Ok, milestone in the 3rd novel, one that took me much longer than I imagined it would: I’ve sorted out the locations and character movements into a correct timeline. I am now convinced that this is perhaps one of the more difficult tasks facing an author who tries to create a long, exciting, and believable tale.

This wasn’t all that important in the past novels. They encompass a longer period of time, months or years. There is plenty of gray area regarding when events take place, and when it does matter, the timing is fairly obvious. The third novel, however, takes place over the course of a week, and is basically the part where all of the characters run up against the consequences of their actions, interactions, and values. It moves very quickly, one event on the heels of another, and characters reacting to those events. For it to make any sense and keep momentum, certain things must occur in a certain order, and in addition, the places where the storylines touch as they all converge have to have the characters in the same locations.

It’s very easy to make a complete mess where some characters seem to have been standing about doing nothing important for hours or days, despite the fact that they had urgent motivations, simply because there is no sensible way for those they are to interact with to travel to meet them in the right amount of time. That’s the problem I had, and it required some analysis and some plot changes to get it to all fit into place. And it’s what I have fixed.

All of this is done in a very detailed outline form, with about half the chapters written to first draft status. Now, finally, I can get on with actually writing the remaining chapters, confident that none of my characters will need a jetpack (except, of course, the ones that actually fly)or a touch of narcolepsy to explain their presence in crucial scenes.