Nathaniel the Noteworthy Eats Delicious Toast

A few weeks ago, someone asked me what the whole "toast thing" was about in Return to Exile. Maybe you remember this. Sky was trying to convince Crystal to help him rather than hunt the Gnomon and he related the story of Nathaniel the Noteworthy, Samuel the Simpleton, toast, and the Tourmaline of Foresight.

In the first draft of Return to Exile the story of Nathaniel the Noteworthy and his encounter with Samuel's delicious toast was far more extensive. An entire chapter in fact. Only a few bits survived. I've included that chapter below to give you another glimpse of how the story evolved over time.

Keep reading if you like delicious toast.

A Note on Curiosity

(Taken from the secret writings of Professor Anastasia Livingstone, Founder of the Livingstone Institute for Science and Mathematics at Arkhon Academy)

Now curiosity is a curious thing, and native curiosity is even more curious—it being such a rare nativity for even a curious person to possess. Take for instance the notorious “Nathaniel the Noteworthy”. Being a common bloke—a non-native curioso, if you will—Nathaniel was obsessed with finding the infamous “Tourmaline of Foresight” (a rare gemstone said to be owned by one “Samuel the Simpleton”).

Nathaniel searched high and low for the gem, traveling from Prestwitch to Germanium in northern Umpshire, until he finally found the Tower of Lowdunderkis, clambered through the Portal of Perfectus the Imperfect, and entered the Edge, where said Simpleton was said to live.

As those of us who have traveled through the Edge can attest, the path was fraught with peril. Nathaniel crossed the Fiefdom of Fidorkun the Fearful, clawed through the Catacombs of Karakus the Cantankerous, and swam the length of the Ingubriate Ocean.

In the Ingubriate Ocean, he only narrowly avoided the Kraken of Trajukistan with the help of Rubber Duckus the Ineffable from the Cape of Lost Hope (not to be confused with Rubber Duckus the Effable from North Emblin, Dorchester County whose drowning in the dregs of an overlarge tea kettle was as tragic as it was unsurprising).

On the Beach of Bungled Dreams, Nathaniel found the Gibbering Pool of Unhelpful Insights and plunged into its fathomless depths. He emerged, confused but determined, and continued on through the Forest of Unfailing Faithlessness until he reached the Desert of Deplorable Deforestation and bought a map off of Oliver the Indirect.

He wandered for twenty years.

After twenty years, Samuel the Simpleton—who had been watching the wandering from his cottage twenty feet away—asked Nathaniel if he was lost, whereupon Nathaniel admitted that he was, in fact, lost and finally asked for directions. Samuel invited Nathaniel in and they had a dialog that went something like this:

“Would you like some toast?” asked Samuel.

“Do you have jam?”

“No; no jam—just toast.”

“How can you eat toast with no jam?”

“How can you eat not toast with or without jam?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What’s that not supposed to mean?”

“I don’t really know what it’s supposed to mean or not mean; how could I know?”

“How could you not know?”

Nathaniel stared at Samuel until Samuel shifted and broke eye contact.

“Um…I have butter…” Samuel admitted.

“Oh, butter’s great then, thank you,” said Nathaniel as Samuel handed him a piece of buttered toast.

Nathaniel took a bite.

“This toast is quite delicious,” said Nathaniel, who hadn’t tasted toast in a good long time.

“Thank you. The secret is to not burn it,” said Samuel, his voice full of confusing portent.

Nathaniel took another crunching bite, the sound echoing in the awkward silence as bits of toast fell and lodged in his beard, which was quite long after twenty years of wandering without a razor.

After another bite—and another minute of awkward crunching—Nathaniel decided to take the conversation in hand.

“I have come for the Tourmaline of Foresight!” he trumpeted dramatically.

Samuel looked up from his toast and stared at Nathaniel until Nathaniel shifted and broke eye contact.

“I knew this day would come,” said Samuel as he took another bite of toast.

“Oh? Did the Tourmaline tell you that?” asked Nathaniel, impressed.

“No. (chew, chew) Oliver told me you were coming after he sold you the map.”

“Oh.”

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

“Sooo…can I have it then?” asked Nathaniel.

“What’s that?”

“The Tourmaline of Foresight; can I have it?”

“And what would you do with it once you had it?”

“Why, I would ask it questions about the future and it would answer them. Am I going to be rich? Am I going to find true love? Will I ever have toast this delicious again? What’s the point of it all?”

