I'm not going to put the cartoon here, because in this house we respect copyright and I can't really claim it's Fair Use since I don't have any comment-or-criticism to apply to it, but you've seen it before and you can find it easily if you haven't.

It's two scientists (some say "mathematicians," and they're not wearing lab coats, which is standard "scientist" shorthand, so perhaps so) looking at a chalkboard full of impenetrable equations and symbols. The left third of the board is full of them. The right third of the board is full of them. In the middle third of the board, connecting the other two parts, all that's written are the words "THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS." One of the scientists is pointing to those words. The caption to the cartoon is "I think you should be more explicit here in step two."

This is, unfortunately, how I plot quite a few of my stories, including the current one. I know the situation going in, I know the outcomes, but I'm a little hazy on how we get from point A to point Z. Sometimes filling in the middle doesn't give me trouble. This time it definitely is.

I don't plot mysteries this way. For mystery/detective stories, you start with the crime (which is, let's face it, almost always a murder). Then you lay out exactly what happened -- who did it, when they did it, how they did it, why they did it. But you're working backwards. Now your job is to conceal chunks of that information or put it in disarray for your detective, who will have to start with one piece of information and use that to get another piece of information and use that to get another piece of information and so on until they have enough to piece together the solution. You are writing a puzzle. Writing a puzzle is significantly easier, in some ways, than writing a story that has a far less structured plot, like a romance. Romance is easy to write and hard to write well. Mysteries can be very hard to plot and write, but they are more forgiving, because you don't necessarily have to put in a lot of style or character to hold the reader's interest if you are shoving them through the story on a careening toboggan of plot.

Which is why I write stories that have a lot of plot, usually.

Anyway, the centerpiece of this particular story is a large battle. I hate battles. They are hell to stage visually, same as crowd scenes only more so, and it is difficult to make the action in them interesting. Usually when I have to do a battle what I do is show you enough of the battle that you can assume it's raging on while I then concentrate on what's happening around the edges -- the commanders worrying about their strategy, the guerilla action trying to sneak behind enemy lines, the person leaving the scene to try to scrounge up reinforcements -- because both the reader and I need to concentrate on only one or two characters at a time, for technical and attention-span reasons.

This isn't just me, by the way. Look at battle scenes done by people who know their craft a lot better than I do. Look at the Lord of the Rings films. We show lots and lots of CGI troops ramming into each other outside the walls of Minas Tirith for a few seconds, but then immediately switch back to "Let's see what Aragorn is doing" or "Let's see what Legolas is doing" or "Oh, hey, there's something a little off about that particular soldier" (she is no man!). This is the only way to do it.

Anyway, I gotta plot this plot. And I really need to plot it today. I was hoping to have started renders on this story three days or so ago. Other factors have gotten in the way -- snow removal, for one ... which exhausted me so much last Sun/Mon that I wasn't capable of doing much of anything.

Also, this story has unfortunately got a lot of Costume Design and I've gotten distracted by working that out the last two days. (I find it is much better to figure out how the characters are going to look and dress, and even save bases for them, before beginning renders, because I find that if I have to stop in the middle of that to design a character or an outfit, it really kills the momentum.)

In short (too late), I had better stop typing this and get started on making the miracle occur.