Otherwise known as an outline. 🙂 Yep, never liked them, never felt like I was good at writing them… And yet here I am, working away at the outline for book two in the no-series-title-yet follow-up to BLOODLINE. And it’s going really well, actually. I had a lot of notes already, so in some ways sitting down and stringing them together is a pretty simple undertaking.
When I originally wrote BLOODLINE, way back when it was a screenplay titled THE DEVIL INSIDE, it never occurred to me that there would be more. I mean, it did, but not seriously. At the time, you’re thinking about entering the finished screenplay in competitions, maybe getting some notice for it, getting people to read it and review it and maybe, just maybe, getting a very good natured and well-caffeinated script reader somewhere out there to read more than a couple of pages and throw you a solid “Consider”. So writing a sequel wasn’t really in the cards, so to speak.
Until the screenplay became a book, and I started hearing from beta readers that they hoped there would be a sequel, that they wanted to see more. And strangely enough, while the word “sequel” was hanging in the air like one of those little vapory words in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, the images started in my head… scenes, dialogue, growth in the individual characters and in their relationships.
And so, here I am, outlining book two. It’s one of those traditional aspects of writing that I usually avoid like bubonic plague… But, like trying a new food that you thought you hated because the last time you tasted it you were, like, four, maybe getting older has made the process of organizing my thoughts into a structured format a little less intimidating, a little more inspiring, a little more… palatable. Or it could just be my sub-conscious telling me to write this stuff down before I forget it.
Who am I kidding? I remember EVERYTHING!
Now if I could just remember where I put those index cards… 😉
GABRIELLA MESSINA WRITES 