“What’s the point of all what?”

“All…this,” said Nathaniel, waving his arms around.

“This cottage?”

“No, no; this! What’s the point of all this! This world! This time thing! This life!”

“Oh that; right, I’m with you now. So you would ask the Tourmaline questions and you think it would give you answers, do you?”

“Um…yes; that’s the point of the Tourmaline of Foresight, isn’t it?”

“Maybe (crunch, crunch, swallow), I’ve never really asked.”

“Never asked?”

“I really think you’d be much happier with the Carbuncle of Self-Loathing,” said Samuel as he stood from the table, walked to an old clothes hamper and started pulling out indescribables.

“Carbuncle of Self-Loathing? I didn’t swim the Straights of Stygian Stench to find the Carbuncle of Self-Loathing! I came for the Tourmaline of Foresight and that’s what I shall have!” declared Nathaniel.

“Just so, just so. Ah! Here we are!” Samuel returned to the table clutching a soiled handkerchief in one hand and a yellowed sock made up of more holes than sock in the other.

He opened the handkerchief and dumped a yellow stone upon the table. At the same time, he upended the sock and a purple stone tumbled from the toe.

“I give you the Carbuncle and the Tourmaline!” said Samuel dramatically.

“You give them to me?”

“Figure of speech; more dramatic than saying ‘lookie here’.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Now, you may ask each stone one question, and whichever pleases you more is the one you may have.”

Nathaniel leaned over and picked up the purple gem. Holding it to his eye, he asked, “Am I going to be rich?”

A moment passed, and then an image appeared in the stone, swimming up from its murky depths. Nathaniel gasped as he saw his future self rolling in a pile of gold coins.

Satisfied, he set the purple gem aside and picked up the other.

Holding it to his eye he asked: “What’s the point of all this?”

Nothing appeared.

“Try giving it a little shake,” said Samuel, “sometimes that helps.”

Nathaniel shook the gem and returned it to his eye.

Watery smoke swirled in the jewels depths, and then, from somewhere deep within, words floated to the surface:

What? You mean this cottage?

Nathaniel’s brow creased as he dropped the gemstone from his eye.

“Um…can I see that first one again?”

Nathaniel left the cottage a moment later. Using the purple stone, he avoided the Bickering Bats of Whitmore, slid past the Stagnant Swamps of Revolving Revulsion, took the stairs up the Cliffs of Maddening Madness, and returned to Prestwitch, Dorset County, where he was greeted—as he knew he would be—by a beautiful farm girl whom he knew was, in reality, a rich princess in hiding. They later married and Nathaniel became rich beyond his wildest dreams—as he knew he would.

Now, after hearing this story, most people assume that Nathaniel the Noteworthy left the cottage of Samuel the Simpleton with the Tourmaline of Foresight in hand. After all, the stone he possessed showed him the future: he married a princess, he became rich, and he never did have toast as delicious as Samuel’s again.

But in this, most people are mistaken.

The difference between the curioso (the natively curious) and the non-curioso (the non-natively curious and the uncurious) is that the non-curiosos are constantly looking for solutions—someone to tell them what to do and what’s next, even if that someone is a pushy stone. They look to the future as a set thing, a place full of answers.

This was definitely the case with Nathaniel the Noteworthy who, it should be said, was most noteworthy for being a know-it-all.

The curiosos, on the other hand, are constantly looking for the next question. They look to the future as a place they explore and create. For them, the future is not set—it is only possible.

Samuel the Simpleton was called Simple not because he was stupid, but because he asked a lot of questions—a characteristic the uninformed all too commonly equate with ignorance, when, in fact, the opposite is the case.

The Tourmaline of Foresight had the foresight to know that a life full of answers is a life without choice, for a person who supposes they know an answer always acts on that knowledge and creates a future that mimics the answer they thought they had. Thus, they do not act, but re-act to their own presumption of knowledge, or to the answer given them by another, no matter how wise and all-knowing that other might be. 

A life full of questions, on the other hand, leads to nothing but choice for questions acknowledge multiple possibilities, and thus, multiple answers that can, in turn, lead to more questions and more choices. 

It is for this reason that questions are to be encouraged, not dismissed. For, if we run out of questions, the future really will be set in stone.

A life full of answers—the life of the non-curioso—is a boring life.

Just ask Nathaniel the Noteworthy who, after only two years, took the Carbuncle of Self-Loathing and walked into Fallowmere Lake, never to be heard from again.

