Show Your Work Saturday! · AI Pro Writers Studio

Show Your Work Saturday!

My Actual Outline for Hazel Thornfield, Book One

So I shared a lot of what I've been workign on for YOU this morning and last night. Today is a show the work on what I've been working on for me. In testing interactions between software I'm starting several ideas a day and generating/writing a book about every two-three days. Desperately need to make time for the publishing/marketing step, so this is my next target for WCP and the skillset. Improve what is already tehere in WCP to be more useful and faster to production.

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Saturday is behind-the-curtain day. Today I'm showing the actual working outline for the first Hazel Thornfield cozy mystery, before the draft existed.

Not a polished retrospective. The real thing, with the gaps and the wrong turns.

What I Started With

The premise that survived the sharpening process was this:

A retired archivist moves to a small Kentucky lake town to restore a Victorian property she's inherited, discovers a body inside the sealed basement, and realizes the dead man has been there since 1987 and the entire town knew.

That's it. That was the anchor.

The five structural points I locked before I wrote a word:

Opening: Hazel arrives. The house is worse than the photographs. She is already regretting every decision.

Inciting incident: She finds the body in the basement during the first renovation inspection. The condition of the body and the circumstances of the sealing make it immediately clear this was not an accident.

Midpoint: She learns the dead man's identity and discovers that the most respected family in town had a direct connection to him. The mystery doubles back on itself.

Crisis: Her investigation puts her in genuine danger and she's given a credible opportunity to walk away, hand it to the sheriff, and leave town entirely. She almost takes it.

Resolution: The truth involves a crime that was understandable, arguably justifiable, and still wrong. Hazel has to decide what to do with it.

That's the outline. One paragraph, five points, fits on a napkin.

What Changed in the Draft

Almost everything between the anchors.

The subplot involving Hazel's contractor turned into something much more significant than I planned because their dynamic was more interesting in the draft than on the page. The midpoint revelation happened a chapter earlier than the outline suggested because the story got there faster. The crisis scene moved locations three times.

The anchors held. Everything else moved.

What I Learned From It

The hybrid method works because the anchors give you somewhere to navigate toward without predetermining how you get there. I knew the crisis was coming. I didn't know until I was writing it that the thing threatening Hazel was going to be an offer to be complicit rather than a direct threat.

That's a better version than what I outlined. The draft found it.

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Now here's the real part. All of the above was the original. That story was written entirely by me with the help of a very early version ot hee PWS skill rooms and persona's. It was awful. The story okay, but even the final I am still not happy with and will do some major rework as it was planned to be a six book series of novellas.

It evolved an morphed from 31 scenes to 65 scenes, I kept reworking and running with it because I love the character, the final setting and the eventual story line. I think I spent too much time with it,. There are 156 files created for a novella. Ridiculous. Some stories just won't let you leave them.

The beginning was great, the ending was there. I loved the characters, but the story between fell apart. I eventually got something i was relatively happy with and writing this makes me want to jump back in with the current version of the Story Development team, but where to begin and how much to give them is a bit murky still.

Have you ever gotten in over you head, spent so much time on a story or project you couldn't give it up even though you know you should?

Let me know below:

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Show Your Work Saturday!