Over the weekend I made some important progress with my novel in progress, Shadows and Stars. Although I have over 80,000 words, there were still some large holes where I could not come up with a good plan to fill them. On Sunday, the 29th, I went to Ameca Mexican Restaurant to have lunch and took my notebook/journal for Shadows and Stars with me as I usually do when I go out to eat or have coffee. After eating (a delicious pollo Chihuahua by the way), I started writing another synopsis of the plot, which is something I do when trying to generate ideas. I try to reduce the entire novel to one sentence, one “elevator pitch”, or what you could find on the back of a dust jacket. The ideas started flowing and I could not stop writing for a few hours. I finally wrote one additional (and important) chapter of about 1,000 words, which I typed into the novel tonight. But, the important take-away is that I finally came up with the entire plot. Now I will continue expanding on that and refining it, until I have the first draft completed, which I hope will be by Halloween. Then I will refine that until I have the novel as perfect as I can make it. Wish me luck.
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 