(end note)

Original Prologue for RETURN TO EXILE

Some of you might find this interesting. Below is the original prologue for Return to Exile. It's very different from what you'll find in the book. Between the first and second draft I rewrote everything but the opening paragraph. The story, world, monsters, and characters changed significantly between drafts, as you'll see.

Enjoy.

Prologue

       Phineas T. Pimiscule was not what you’d call an “attractive” man. He wasn’t “desirable” or “appealing”. He didn’t like “things” or do “stuff”” or “wash” himself. He was not the kind of guy to “put” “quotation” “marks” around “words” or say things in an unassuming or assuming way.

         He was the kind of guy who wore a monocle.

He was also very kind to little old ladies who needed to cross streets, if they weren’t dead already, and passably kind to poor, nearly drowned puppies he occasionally found in the stream on the west side of his family’s ancient homestead, if they weren’t werewolves.

He also lived in a crypt.

Some people might find living in a crypt depressing. Phineas certainly did. But it was better than dying in a crypt. Now that’s something to think about!

Phineas was, all in all, a curious man--a curiously old man who didn’t look a day over forty, which is really not all that old, if he was in fact forty, which he wasn’t.

What was most curious about him, aside from whom he was, and where he was from, and why he lived in a crypt—and all the other things that were in fact far more curious—was the fact that at this very moment in the prologue, he was running for his life.

I don’t know about you, but when Phineas ran for his life—which he did far more frequently than you might suspect—he ran with style. He picked only the darkest of graveyards, the spookiest of houses, and the corniest of cornfields to flee in.

He also liked to carry old books with him, or scrolls, or possibly maps that led to unknown and exotic places, like The-Twelve-Levels-of-Hidden-Terrors, or Wyoming.

He would occasionally drop said books or maps, leading to countless misadventures for unsuspecting children with too much time and not enough sense, many of whom were, it had to be admitted, living in forgotten closets or under darkened stairs, and, in extreme cases, living in both of these places simultaneously, without adult supervision, or under limited supervision from a wicked step aunt or poor shoemaking single father.

That’s what makes this story different. Our main character, who’s not, in fact, Phineas, didn’t live in a closet or under the stairs, as surprising as that may be. His parents took their responsibilities seriously and were not wicked in any way, making it unlikely that Sky, our main character, would be in a place he shouldn’t be to find a dropped book or map that would inevitably lead to misadventures. But even the best of families can have problems.

But I get ahead of myself. Sky has a whole book about him, while Phineas has but this pitiful prologue, so without further injustice, let’s return to Phineas and enter, as it were, a more action-packed sequence.

Decaying cornstalks towered over Phineas like a big tower towers over smaller less big towers. He paused briefly to get his bearings, breathing in the dust as he gasped great lungfuls of air.

Scattered stalks littered the ground, crunching as Phineas shifted from one foot to the other, pondering his predicament.

The gibbous moon cast blue-black shadows of stalks that looked like monstrous figures eating unspeakable living buffets (this is what’s known as setting mood).

A ROAR echoed across the cornfield, and Phineas knew that the creature had finally picked up his scent. He’d scattered a container of pumpkin pie spice to scare the beast off, but it wouldn’t hold it for long. He didn’t have much time now. He’d fought monsters in the past—it was sort of his thing—but this monster was different. It seemed to be controlled by a greater intelligence, no doubt by the evil mastermind behind the infernal plot that would only be revealed in later chapters of this book.

His only choice was to run. He had to tell people. He had to warn them!

Adjusting his monocle, Phineas cut a path through the corn in what he hoped was the direction of the highway. If he could but make it, he could quite possibly get picked up by a passing motor-coach. What he’d do then, he didn’t know, but he knew that these things tended to unfold themselves in setups and payoffs, and he had no doubt that some benevolent force would intervene on his behalf. He was, after all, a lovable character and there were still so many mysteries surrounding him that needed answered.

Phineas popped out of the field suddenly, tripping on a dangling vine and falling to the ground.

With cut and bruised hands, he pushed himself to his feet and cleaned his monocle with his dirtied shirt, which seemed to make things worse.

He replaced the now blackened monocle to his eye and stared up the highway at the rapidly approaching headlights.

Stepping closer to the highway, he began to wave his hands to alert the motor-coach to his presence.

Just as the headlights were about to fall upon him, a pumpkin clawed hand reached out of the woods and grabbed Phineas by the neck.

