Outlining

I've never been a fan of outlining before I write because I never, ever stick to it and frequently stray so far from it that I might as well be writing a different story. I think that, as you write, you get to know your characters better and sometimes what you originally planned for them doesn't jive with their motivation anymore.

That said, I decided to sit down and outline Liv Leigh -- the advantage being that I already have my crappy first draft done. I finished the outline yesterday. It was an eye opening experience.

First off, I found places that I'd edited something out, but left a reference to it in later on. For instance, I have the ferret find something for Liv that she originally threw across the room in my first first chapter. But I took that out. Now, I either need to put the scene back in somewhere or delete the part with the ferret. The two scenes were a couple hundred pages apart and I didn't notice the problem on my read through, but outlining brought it out.

Also, I realized that the whole story happens in only a few days for all intents (I know, this should have occured to me long ago) and I've never been a big fan of "forever" love happening in a few days unless it's between people who have a history. So, this isn't going to work for me. And I'm not entirely certain how to fix it, so will have to give it some thought.

Outlining really got the story down to the bones and will certainly help with the synopsis that I want to do next. Ugh. I wish we could feed our pages into the "Amazing Synopsis Machine" and have a one page, three page and five page synopsis's (synopsi? LOL...) pop out. And if you act now, they'll include the "Incredible Query Letter Writer" as a bonus gift.

No such luck.

I'm off ... well, I've always been a little off, but I'm going.