truths thrust upward and outward to startle and inspire us. And, taken together, they have written me stories that made me weep.

Lester Dent’s Master Pulp Formula is just that – a formula for writing a pulp yarn of six thousand words, applicable at sixteen thousand or sixty thousand, believe you me. It’s a formula for keeping everything in proportion – so your story doesn’t start dragging in the second quarter, or rushes unsatisfactory toward a crashing climax. And, with a sufficiently loose definition of ‘action,’ you can apply it to startling results to romance, erotica, or Westerns, too.

(And remember, per the Snowflake Method, it’s not really an interesting story until the third perspective enters the page.)

Orson Scott Card is a terrible human being – but, confoundingly, also a very good writer. He’s not the only one, not even the only one on your bookshelf. And, before I knew what a terrible human being he was, I read his book, and his method of writing – the MICE Quotient – is too good a way to write for me to thrust away. What, then, is your story? How do you frame it? Is it coming to a place? Or is it asking a question? Or fixing a rent in the world? Or struggling against your place in the world? The power here is that any one idea – a person, a place, a mere notion – can become different stories depending on which avenue you pursue, how you choose to frame it.

Here they are, three tools, three totally contradictory ideas about writing, about art, about storytelling. And I use them all.

Because each could be the right tool for the given job.

Join me, over the next four weeks, as I show you how to use my three tools for your writing job.

Heinlein’s Rules of Writing: Introduction

19 March, 2015 /

This is a story of how to succeed as a writer.

I started writing when I could form coherent words on a typewriter. Ensconced in some damp box in a decrepit trailer on my mother’s property is a one-page detective story I ripped off from Gonzo on Muppet Babies* – the earliest story I can remember writing, on Mother’s Selectric.

My writing career, in terms of getting things out, starts in 1998 – when I first sent “The Remedy” out to Asimov’s Science Fiction. They rejected it, but a year later the Ray Bradbury Contest gave it third place and published it in the annual anthology. Waukegan Library sent me a copy of Yestermorrow signed by Bradbury himself, something I still deeply treasure. That same year, I published my first ‘zine, Rocket Takeoff, starting my love-hate relationship with the publishing world.

In those days, you mailed yourself a copy of the story through the mail for a poor man’s copyright, and mailed another copy to the magazine so you could wait six months or a year for your rejection. Asimov’s was so notoriously behind the times that in 1998 the guidelines included the words “please remove the sides of the paper before submission,” a phrase I struggled with until I remembered the old dot-matrix printers that I hadn’t seen since ’93. You published anything by either coding an HTML website from scratch or by running copies off at Staples and then staying up all night stapling them together.

The market for SF short fiction was tiny then, because the explosion of online and otherwise Internet-enabled new markets, like Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, or anthologies like Blood on the Floor, had yet to happen. By 2001, I had a list of six markets that paid money, which I’d pulled together from checking the Barnes & Noble racks and copying out of the library’s Writer’s Digest.

Six. Total.

Submitting a story to those six markets and collecting rejections would have taken three and a half years, according to the nascent response-time information available at websites like Writer’s Black Hole. I don’t have records from that time any more, so I can’t tell you if I actually shipped one story to all six or not. I did write “Gods of War” and got Honorable Mention in the Cuesta Literary Contest. I flew off to China for a year, and came back.

There were more markets and more opportunities and more information. Duotrope’s Digest had started up, aggregating response-time, payment, and guideline information, and keeping track of which markets were still able to pay. I sold “Gods of War” to MindFlights.com**, sold a few other pieces, and kept on writing. But it was always starting, never finishing (a bit like everything else in my life during the three years wandering in the wilderness). After “Gods of War,” nothing seemed to sell, and “Gods” was just sitting there useless on my hard drive, spent.

I went back to China to finish my degree, and made the acquaintance of Paul Skelding. He was big on new publishing – Amanda Palmer and “the death of traditional publishers” were always on his lips. He introduced me to Smashwords and the concept of selling e-books. He and I concocted an online magazine together that spectacularly failed to sell, before he got married and was transferred north to Beijing.

I despaired, at that point. I’d dropped an old story from 2007 or thereabouts into One Weird Idea, one that had failed to sell, because I had literally not finished anything since. I was exiled from China and spent six weeks meandering around Hong Kong, living out of a matchbox in the Chungking Mansions and alternating between drifting up and down the Kowloon shore and sipping cheap spice coffee in the internet café/hat shop on the first floor. I admitted that One Weird Idea was a failure, and looked at my career to that point. I felt that if SF/F wasn’t spent, I at least was. I plinked at a few stories, both in America and once I’d fast-talked my way back into China, but the spirit was gone.