As the vined pumpkin hand jerked him back into the cornfield, Phineas had three parting thoughts. First, he was surprised to find that he was not the main character in this story, but only an introductory character who would set voice, mood, etc, a conclusion that you, as the reader, had no doubt already reached. Second, he felt a sense of relief that the burden and toils of being a main character were not his to bear. Still, as a good supporting character, he wished he could have warned someone by dropping a book or map or something. As it was, all he’d dropped was his monocle, which, while not incredibly informative, was helpful and would prove useful in subsequent chapters.

As Phineas was dragged off, screaming, into the cornfields and the awaiting terrors beyond, he comforted himself with his third and final thought of the prologue: The Monster Hunters were still out there somewhere. They would be able to help the boy—the main character—who had so unsuspectingly driven past him in a beat up green station wagon with his family only moments before.

Phineas thought about having a fourth and final, final thought, but as it turned out, thinking of having the thought was as far as he thunk because at that moment, he disappeared from our story.

Return to Exile Book Group Discussion Guide

Several people have asked me to put together a Return to Exile Book Group Discussion Guide and I've finally done it. I made two separate documents. One has just the questions. The other has both the questions and some answers/discussion prompts. Click on the links to download their respective guides.

Return to Exile Book Group Discussion Questions
Return to Exile Book Group Discussion Answers

The Legend Thief ARC giveaway is still ongoing, so visit the "Billion Dollar Giveaway" post to enter. I should receive the ARC at the end of June, at which point the giveaway will end, so hurry up! It's awesome!

Blog Tour Update

Hi everyone! Just a quick update. If you've been following the Return to Exile blog tour, you've no doubt noticed that the calendar keeps shifting. S&S had some sort of warehouse mix up, so many of the blogs still haven't received their review copies. S&S has fixed the problem and they are sending out the review copies now. They should arrive early next week. Stay with us! We're adjusting the schedule to accommodate the very patient, kind, forgiving, attractive, and insert-good-please-don't-hate-us-descriptor-here bloggers participating in the tour, so keep checking the calendar! Things should settle down next week. Until then, make sure to visit the previous tour stops, many of which are featuring interviews, reviews, and book/bracelet giveaways.

Also, to help you cope, I've included this elevator music for your listening pleasure. Enjoy!

Return to Exile, A Personal Note

I have birthed a book. I delivered the final draft (#4) of The Legend Thief at 2:00 AM this morning. At 7:00 AM, my editor reviewed the changes, declared it even better than Return to Exile, and said it was ready for copyediting. It is finished! (mostly)

Now, I'm turning my attention to other projects and gearing up for the "relaunch" of Return to Exile. We're calling it a relaunch because my first launch, in September, was sort of pathetic. I don't usually talk about my personal life much, and so the reasons for this patheticness might not be readily apparent. In a post last March, I briefly mentioned that I was recovering from a neck surgery. That's all I've really said about something that has dominated my life for the last two years.

For nearly a year leading up to the surgery—starting within a month of selling my series to S&S—I suffered from neck/shoulder/arm pain. It got to the point where my entire right arm went numb and I spent more than half my day in bed, struggling to control the pain and get sensation back into my arm as I desperately tried (and failed) to write. During the surgery, the surgeon discovered that I had a nerve wrapped around a bone spur in my neck. He pulled out the disc, fixed the problem, shoved in a cadaver bone, and fused the vertebrae together with a metal plate.

My neck surgery cost as much as this guy

Yes, I have dead people's parts in me and I am part machine. I am like the Six Million Dollar Man, not because I have any cool abilities, but because that's how much the surgery costed (bye-bye book advance).

By May, I'd recovered enough to start writing again, which was good because I'd written less than sixty pages of The Legend Thief, a manuscript I was supposed to deliver in April. Fortunately, my awesome editor, Courtney Bongiolatti at S&S, was very understanding and extended my deadline.

Unfortunately, by August—the month before launch—the pain started to return and I began to get zingers down my arm. The nerve hadn't quite recovered. Additionally, I had a bulging disc and a pinched nerve on the level above the fusion. The doctor put me on Neurontin, a non-narcotic medication for nerve pain, and it helped a bit.

I delivered the first draft of The Legend Thief in August amidst some intense apologies (it wasn't very good at the time, unlike now, four revisions later).

In September, we launched Return to Exile.

