I wrote a ten thousand word outline for the novel I’m working on. The benefits of such thorough planning cannot be exaggerated. Relative to the first book in the series which had no outline, I’m sailing through the story. Of course, knowing the situation and the characters well at the start of the second book has made writing an outline relatively easy.

Now, I’ve come to a spot where I need to alter the plan. One character talks another into doing something that seems out of character, and I have to find a motivation.Vanity was my first thought, since it is the universal motivator. The next step is to backfill the situations with the motivation.

It actually only took three small inserts to make the action believable. I snuck them into the outline for documentation purposes and am now massaging the changes into the text.

Voila.

Back to posting to this blog after our vacation to Santa Fe. Had a great time on very familiar ground.

Familiarity is one reason I go. As everything changes, we search for that which seems not to: old songs, old cars, old friends. I live two thousand miles from where I grew up. I go back to see if things have changed and of course they have.

But Santa Fe almost hasn’t. We were there for a fiesta that has been celebrated on the plaza for 299 years – since 1712! The plaza, the Governor’s Palace and the Plaza Hotel are the same. The tile on the hotel floor has the same luster it did in my childhood. The five and dime is half a block away – though it’s no longer Woolworth’s.

I visited Cow Creek, twelve miles of dirt roads beyond of Pecos NM, where a spent several summers with my boyhood friend George. The river is the same as are the road and the rocks. The trees – many scorched by a fire several years ago – are returning. It all lifts my heart.

And so does this children’s story I’m writing.  Twenty-thousand words so far.  I hope to finish it by Fiesta Santa Fe’s three-hundredth birthday, next fall.