In December of 2012, when the world failed to end, I discovered Dean Wesley Smith. Specifically, I discovered The New World of Publishing and Think Like a Publisher. Dean doesn’t peddle get-famous-quick or false-hope stories. He praises Amanda Hocking’s grit and her good luck, but doesn’t consider her a pattern to replicate. He laid out the numbers and showed a way to make a living as a writer. Not get rich quick – make a living.

I was inspired. The various starts I had going all the way back to 2008 started getting finished, things like “Home for the Holidays” and “The Short, Strange Life of Comrade Lin” and “Simplified”. I checked the anthology lists, and cranked out pieces like “Bartleby the Clerk” and “Wives are Waiting by the Bank or…” and “The Diction-fairy” for them. I revived the moribund company structure I’d started on my last visit home, dusted it off and made it my publishing house. I put up stories on Smashwords and Amazon, I worked on the blog, I put together a business plan and marketing. I finished my first proper novel, No Time, for 2013’s National Novel Writing Month.

Lachlan Atcliffe commented, at the time, “whatever or whoever you’re doing, keep doing it.”

Most importantly, I sat down to write and I kept writing. Dean Wesley Smith incorporated workflow analysis and production goals. Jack London called it his stint and took to it with the same grim determination he used to haul line or shovel coal. But Robert Heinlein formulated probably the most perfect, crystalline version of the process. These are Heinlein’s rules:

  1. Write.
  2. Finish what you start.
  3. Do not rewrite except on an editor’s orders.
  4. Put the story in the mail.
  5. Keep it in the mail until it sells.

It was true for Jack London and Bob Heinlein, it was true for Dean Wesley Smith, it’s true for me and it’s true for you. In traditional blogging style, I’ll be treating all five of these individually over the next few weeks…and presumptuously adding one of my own. But, really, if you sit quietly with Heinlein’s rules and live by them, you, too, will succeed as a writer. It’s not easy. Nobody said it was easy. But it is that simple.

—

* To be fair, I also ripped off Tiny Toons: How I Spent my Summer Vacation for some bits.

** Yeah, I sold an overtly Buddhist short story to a Christian lit magazine. I was as confused as you are.

How “No Time” Happened, Part 2

19 February, 2015 /

In August of 2013, I flew back to America to sit the mandatory French testing that would guarantee me a placement in the Peace Corps. I’d worked on an organic farm outside of Shenzhen, China, and with proof of my French skills, they were certain to ship me off to some distant clime in West Africa. While I was home, I scoped out locations and soaked up the atmosphere of Morro Bay, a place I hadn’t seen in two years. I hashed a bit at my outline, in between visits with old friends, meals that involved cheese and good beer, and endless games of Europa Universalis III.

A month later, in September, I flew back to China, flush with success. I started a new semester at Northeastern University’s online program and hit the bricks, looking for work. I knew the schools had hired while I was an ocean away, but that just meant more tutoring opportunities, right?

…right?

A month later, I was still hitting the streets. China’s National Day had come on October 1, a weeklong vacation where, as with every Chinese holiday, the students go home to their parents, sleep, eat mama’s cooking, and sleep more. And eat. And sleep. Zhuhai, already a sleepy little seaside city, was sleepier still, soaked in its own turpitude.

It was during the holiday that my girlfriend broke up with me. Two and a half years come to an end. Looking back on it, it had been a long time coming. I’m glad she pulled the trigger – and I’m still glad she stood by me as long as she did. I said goodbye to her and cut our staycation short, walking home instead of taking the bus. It was four straight miles through the dark starry Zhuhai night, where the sea is slate-grey at noon and muddy brown at dusk, and the suspicious smell of the Pearl River’s effluvia poison the Pacific…but hell, at least the air’s clean enough to breathe.

I went home to the cavernous four-bedroom apartment that my roommate had fled months before, where we never did buy furniture and the kitchen always seemed in constant danger of being overwhelmed by some lifeform or another. It was a whitewashed tomb on the eighth storey, full of closed doors and regrets. My room and the kitchen were the only places that even seemed inhabited, and my room only because of the three luggages and the small collection of Tsingtao beer bottles I’d collected after each day’s job hunting.

