Nine Characters + One Butterfly = Chaos Theory
The Process of Constructing a Pitch Originally posted on Michael Runs the Gamut on May 8, 2014 [Comments from 2021 are in italics, enclosed in square brackets, like this one.] After the first year’s round of pitches, and the first few rejections by agents, I regrouped, re-edited some sections of the book, gave it a …
Prepping For the WLT Conference (2012) Originally posted on Michael Runs the Gamut on May 8, 2014 [Comments from 2021 are in italics, enclosed in square brackets, like this one.] Here’s the final pitch I used for the 2012 WLT Conference. Sorry, I still have to cut a few things. “The mainstream novel, If a …
Prepping For the WLT Conference (2011) Originally posted on Michael Runs the Gamut on April 28, 2014 [Comments from 2021 are in italics, enclosed in square brackets, like this one.] A month after that (3-13-2011), I had already made several changes (not necessarily for the better). This was the first pitch I tried to create …
Pitchapalooza (2011) Originally posted on Michael Runs the Gamut on April 29, 2014 [Comments from 2021 are in italics, enclosed in square brackets, like this one.] In the previous post, I showed you the pitch I used for my novel, If a Butterfly, at the 2012 Writers’ League of Texas’ Agents and Editors Conference. This …
If a Butterfly’s Final Pitch Originally posted on Michael Runs the Gamut on April 22, 2014 [Comments from 2021 are in italics, enclosed in square brackets, like this one.] My previous post was about starting to split a very long novel into two parts. I started working on doing that a few days ago, and …
Originally posted on Michael Runs the Gamut on April 15, 2014 [Comments from 2021 are in italics, enclosed in square brackets, like this one.] My first completed novel, If a Butterfly, was EXTREMELY long. The first draft was well over 300,000 words, about 1,300 double-spaced 8.5 x 11 pages; but — in its defense — …
Once I started using Scrivener it became obvious that it could do a number of things that I was using several other programs to accomplish. Here’s an example. In an earlier post, A Milestone, I mentioned one method used to keep track of which characters were in what scenes, and how often they were appearing …
Originally posted on Michael Runs the Gamut on December 10, 2013 The Plot Thickens (A Little) In the last post I established that I thought my cast of characters was complete, but was it? They were all lined up neatly on the butterfly’s route (a teacher in Canada, a rock deejay in Virginia, a scientist …
Originally posted on Michael Runs the Gamut on December 7, 2013 [Comments from 2021 are in italics, enclosed in square brackets, like this one.] Okay, by this time I had six main characters (a lot to juggle, I know), but with NaNoWriMo just weeks away at this point, my biggest worry was finding a way …
Originally posted on Michael Runs the Gamut on December 3, 2013 More Decisions In the last post, I talked about the idea of constructing the plot of If a Butterfly around a Monarch butterfly, on its annual migration from Canada to Mexico, interacting with characters who happened to be in its path. The original idea …