After launch, I quickly discovered that I couldn't tolerate standing/sitting for more than an hour or so at a time. As a new author, no one knows who you are. If you can't get out in front of people, no one will ever know who you are and your book will suffer as a result. There's a tipping point at which word-of-mouth takes over, but you need a critical mass of fans talking about the book before that can happen. So, I tried to push through the pain and get out in front of people.

My illusions around "heroic will" triumphing over all obstacles came to a sad end when, after spending six hours at various Costco signings, I ended up in the ER, unable to string a complete sentence together. The aggravated nerves in my neck had caused muscle spasms that pinched the arteries and slowed the blood flow to my brain. At least, that was the best guess after ruling out stroke and other possibilities. Fortunately, there was no permanent damage, though those who commonly read this blog may disagree.

That event pretty much ended my launch before it even began. Since then, I've focused on revising The Legend Thief. My creativity—which was stymied by pain and possibly Neurontin (which I went off of in December)—has slowly returned. I've worked with a physical therapist for several months, and my neck is now pretty much under control. In February, I presented at the "Life, the Universe, and Everything" symposium to test the waters and see how well my neck would hold up, and I'm happy to say it went great!

I'm back. I'm ready. We're relaunching Return to Exile. I'm late to the game, and I could use some help.

If you are a blogger, click here to sign up for the Return to Exile blog tour. Signing up basically means that you'll mention Return to Exile on your blog on whatever date you sign up for. This could include a review, a giveaway, an interview with me, or even a simple mention or link on the side of your blog—whatever you want. You don't have to blog about books to sign up. All blogs—books, foods, crafts, parenting, whatever—are invited! We have over twenty amazing blogs that have already registered for the tour, so join the party! The more the merrier!

Additionally, we're trying to setup school visits as part of the tour. If you're a teacher, librarian, principal, or other academic sort, click on the "For Educators" tab to learn more about inviting me to your school. I know it's the end of the year, your schedules are full, and you're out of budget. I wish I could do all my visits for free, but a six million dollar surgery is a lot of surgery to pay off. Having said that, we are willing to work with you no matter where your school is located, or your circumstances, so don't hesitate to contact us (and by "us," I mean my assistant who is handling all of this). My presentation is different from anything you and your students might have seen before (see "For Educators" for more info), and I'd really love to visit as many schools as possible before the end of the year. Invite me! You won't be disappointed!

Finally, spread the word! Tell everyone you know to buy the book! Like my Facebook page! I have a lot of ground to make up and it's all uphill. I appreciate every ounce of support, and a big thank you to my fans, my family, my friends, my editor, my agent, and all the others who have supported me through this! You have no idea what your encouragement has meant!

How To Write a Book - Part 3: Structure

In Part 1, I talked about picking the right idea, magical egg whites, and the evils of the god-wizard hybrid Kronos-Voldemort. In Part 2, I talked about refining the idea, Dogniss Nevergreen, The Lost Hunger Symbol, and the secret power of Pop Tart Industries. Now, I'm going to discuss structure, story development, and probably whatever ridiculous thing occurs to me as I'm writing.

There are two basic approaches to story development: top-down and bottom-up. Top-down means that I lay things out according to some kind of system, like the three-act structure, or the Hero's Journey. I focus on plot. Characters become, in many ways, an outgrowth of plot needs. Here's a table showing a structural breakdown of Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, and The Hunter Chronicles:

	Harry Potter	Percy Jackson	The Hunter Chronicles
Birds-Eye Kicker	Harry left on porch—the boy who lived.	None.	Phineas flees Exile with Sky.
Normal World	Harry lives in closet.	Percy at museum. School problems.	Trapping Phineas in the woods. Moving again.
Inciting Incident	Arrival of owls.	Fight with teacher.	Phineas is missing.
Turning Point	“You’re a wizard Harry.” Go to wizard school.	“You’re a demigod Percy.” Get to Camp Half Blood.	The Arkhon is about to break free. Find your uncle.
Rising Action	Diagon Alley. Missing stone.	Camp Half Blood. Missing lightning bolt.	Search for Phineas/keys. Solve riddles. Survive.
Point of No Return	Harry decides to stop the thief from getting the stone.	Quest to find bolt.	Sky decides to go with Hands to hunt the Gnomon.
Crisis	Traps take out Ron and Hermione, leaving Harry alone to face the thief.	Percy somehow has the bolt and Hades believes he stole it.	Fight with the Jack ends badly. All seems lost.
Climax	Harry gets the stone and fights Voldemort.	Percy fights Ares.	Sky outwits the Arkhon.
Denouement	Harry recovers. Lose ends are tied up.	Percy poisoned and recovers. Lose ends are tied up.	Sky recovers in hospital. Lose ends are tied up.

