Planning - The Mystery Date

Part 1

It feels good to be back at the keyboard again, even though I definitely struggled today. My last post was exactly two months ago, just a few days before my wife gave birth to our first born. Our son was born on July 11th and has left me pretty braindead ever since.

I've had the itch to throw the dice and write another story for a few weeks now. Unfortunately, every time I had an hour to set aside for myself my brain disagreed with the concept of thinking. In fact, when I first sat down to start writing this story, my brain basically shut down after the first paragraph and I had to come back to it.

This short story will have to be continued in the next entry because I basically only used one die by the time my one-hour alarm went off. Because the story is going to continue, I will only include an image of the initial roll below. The sorted image and my planning will come after the next part.

My focus this time around was a concept that I understand in theory, but I can't recall a time I actively tried to give attention to: a B-story. This part set up two different stories and motivations: getting out of the escape room and the betrothed couple's intent. I think I'm finding that in a short-story format, this is an active challenge for me. When I think about the side-stories in a novel, it seems fairly straightforward: you set up the A-story and then every now and then you dedicate a chapter to the B-story instead. To try and do both at the same time had me going back and rewriting multiple paragraphs. I was surprised how little I had completed when my timer went off.

Part 2

Here we go, at least one more part will be needed. I felt the groove returning as I started this story today despite having forgotten what the dice roll was. Unfortunately, the one-hour time limit wasn't enough to wrap up this story yet.

I stepped away from the B-story this time around to focus on the main A-story. In the third part, my goal will be to intertwine the A and B stories again. Hopefully. My confidence isn't super high on that, but I am going to try.

What I am excited about is that I am starting to find a more consistent voice and feel like I am having less issues sticking to the past-tense tone (please let me know if this is inaccurate).

However, a new challenge has appeared in keeping up with multiple characters in the same room, all interacting at once. My book has many scenes with a group of people, especially early on, In writing the two parts of "The Mystery Date", it has been difficult to not leave anyone behind, while trying to stay consistent with their personalities and motivations. This short story is making me rethink those scenes, and I am starting to wonder if my tone wasn't so much the issue with all of my drafts, but the juggling of so many characters was?

Some interesting lessons being learned.

Part 3

Completed. Finally. And to make it feel like a longer gap, I apparently never published this post over a week ago. Oh well.

When I started this specific roll, I knew that I had chose a setting that would require a lot of description. Add to that the challenge of incorporating a B-story and it's no surprise that it took me multiple parts to include all of the dice. I am happy to be done with this group and this room.