The collection got bigger as October wore on. My internet gave out and never came back, the food in the fridge went bad as I dined, night after night, on a bottle of Tsingtao and two packets of Chinese peanuts. I began to take up residence in the local gwailo bar, an Authentic Australian Bar joined at the hip to a dodgy Italian restaurant, owned by a Welshman and staffed with the best English students the Zhuhai universities could provide. I ordered the garlic chicken at the extravagent price of ten dollars, and made four meals apiece out of it, washed down with copious amounts of the local swill beer that was priced just right at less than a dollar per pint. I did my homework over their wifi, perched on a rickety stool in the back and with my computer shoved in between the skittles table and the wall, ducking down if I saw my ex or any of her colleagues so I wouldn’t run the risk of embarrassing her.

My Hemingway impression was perfect.

I began, in a crude way, to figure out that I was destroying myself, and that unless something was done, my grades would suffer. Unless something changed. Unless I changed. Unless I did something…adventurous.

I signed up for National Novel Writing Month on October 20, my mother’s birthday. I shaved my beard on October 30. I had an ill-advised one night stand thanks to my Doctor Who costume on October 31.

On November 1, I nursed a hangover and opened a new word document. At the top, I typed NO TIME: THE FIRST HOUR. And I began to write.

I’d written a novella the previous year, a patchwork piece of five interconnected pulp stories entitled Ian Brown and the Hand of Fatima. But I’d never finished a full-length novel. National Novel Writing Month asks for 50,000 words. The 12-chapter mystery formula asked for 60,000. Well, Hell. I had no job and no girlfriend and my life consisted of online classwork, the pub, Sid Meier’s Civilization IV, green Tsingtao bottles, and my bed.

And now, a book. Gooch took shape immediately – I’d done preliminary work on him, Rachel and Maria a week before I started. I groped for Rachel’s voice and found it once I realized the person I thought she was was actually Debbie-Anne. Maria took her entrance and characters began to crawl out of the woodwork: Uncle Jerry (then under the pseudonym Uncle Wrex), Matthew Park, Alison Wingate III.

Francesca Caballero y Gutierrez, Ama, was a particular treat. Until Gooch opened that door, I was expecting the frail old woman from my notes. The woman who appeared on the page is still blind, but her fingers are strong and her ears sharp. Age didn’t diminish her – it refined her. And I fell in absolute love with her (still am!).

The soundtrack coalesced. Gooch’s “Telegraph Road,” Maria’s “Heaven on Their Minds,” the tick-tock of “No Time” and the spare acoustic eulogy of “Beast.”

I remember finishing chapter four and talking to my mother on the phone and going “I wrote this character who’s just like you!” (Alison)

I remember writing chapter nine and calling her again and going “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t plan this. Alison just …kind of got away from me there.”

I remember spending almost a week on chapter eight, as it metastasized and threatened to strangle the book like a cancer. As it simply kept growing as fast as I kept writing, and of the sleep-deprived despair I felt at ever finishing the damn thing. I remember Lachlan Atcliffe steeling me to carry on and listening to my rants about how much I hated it.

No, seriously, fuck chapter eight.

I remember writing about Gooch’s love of tequila, inspiring Big Joel to suggest a round of tequilas. And another, and another. We whispered terrible secrets in the dark, the things that haunted us and drove us to that dingy bar, that distant continent, that fish-smelling village of Tangjia that had once shown so much promise.

There is a pervasive energy to the gwailo, a malaise and a shadow that hangs over us whenever two or more gather – the mingled love and fear of Home. In large cities, young cities, husky, brawling, where there are Russians and Frenchmen and Israelis thrown together with the usual detritus of the Anglosphere, where some are still young and still on their gap year, where there is still some hope, the malaise ebbs. In cities like Zhuhai, it’s in the air – the sense that you have failed at life at Home, and will fail again if you ever return, that are less than a man if male and an invisible white ghost if female. In Haikou, it was suffocating as the jungle odor of the coconut groves and the punishing wet heat of afternoon before the monsoons came, and just as real.

There was an Englishman who tried to pick a fight with Big Joel that night, but the old brawling hockey-playing Irish boy from south Boston wasn’t having it. He was quoting Robert Frost instead, as he might have done before a tabernacle or a Harvard lecture hall in another life. So, after the tequila conspired with darkness to rob me of memory, he started in on me. They tell me we wandered out together as the bars closed at two AM, spilling into the street market beneath the shadow of the legendary Dragon Union dance hall and brothel and bordello, that dominates the heart of Tangjia.