Now, a few notes:

1. There are many ways to structure a story from the top-down. This is just one of them.
2. The "Bird's Eye Kicker" is something I made up. When working in a third-person limited POV, it's often difficult to get at the larger context of a story. The "Bird's Eye Kicker" is one way to do this and usually takes the form of a prologue. It's a technique that launched the big story very quickly. Prologues have fallen out of vogue with some editors. Why? I have no idea. One reason I've seen is that prologues don't "start on the story," that somehow they're outside the bounds of a story. This seems ridiculous to me. Prologues create mystery, setup core questions, and — most importantly — give the bird's eye view of what is to follow. They can be an integral part of the story, if done well. To avoid the prologue stigma, some books, like Harry Potter, call their prologues "Chapter 1," but they are still prologues with a different POV than the rest of the book.
3. Some curmudgeons will look at this breakdown and declare that these three books are, in essence, the same — that they tell the same story. These nameless "theys" are confusing structure — meta thinking — with plot, or the content of the story. STRUCTURE IS NOT PLOT! Structure is a way to tell a story, an organizing principle. It's the "beginning, middle, and end" bit broken down in more detail. The content — what happens within that structure — is the plot. 

The top-down approach can lead to problems: shallow characters with unbelievable motivations, weak connections between events, and weak subplots. These things arise because characters are forced into situations to fill plot needs rather than having plot stem from character needs.

A bottom-up approach occurs when plot stems from character needs. In my experience, the bottom-up approach leads to better stories and richer characters, but takes much, much longer. The bottom-up approach starts with character. To get at character, I ask four questions:

1. Who is this character?
2. What do they want?
3. How are they going to get it?
4. What's stopping them from getting what they want?

These are the four main questions I ask, and I ask it for every character, not just the protagonist. This creates a complex relationship map. Whose goals are aligned? Whose aren't? How do they deal with conflict?

The most important question through all of this — the one I ask over and over again — is "why?" Why do they want this? Why would this stop them? Why don't they get along? The "why" question creates character depth. It creates back story that I can use to make a character real and a character's motivation significant and meaningful to the reader.

I chart a beginning, middle, and end for each character relationship. Then, I lay out these beginnings, middles, and ends within the story. It's like piecing together a giant puzzle, and the goals of the protagonist are like my corner pieces, showing me where to start. Who are they? What do they want?

Then, I look at my primary antagonist. The antagonist determines plot. If you're having a hard time figuring out your plot, look at it from the eyes of your antagonist. Your antagonist wants something and the protagonist is getting in their way. The story starts when the antagonist makes their first move (Ambrosia and the Wargarou hunt Phineas). The protagonist reacts (Sky searches for Phineas). The antagonist makes another move (shifts into a hunter to search for keys). The protagonist reacts (Sky tries to find keys first), and on and on until the protagonist takes the initiative, forces the antagonist to react, and saves the day.

Once you have the primary relationship mapped, move on to the next most important relationship and work it in (these are your subplots). This is where it gets tricky, and the more characters you have, the trickier it gets. The reason it's tricky is because you're trying to maximize conflict — you want opposing goals. Conflict drives the story. Characters that always get along make for a boring story. At the same time, you've got to manage pacing and keep the story focused. You need to resolve some relationship conflict while, at the same time, weaving in new conflicts to keep things moving.

This requires scene layering, where multiple things are happening simultaneously. I have some scenes in The Hunter Chronicles: Return to Exile where the layering in six or seven layers deep. For example, in the Jack, Sky is searching for Phineas to save him, Crystal has her own reasons, the Jack is stirring, there's a wall that sets up the wall they have to get past later, T-Bone is injured (raising the stakes), the Wargarou is tracking them (which implies that Ursula is dead), and Crystal has spotted a Gnomon (which sets up the Epilogue). It's a busy sequence, but it's probably my favorite in the book.

Believe it or not, when I wrote The Hunter Chronicles: Return to Exile I used a bottom-up approach. The fact that I can lay it out in a top-down grid is coincidental. A top-down structural approach to development can be helpful when you outline the primary protagonist/antagonist plot, but only after you've done the bottom-up work. If you start with top-down, you will have a flat story quickly written that nobody wants to read.

That's it for today. I'll try to put more funny into the next one.