ROW80 Check In, Steampunk, Plot Bunnies and Murder Mysteries

antster or plotter?

As a dyed-in-the-wool write-by-the-seat-of-your-pants author, who's tried - and failed - to ever outline a story, I find it interesting that this past week has seen me try three new things:


1. starting a murder mystery short story (I've always wanted to write a mystery)

2. plotting a list of 5-10 scenes that are necessary for the story (including whodunit)

3. drafting the scenes linearly

Is it a full moon or have the planets aligned in syzygy or what?

The one thing I did do is stick to my current time period (Spain and Turkey, 1492-3). I had all these visions of leaping into a story involving characters from the Sparkly New Idea, set in 1930s Ontario and Quebec, but I resisted!

One the other hand, I keep getting assaulted by steampunk imagery, most recently at the Cirque du Soleil show Totem. I can't find a good photograph from that, so here's my favourite steampunk Dalek:

What to do, what to do?

Does it count as steampunk if there are plot bunnies in the story? Actually, now that I think about, it everyone's welcome to submit a story for the upcoming Attack of the Plot Bunnies anthology. I'll post further details this week, as they become available.

Anne-Mhairi Simpson had a great idea today - that it's the momentum from writing a new piece that carries you through editing another. I hadn't considered that, since I usually don't work on more than one story at a time (I have to stick to one, or nothing gets finished). But having my short story set in the same time, with the same characters, has undoubtedly helped.

Almost as though I was writing a sequel.

Almost.