First of all: an apology. As you may have gathered, this year's Christmas Story is going to be another detective story, so my plan for this newsletter for this year was not just to give updates on the writing for paying subscribers, but also the use the free newsletter to serialise our previous detective story Deadvent Calendar. Happily, because the Christmas stories are all 24 episodes long, this means I can put them out at fortnightly intervals right up to the end of November.
This is what I thought I had set up. I thought wrong. I had set up a couple of episodes and then got distracted, and I didn't realise this until last week, when I started planning this progress update. So, now, I have finally done it (or as much of it as I can do, because you can't schedule Substack newsletters more than three months in advance). Anyway, this means that a couple of Deadvent Calendar episodes are about to come out in a bit of a rush, and then we'll be back to a two week schedule (I hope).
Meanwhile, with this year's story, I have been playing with cards. I've moved from the bullet points to that traditional writer's stand-by, the index card. Literally from bullet point to index card, in fact, because what I do is take 24 cards and title each one with the contents of the bullet pointed list I created to outline my episodes. One card for each episode. Then I go through and try and fill the cards with all the little details I've thought of for that episode: moments of action, snippets of dialogue, jokes and ideas to play with. Most importantly, though, I fill them full of plot. Everything that the plot needs to happen in that episode.
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