Monday morning fiction blogging

I had a problem with my plot. Before I left for my Christmas vacation, I discovered that the person who I *thought* was the bad guy, turned out to *not* be the bad guy. So I had to write in a new bad guy if I wanted my plot to work. Sorry if that seems a bit Manichean, that's just how the mystery / thriller genre works, there's basically one plot that you slot different scenarios and characters into, the secret is in how creative you are at tweaks to that plot and tangling sub-plots around that one plot and how interesting of characters you can drop into the plot. If the character who was slotted into one place in the plot suddenly decides he doesn't like it there, you just have to figure out something to do with him and put some other character into that slot. In my case, the guy I thought was the bad guy turns out to be a victim of a frame-up. Except it's not quite that simple. Heh.

So anyhow, I was puzzling it over for the past two weeks, and think I finally have the solution. I also came up with some additional plot points / scenes to write into the text. So I spent a couple of hours writing tonight to put some of that in, and have another weeks' worth of patch-ups to do before I'm ready to push on into the meat of things with the actual murder. The murder is happening later than I'd like it to happen (generally you want it within the first few chapters, that's how the genre works), but there's a helluva lot of pipe to lay here, and mysteries within mysteries to lay pipe around. All the friggin' foreshadowing I'm doing will simply have to substitute. I mean, I'm up to 24,000 words (typical novel length is around 100K words nowdays), and I'm still laying pipe. And once I have a dead body to play with, there's still a *lot* of plot to go. Oh well, big books are preferred nowdays because if someone is paying $8 for a paperback novel, they darn well want their money's worth. So it goes.

-- Badtux the Writing Penguin