Of sleepless nights and outlines

My next step was to create an outline. This was an easy decision for me to make. You see, I have been creating/designing/illustrating/producing games since 1984 and you document EVERYTHING you are going to develop. In this case, I wanted to make sure that as new ideas came into my noggin, I was at least getting a sentence or two down. So, I started with who I thought my main protagonists, villains and supporting cast would be. I gave them names and wrote a little bio on each of them (no more than a paragraph.) I did this so that I would make sure that whatever was happening in the story would be true to who the character was. I knew that some characters would emerge later as I needed them and found, to my great joy, that some minor characters ended up being quite major. It's fun when that happens!

After I created my list of characters, I took the few chapter ideas I had and created a paragraph for each one. I didn't worry about the prose, I just wrote what would happen in general. I continued to do this over the course of about two months. I had two things with me at all times - a pad of paper and my iPhone. If I was driving or sleeping, I had my iPhone near by and used the recorder app to take notes on (I also used the notepad occasionally). The pad of paper was handy if I wanted to sketch something out which I did quite often.

As I continued to come up with new chapters, I generally put them in some sort of order in Word, knowing that each chapter may get moved. It was at this time I was also looking at plot holes and asking myself why this person was doing this, how they were able to do it, why they couldn't be stopped, etc. I've read fantasy for 30 years and I always hated that the main protagonist couldn't do something because some wizard says that "it is forbidden for them to interfere" or some such nonsense. Like a good adventure game, I wanted to make sure that I didn't take a cheap way out.

Once I had a paragraph for each chapter, I decided to take a quick break before diving in and actually start writing. Not a long break. Just enough to create a pen name :)