Praise be to China and the Chinese, for they make use of every public space. Any square inch will be turned to community garden, to ballroom dance practice in the evenings, to the housewives’ tai chi in the mornings under the care of the wizened master, or to the street market. Enterprising young guns from across China, from Urumqi and Kashgar on the old silk road where the men all wear silk hats under Allah to the waterside slums of Shenzhen, gather in the night markets to buy and sell. The card tables come out at sundown, the portable barbeques are trundled from their hiding places, the restaurants retreat inside themselves while the Muslim boys banter and grill you oysters and kebabs and crucified chicken drumsticks and the toothless Hokka women smile at your Mandarin as bad as theirs and grill or blanche vegetables and pork by the mouthful. We whites set up ourselves a card table, between two pointless street gangs and a quiet table of low-grade tong soldiers.

They tell me that the Englishman became mean as he drank, as Englishmen do, and he began to insult my mother. They tell me I took a swig of beer, and asked with all politesse if he was joking around, or if he was really trying to insult my mother. They tell me I put the bottle on the table, quite deliberately, as the other six guys shifted around, ready to start the fight if I threw the punch. Hell, I had a brown belt in Uechi-ryu and a Boston southie going for me.

And the Englishman sputtered that he was just joking around. And I smiled, and shook his hand, and was pleasant.

That’s the bit that scared people, the bit they were haunted by when they told me the next morning. I was scary because I was friendly.

Finally, by November 30, I had taken a spare room with a Grand Old Gentleman and a scholar, and stayed up all night, powered by homework and cheap Tsingtaos and Pepsi, and plowed inexorably through the last few chapters. I wrote them all in that night, finishing at 5:50, the time on Gooch’s microwave when he stumbles into his house on Easter morning. I scattered [tk]s like confetti, marking places to fix in the second draft or after, leaving them spread in my wake as I sailed on towards the safe harbor of the end, the end in sight, -THE END-.

And I reached The End.

The dawn was just yellowing, the sun peeking triumphantly out before the factories would bury it under smoke and soot. I put on Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” and brewed myself a cup of jasmine tea. I spent an hour like that, wandering the house, as my roommate wandered out for his coffee and out to teach his morning class. I let it steep into me, into my bones.

I’d written a book.

At 62,000 words, I’d written an entire novel.

I uploaded it to NaNoWriMo for verification, and got my winner’s diploma.

Then, spent, I stumbled to my room, and slept.

On December 1, I took the ferry to Hong Kong. It was time for my visa run…and a party to go to. One I had damn well earned the right to go to.

Strange and beautiful things happened then in Hong Kong, but then they always do. Hong Kong, for my money, is the most romantic city in the world. And I had written a book. God damn. I’d really done it.

The rest of the story is a roundy-round of drafts and edits, shifting names and nationalities, Alison and Jerry and Ama assuming their proper place and dignity, things explained, verisimilitude. The story of publishing a book is rarely as interesting as the story of writing it. But, hey, that’s the company motto: Every story has a story.

And I’d written a book.

God damn.

Edit: Big Joel died, not too long ago, in a freak car accident in the streets of Zhuhai. Wherever you are, raise a glass for him. Where he’s gone, everyone is a poet – and he can drink and quote Robert Frost in a night that never ends.

How “No Time” Happened

12 February, 2015 /

No Time: The First Hour

No Time: The First Hour

I covered this a little bit on the Acknowledgements page, but here’s the full, uncut version of how No Time: The First Hour came about.

It started with Audrey Niffenegger, and started with The Time Traveler’s Wife. I grew up on Bill & Ted, Doc & Marty, the Doctor and time travel episodes of Star Trek same as anybody. Until Audrey came along, time travel in science fiction was conventionalized – an adventure plot, the danger of paradox, the terrible knowledge of the future. The most original development, arguably, was Bill and Ted’s most excellent insight that you can totally stuff your pockets with the things you really need once the adventure’s over! Excellent!

*air guitar*

AIR GUITAR

But then Audrey turned it on its head – Henry DeTamble doesn’t interfere with historical events, because he’s locked in an eternist framework from which there is no escape. There’s one small paradox. Henry does plenty of running, stealing, and fighting, but that’s not the focus of the story. The focus is the strange relationship between Henry and Clare*…and time travel is a force that both brings them together and separates them. Time travel becomes a metaphor, not for history, cause and effect, or prophecy, but for the emotions inside a long-lasting relationship. It is an inexorable tragic force, like age and how people change once they’ve been together for years. Audrey didn’t approach her time-travel book like Star Trek or Back to the Future…she came at it completely differently.

And I started to see the possibilities. My tiny little mind started to crack open to the light.

Then I read the Continuum RPG, and my mind fucking exploded.

Guys? We're the good guys, right? The bloody hands and crypto-fascism are making me start to think we might not be the good guys...

