 Two years ago, I wrote a post on research, setting out five steps to getting a best result. During the past two weeks, I’ve been following that same methodology to assess service suppliers and have narrowed my search to two possibilities.
I googled then sifted the results, gathered reports, opinions, financial data (from the sycophantic to the ranting) and filed the source URLs of the most valuable. (Note to self and others: never, ever fail to copy the URL to somewhere safe. You will forget the site name and you won’t be able to find it again. And you’ll kick yourself raw. Emailing it you yourself is pretty solid.)
But then you have to get down to the dirty stuff.
I used the net to dig out clients of the two suppliers and then wrote to them in confidence. If you do this, you have to keep that promise. Whatever the temptation. You cannot blat out what you have been told all over the web. Well, you could, but you mustn’t.
Why? Because one day, when you have become the Great Wise One, somebody might do it to you.
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 Now I’ve finished the first run through of edits on Book3, I’ve finished my heroine’s story. I’ll leave her for 6-8 weeks at least until I even glance at her again.
So, Book 4. Yes, I’m acquainted with the main character and I want to tell her story. But that’s it. I need to let her run around in my head a bit, to have some adventures, get into trouble, struggle to get out, land in more – you know the rest. More than anything, I have to get to know her, to find out what she wants, what’s stopping her, what she has to do, or GMC, as creative writing tutors call it.*
My way of doing this is to write down 30 lines of plot. Less an outline, more of a wireframe as I like the 3D analogy better.
Line 1: The beginning – the initiating incident
Line 2: Impact and realisation
Line 3: The plan
Line 6: First enormous set-back (turning point 1)
Line 15: First glimmer of light (turning point 2)
Line 21: Gritting on in face of terrible odds and sacrifice (turning point 3)
Line 25: Despite developments, we might be getting there – the false dawn
Line 28: Catastrophe/black moment – do or die
Line 30: The end – the resolution and loose-end-tying-up
Not all there, but you get the idea.
Off now to fill in the missing lines and to release the muse…
Picture: My photo taken in the Naples Archeological Museum. More here.
*Goal, Motivation, Conflict
Updated August 2020: Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers – INCEPTIO, PERFIDITAS, SUCCESSIO, AURELIA, INSURRECTIO and RETALIO. CARINA, a novella, and ROMA NOVA EXTRA, a collection of short stories, are now available. Audiobooks are available for four of the series. NEXUS, an Aurelia Mitela novella, is now out.
Find out more about Roma Nova, its origins, stories and heroines… Download ‘Welcome to Roma Nova’, a FREE eBook, as a thank you gift when you sign up to Alison’s monthly email newsletter. You’ll also be first to know about Roma Nova news and book progress before everybody else, and take part in giveaways.
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 I didn’t know I’d feel so bereft. Now I’ve done the first run edits on fiction Book 3, the last in the trilogy, I’ve finished my heroine’s story. No, really finished. After the relief of completing the red-pen exercise, sadness crept up on me and now has me in its grip.
I’ve lived with my heroine for two and a half years, written over 300,000 words about her, sweated hours over her adventures, her troubles, her victories, her fears, her doubts, her joy. It’s like I’ve lost a dear friend, a small death.
Now I have to pick myself up, stop wimping and get on with the next book. It’s a spin-off, the story of one of the secondary characters. Once I have my 30-line outline and set my brain to thinking while I sort the airing cupboard, wash up or dust the furniture, I’ll be off. We will glimpse my heroine, but only as a small child. Or perhaps I’ll sneak her in somewhere else…
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 A lovely person who bought my non-fiction history ebook Military or Civilians? The curious anomaly of the German Women’s Auxiliary Services during the Second World War was (in her words) blown away by the resources I had collected.
Over the three years I accumulated and read every book I could find on the subject, I merely added each one to the list after finishing it and went searching for the next one.
Maybe we don’t give ourseves enough credit for the research we do, whether writing historic and alternate historic fiction, historical biography or traditional history.
If you haven’t downloaded Military or Civilians? yet, here’s the resource list, or more properly, the bibliography. But most of it’s in German. If you want to othe untold story of 500,000 women in the Second World War, you’ll have to buy my book!
Military or Civilians? The curious anomaly of the German Women’s Auxiliary Services during the Second World War is available as an ebook on amazon.co.uk (link below in box), amazon.com, amazon.de
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Ten days ago, my mother-in-law died. Born in 1929 in a working class family in Birkenhead, she’d lived a modest childhood, endured separation from her parents and siblings as an evacuee during wartime, returned to a bombed-out city, married, had a child at the start of the space race and witnessed the technological age from its start. She supported her husband in his devotion to the Royal Naval Association and the British Legion. Devasted when he died after 51 years of marriage, she became ill herself and succumbed to Alzheimers’ and dementia shortly before her 83rd birthday.
This isn’t a eulogy, though she deserved one for her open, friendly nature, the wilingness to go an extra two miles and for her kindness in praising others for their achievements, irrespective of whether she understood what they had achieved.
But she didn’t have the educational opportunity – she left school at fourteen. She didn’t have the chance to develop any aspiration other than the traditional one of wife and mother. She didn’t have the opportunity to widen her horizons, so stayed in a narrow, closed and uninformed world.
Perhaps she may not have been any different, but she didn’t have the chance. Little wonder she couldn’t understand it when she saw others squandering the rich choices before them and living only to grab money and kick others aside as they blundered on.
But she understood what it meant when her grandson went to a good grammar school – she’d worked in the schools meals service at one. When he gained a place at university, she didn’t know what a Bloomsbury Group university was, but she was happy he was happy there. She was only anxious that he would “get a good job” afterwards. And he did.
As she slid into the brain-rotting illness, one of her constant questions was “Are you happy?” and she always smiled when you reassured her you were.
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Two years ago, I wrote a post on research, setting out five steps to getting a best result. During the past two weeks, I’ve been following that same methodology to assess service suppliers and have narrowed my search to two possibilities.
