Developing Mister D / The Infernal Aether

The Story Arc

I posted my last update when I was busy reworking my story arc on the advice of D.L. Mackenzie. This was fired over to him late last night so, while I'm waiting for him to come back to me with comments, I thought I'd give a brief update on the past week.

As I said previously, the Mister D series is something which has been kicking around in my head / house / PC (pity my family when one of my documents goes missing!) for some time now. So I've always assumed that I had a story arc. However, when it came to actually being asked to mail something over to someone, I suddenly realised that there was precious little tangible there.

I threw together a page and a half of bulletpoints from the various notes and mind maps I've built up over the years. Why bulletpoints? In my day job I regularly work with reports and this is a natural way to me of pulling together a business paper.

D.L. Mackenzie came straight back with some valid points, mainly around it being pretty unstructured, with some of the ideas not really flowing properly. All of which were fair comments.

I'd always approached Mister D as a bit of a labour of love, then as a frustration. In the end I figured that if I just threw out a few stories I'd soon find my way. After all, that's a much more exciting way of doing things and much more appealing to the creative side of me. It's also one of the reasons I've never really sat down and done a proper story arc - I always find myself being drawn to the much more fun process of actually writing.

Over the past week, I've followed the advice and written out the story arc in long form - like a treatment - plotting out each part and story as a series of paragraphs flowing from one to the other. This has been hard work but also a lot more fun than I thought it would be - the story has started to pull together, and forcing myself to write in this much detail has pulled out some tangible storylines from the vague ideas I had previously.

So my page and a bit turned into nine story parts over 13 pages and over 6,000 words. I won't share too much right now because it may all massively change once D.L. Mackenzie gives me his feedback, but also because I don't want to give away any spoilers at this stage - I'd really like you to read the stories! I do promise though that I will share it in more detail soon.

Speaking of spoilers, there is one big change which D.L. Mackenzie and I have been discussing - more on this in my next post...