Guys? We’re the good guys, right? The bloody hands and crypto-fascism are making me start to think we might not be the good guys…

Continuum, the Aetherco RPG from the late 1990s, is the greatest time travel game you’ve never heard of. Like The Time Traveler’s Wife, Continuum assumes a perfectly eternist universe – where the Twin Towers are always falling, somewhen. And Continuum thinks through all its implications – you enter into a society of time travelers (spanners) locked into an eternal Time War that they know they’ve won, but know must be fought. It takes a degree in theoretical physics to effectively wield the Time Combat rules.

I’m not going to lie, Continuum was a big, big influence on the world and society of No Time. No Time basically started life as a reinterpretation of Continuum – specifically, one where the Continuum and the Narcissists are perfectly matched, a Temporal Cold War out of Star Trek rather than a chillingly prescient terrorist hunt.

Along the way, I started a story called Music Girl based on some ideas I read about adapting Michio Kaku’s work to tabletop RPGs. Kaku and scientists like him enjoy playing with the dimensionality of time, really digging into the concept of the fourth dimension. Things would look more comprehensible up there, the way two dimensional worlds (such as the figure above) make perfect sense as long as you’re looking in three dimensions. Three-dimensional shadows would be cast. You could have perfect hair, because your head is now a hypersphere.

I still have the physical printouts of all the fourth dimension notes I made for Music Girl. Scrawled along one page like Jack Torrence’s moonlighting as a ghostwriter for Philip K. Dick are the words “LISA IS LISA-SHAPED LISA IS LISA-SHAPED LISA IS LISA-SHAPED.” Because if I study enough fourth dimensional physics I become all Roscoe’s Not Here, Man.

So, while I was cheerfully filing the numbers off of Continuum, I realized that the only way to do a time travel story properly is to build it from the ground up. Like …from the very laws of physics. How does time work? How do paradoxes work?

I wrote up a document that I am exceedingly smug about. It outlines how Gooch’s universe works. It’s an exceedingly elegant system…one very different from the rules that govern the Continuum. Superficially, the Eternists and the Continuum are similar. But all you have to do is scratch the surface and keep your eyes open…and, as Will Howe could tell you, there are things in the fourth dimension, Horatio, undreamt of by your philosophy.

All very fine intellectual games, but not a story.

When I have a setting or a scene, but no characters, I ask two simple questions that Orson Scott Card taught me:

  1. Who hurts?
  2. Who has the freedom to move?

My character wouldn’t be a general of the Time War. I was sick to death of those stories. Nor would I have some hackneyed Terminator Twosome duke it out for the girl.

Roscoe1

No…I wanted something subtler, something classier, something more in the tradition of Le Carre or Hammett…

Hammett?

HAMMETT!

A detective, of course! A hardboiled gumshoe, a marginal figure on the edge of time traveler society. A real Harry Dresden type, waging his lonely crusade to protect us mundanes from the superpowered who mistake themselves for ubermenschen. Chandler’s The Simple Art of Murder came back to me:

[D]own these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.

Why would he stick his neck out for us levelers and plebians? Ah, of course…where there is the time traveler, there is also the time traveler’s wife. What a woman she would have to be! Someone who, herself not time-active, nevertheless can hold her own.

And every Holmes must have his Moriarty.

His opposite number in the Time War…wait! Their own private, little Time War. Their careers are consumed with each other, bound up with each other in ways Moriarty and Holmes never were. The arrival of my time-active Moriarty puts into motion  the inexorable eternist machinery to start my Holmes’ career, and vice versa. Their Time Combat is but one battle of a vast and eternal Time War, like a pair of Vietnamese snipers with a vendetta in 1971…but a tale to tell, nevertheless.

I’d run across ticket2write’s Guide to the Twelve Chapter Mystery years earlier, so I dug it up again and proceeded to lay out a plot. At this point, Gooch was little more than a sketch, Rachel and Maria subplots. Hell, I didn’t even know who  the murderer was. But I hammered out what I wanted to cover in each chapter, broke it down and shook it out.

Then I set it aside for over a year. It would take a series of massive shocks that nearly destroyed me to make me finally dig it out and put flesh on Gooch’s Quixotic bones…

…which is where we pick up next week. 😀

—-

*Sidebar: I think I am very strange, because when you ask me to picture the ideal romantic couple, I picture Leto & Jessica Atreides, Gomez & Morticia Addams, and Henry & Claire DeTamble…rather than more conventional choices like Romeo and Juliet or Elizabeth and Darcy. By sheer coincidence, my main couple are (mostly) happily married and in their thirties…

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