a plot emergeth
After several days of not getting it accomplished and working up a mild case of stress about it, I finally sat down today and, from, oh, about one-thirty until five-thirty, in a prolonged session of brain palpitations, wrote the plot for the Hallowe'en story.
And yes, it did take all of four hours. If you've never plotted a somewhat loopy fantasy detective noir which has to actually hold together as a detective story despite the main point being the fun and games along the way -- and I suspect you haven't -- then hush your mouth.
This one is definitely going to be more about the journey than the destination. I will never actually manage to write The Long Goodbye, which now and forever remains peak-of-form for this kind of thing, undefeated ... but this one may turn out to be as close as I've yet come.
I refer to the film, the one with Elliott Gould, and not the original Raymond Chandler novel. As I recall, the latter was perfectly fine but the film is far beyond that, well into brilliant. Some of that is Gould, but I suspect about seventy-five percent of it is Leigh Brackett, who was perpetually underappreciated in her lifetime.
It's going to be long, and I suspected even before coming anywhere near the plot that it was going to be long, which is why the mild stress. It's long enough that I suspect I'll need all of September to work on it, which meant that both the character design and the plot had to be finished before 1 September.
Which is, I hate to break it to you, the day after tomorrow.
30 August 2026