It is Monday morning, and I am in the middle of organized chaos. I love the word chaos - such lovely energy just zooming around at will, causing havoc here and there! The Cambridge Dictionary defines organized chaos as "a situation in which there seems to be a lot of confusion and no organization, which makes you surprised that the results are good".
I look at organized chaos a bit differently. I see it as bits of random chaos that are actually diverse small sections of action that within themselves are quite organized. In the end, everything comes together with the desired result. I am seldom surprised that the end results are good.
What I am doing right now - since we are almost to the end of the second month of 2021 - is setting out a rough sketch of the Christmas mystery novel that I will be putting up on Kindle this November, I know who several of the characters are, where the physical setting is going to be, and the "why" of the major story. I am going to leave it to the process to develop the minor stories that make any book captivating to readers.
Since I have decided to do the same setting every Christmas, with pretty much the same characters, I will need to develop a method of keeping track of the "minor" details - what each room consists of, who likes who, who doesn't get along with who, interactions amongst the businesses in the local area and such.
I have the idea for the story in my mind, and I have fleshed it out in my mind. Now to set down what is going into each chapter, and how this will develop from chapter to chapter. It will be a relatively short book - around 50,000 to 60,000 words. Longer than a novella, which is usually set at 40,000 words max.
Off to see where my characters want to take this story!
(c) February Bonnie Cehovet
Reproduction prohibited without written consent from the author.
