Outlining Process

Outline : 30% Done

It's very nostalgic going through all my old notes, and also quite interesting.

I think that I've seen a theme emerging, in terms of scenes that seem to dovetail and have the same characters within them. What I do find is that the vague idea that I had for my story has already been fleshed out by my subconscious note taking over the last 2 - 3 years. No such thing as a title at the current time, but in this industry, if I ever get all the way through ( finish manuscript, get agent, get editor etc ) the title that I thought would be most appropriate would probably not make it to the cover. A small sacrifice for the opportunity to share the story with other people, wouldn't you say?

The other thing that I noticed as I put together a sequence of events and characters is that the story actually starts about 20% further in than I thought. Quite whether that means that I will have to invent more plot or whether it will arise naturally in the writing process I don't know, but we shall see.

I've been reading on several blogs and news sites ( see this ) about the change in returns policy for Borders over in America ( and perhaps worldwide? ). I also notice that someone else has commented that here in the UK at least one publisher has a no returns policy on back list books, which seems fair. As much as we'd all like to shift oodles of books in year one, it would only be fair to acknowledge that book selling chains and stores are taking a huge risk on new and previously unpublished authors ( unless your a celeb, in which case they're still not going to earn out that eye-watering advance ). So it seems that the UK publisher ( Hachette ) may have arrived at a happy medium. On the other hand it might mean that if you ( or me ) as the first time author fail miserably, there could be even less scope for relaunch or break out. I shall watch with interest.