The newest addition to the SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises, LLC family is a second whiteboard! This one is somewhat smaller than its big brother, and has really high-quality wheels. It’s perfect for the writer on the go! No more excuses for Rune Skelley! Doing laps around the neighborhood? This bad boy can tag along! Going to the roller disco? He’s already wearing his shiny white suit!
We weren’t really in the market for a backup whiteboard, but when Jen saw it at the salvage center, her brain lit up with potential uses for it. (Maps! Plot rainbow overflow! Character inspiration photos! Murder board!) There was no talking her out of it, which Kent must have known because he didn’t try very hard.
There’s a lesson in here somewhere, akin to “don’t go grocery shopping hungry” or “don’t go to the animal shelter unless you really want a pet.” Keep Jen out of the stationery aisle and, apparently, the used office furniture warehouse.
A good writing partner is someone who can admit he was wrong about the number of whiteboards your office needs.
Book 4 of the Ghost Series keeps expanding. Regular readers of the blog know that there are so many characters we had to modify our plot rainbow to accommodate them all. And since these characters insist on interacting with one another, having so many of them causes an exponential increase in the number of plot events. In practically no time we outgrew the acreage on the front of our new whiteboard. Lucky for us, the back is also magnetic.
Act 3 of the novel now lives on the back of the board, where it has plenty of space to stretch its legs. We thought this was the perfect solution, and it is pretty great. The problem is, no matter which side of the board we’re looking at we want to reference something on the other side. This entails a lot of flipping the board back and forth. And back and forth. And back and forth. Jen keeps joking about buying a second enormous whiteboard, and Kent keeps hoping that she really is joking. “But just imagine,” she says, “how complicated a plot we could devise if we had twice as much space to work!”
A writing partner is someone who will go along with some — but not all — of your mad schemes.
The thing about quadrilogies (or tetralogies if you prefer) is that they’re longer than trilogies. Like, an entire book longer. And in our case, that extra book is shaping up to be the longest of the series. That’s nothing unusual. You’ve probably noticed in other series you read that the books tend to get longer as their roman numeral suffixes get higher. We were expecting Book 4 to be a bit of a beast. Were, in fact, braced and ready to flip our new whiteboard over and continue our plot rainbow on the back. The damn thing could be 16 feet long if it needed to be! We were prepared. Or so we thought.
When you’re writing a ghost story, you can’t count on death to prune your cast the way you can with other genres. Characters have a way of piling up as we discovered when we tried to set up the rainbow for Book 4. We had nearly twice as many characters as places to put them. The snazzy grid on the whiteboard has room for 11 rows. We needed 18. Not all of these people will have Point of View, but we need to keep track of their comings and goings and dastardly deeds.
We tried looking for ways to lump characters together into a shared row, but there weren’t enough we could do that with to solve the problem. We tried arranging them in columns instead, but that gave us too few rows for the plot. We scratched our collective head and joked about buying a second board.
In the end we dusted off our paper cutter and chopped all our beautiful squares in half, allowing two people to share a row while maintaining their individuality. We have embraced the rectangle lifestyle. The main difference is that Jen has to write smaller to fit all the important info in half the space, but she’s up for the challenge. We just hope we have enough magnets. We bought 400 of the little suckers, and for most plots that would be more than sufficient. Depending on how dense this rainbow ends up being, we might need more, which is truly kind of terrifying.
A good writing partner is someone who isn’t afraid of all the neodymium.
The fancy new whiteboard now houses our Ghosts, Book 4 rainbow. Barely — it flows across both sides already and we have a lot left to add. (hooboy!)
Not only are we fleshing out the fourth and final volume, but we’re also creating a text synopsis of Book 2 simultaneously. Which puts some of Book 3 in the mix as well, because we have to keep in mind how events span that interval.
We’ve crammed at least three novels’ worth of ghosts into our brains, is what we’re saying. It’s really all four, although Book 1 hasn’t come up too much recently.
But, this is exactly why we wanted to handle all the outlining and storyboarding and other pre-writing for the entire series up front. It’s hard work, but it’ll spare us from getting halfway through the fourth book and wishing we’d done a bunch of things differently in the earlier ones. In other words, it will save us from needing to rewrite the whole tetralogy. Our revisions will be focused on how to sharpen up the telling, not trying to get the shape of the tale itself.
A writing partner is someone who’s willing to let their skull become a haunted house so you don’t have to face an army of spooks all by yourself.
We’re quite fond of our plot rainbow process, as regular readers of this blog will have no doubt noticed. Wedotendtogoonaboutit.
Despite its many shining advantages, there is one not-insignificant downside: it takes up a lot of room. A whole lot. And when you have members on your writing team as eager to help as Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord, it can be a problem. Our furry coauthors have learned that we don’t like it when they scamper around on the rainbow, scattering all the colorful squares willy-nilly, and they do a pretty good job of staying off it. But we can tell they resent it. They like to lay down riiiiight beside it and then casually streeeeetch their legs or shift their snouts into the danger zone. Lady Marzipan’s tail presents a whole other set of challenges. Plus, the two of them shed like they’re being paid to do it, and when the rainbow is spread out on the floor we can’t easily sweep or vacuum.
Terrible Beasties
So instead of wallowing in filth with resentful dogs, we took action. We bought a whiteboard. It’s magnetic, double-sided, and on casters. It’s also freakin’ huge. We’re talking 4 x 8 feet (which is a lot more impressive in person than it looked online). We were going to include a picture of it here, but, I mean. It’s a whiteboard. You know what those look like. It will look a little more exciting once we get the grid drawn on it to keep the rainbow neat and organized.
Our Writing Cave redecoration project is coming along nicely. Jen finally found her inspiration. It’s going to be very cool. We’re just waiting for some samples to arrive before we really dive in. The funny thing is that this amazing new whiteboard is not going to be part of that redesign. We do the vast majority of rainbow-related work in the Auxiliary Writing Cave, which is on an entirely different floor of the SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises HQ than the main Writing Cave, and have no interest in carting this beast up and down the stairs. It will live in the Aux Cave, and spend its off-season tucked beside the elliptical machine in the adjoining exercise room. We have other exciting ideas in store for the main Writing Cave. You’ll hear all about them, we’re sure, as we finalize our plans and do the actual work. And that project *will* be photo-worthy. We guarantee!
A writing partner is sometimes someone who will help assemble your new white elephant. Without complaint.
The newest addition to the SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises, LLC family is a second whiteboard! This one is somewhat smaller than its big brother, and has really high-quality wheels. It’s perfect for the writer on the go! No more excuses for Rune Skelley! Doing laps around the neighborhood? This bad boy can tag along! Going to the roller disco? He’s already wearing his shiny white suit!
