Two months in and halfway there

Scroll down for an introduction to this year's story

Yes, it's true. February's finally over, Spring is coiling up, ready to launch and I've already written 12 chapters of this year's Christmas story.

Halfway through the first draft. And its going pretty well, I think.

I've written before about the process I use for the Christmas stories. Basically I work out the plot but then break it down into 24 episodes. This is a tricky business. Each episode has to be relatively self-contained, after all anyone might start listening at any point in December so you want to give them something that makes sense on its own.

Of course, this also usually means having to explain a little bit of what's going on at the start. I suspect this is also helpful for people listening on a daily basis over Christmas, just because you can't expect everyone to remember everything that's happened so far.

Equally, though, you don't want to be too boring, and I know a lot of people binge listen, so recapitulating the last episode could get seriously irritating.

As well as the beginnings, this also means that the ending of each episode needs to be neat, capsuling up that episode. Although I do also want to try and make things a little cliff-hangery. Not always literally, but at least enticing enough that new listeners might want to come back next time.

This means that each episode has to have some kind of incident or event, which in the past has meant I've always tried to make sure there's some new plot development each time.

On the other hand, this can make things terribly frantic and breathless. Sometimes this works well, I think, as in the more caper style stories like 'Timothy Hope' and 'Deadvent Calendar'. But I'm aware that this can get convoluted and overwhelming. 'And All Too Magical Christmas', for example, was a particularly complex piece of plot machinery, even if the basic structure was, hopefully, simple enough.

This means that I'm trying to temper things a lot more in recent stories, making sure I have episodes that are mostly for character development or just pausing and enjoying the scenery (especially last year, in snowy Hexwood).

And sometime the story does the pacing for itself, as it has just done with this year's.