I’m ready, finally, to set sail.

It was touch and go with the preparations almost foundering on the rocky shoreline that represented the plot holes, and in the end, I put all of the plot lines on cards and blue tacked them to the wall in the order I expected they would play out, and it showed where the holes were.

It was an innovative idea, sadly not my own, but one I used many years ago when working as principal researcher for a company biography, a company that had been in business since the 1890s. Inthat instance, I collated the main points attached to dates, sorted the cards m into date order and it gave a very clear historical outline.

The same, I found worked for the plot, and in being able to attach a loose timeline across all of the plots and sub plots to see where, chapter wise, they were going to fit in. Or where something was missing.

I know there’s probably very good computer software that also does this, but I was getting distressed, and didn’t want to put it all into a program, and find it didn’t do the job quite as i might expect, and being so close to starting time I didn’t have the time to fiddle.

Call me a luddite, but what did we do before computers. Yes. Pencils and paper.

Or was that charcoal and papyrus?