Not much to report this week: a bit of editing, bit of reformatting, bit of outlining. Not a lot by itself, but each job makes its respective project a little more than what it was before.

I like outlining new ideas. The creativity tends to snowball as the idea forms, with bits of dialogue and possible scenes playing out in my head, characters revealing themselves, and the whole potential of the story seemingly ready to race onto the page. If only it stayed that easy all the way through the final pages!

Alas, once those initial scenes hit the paper, I find I eventually run out of steam. Sometimes there’s an easy way back in, like finding what connects two scenes that occur fairly close together in the story. Other times it’s like prying off a bottle cap with a knife—poking and leveraging until you’d almost rather smash the bottle, all in the hopes of finding or creating a weak spot where you can get in at what’s blocking you and remove it.

Hopefully this outline leads to more easy ways in to the story and less smashing of the bottle.