I missed my blog post due to a 3-day power outage this week. We’ve had trees down, rivers flooding, school closure … Nothing out of the ordinary for many parts of the world. I don’t have a generator so, believe me, it was a real treat to have a hot shower, get back online, and cook meals on the third day.

I’m pleased to say, though, that rather than spending the three days in line for propane to run a generator, my daughter and I treated it like a writing retreat—by hand-writing! Going through Story Genius, we hand-wrote the exercises in notebooks. My project was perfect because all I had was the title, Sophie, Sylph-Shifter, for a novelette I’ve promised to write, and very limited knowledge about the main character, who is based on a side-character in my series, Braided Dimensions—Sophie, daughter of the main character, Kay. This is for a Faeworld anthology that will come out in 2024, 10-35,000 words.

if you’ve already been working for a while on the book, as my daughter had, it’s harder to try a method that gets you to drive the “third rail” of the story right along through based on the main character’s greatest desire and greatest misbelief that keeps her from this desire. According to Story Genius, the story pulls the rug out from under the protagonist until she has to face the misbelief and see reality head on. I’m finding it a useful set of exercises, each time I read it. I’m even trying the blueprint sheets this time around.