![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjWriting Daughter of Mystery an awful lot of the complexity of the plot simply emerged during the writing. I had a general notion of where things were going, and found that a lot of other stuff happened along the way. But The Mystic Marriage is being a much more "planned" story, in that I know pretty much everything major that's going to happen -- or at least where it's all going to end up. So in order to keep things moving and balanced properly, I have half a dozen different plot-arcs that all need to advance consistently. And they get advanced in the context of 4 rotating points of view. Needless to say, there is a spreadsheet involved.
So we have the primary romance thread. Unlike DoM, this isn't a sweet "first love" situation, but more of a pursuit-and-misunderstandings among somewhat more mature characters. Then there's the development of Antuniet's alchemical "great work", with all its speed bumps, failures, and successes. Woven in among this is a thread concerning Antuniet's foreign antagonist, with his shifting goals and strategies, not only aimed at her but at meddling in Alpennian politics in general. Alpennian politics is another main thread, as the various factions are still hashing out (metaphorical) territory and tactics in the post-succession era. Not only are the carry-over protagonists from DoM inescapably tangled up in politics, but Antuniet's key goals require taking sides. And one of the prospective claimants to the throne from the previous book has his own thread braided into several of the strands. A more minor thread follows Margerit's continued development as a designer of mystery ceremonies.
And when I started laying all this out in the spreadsheet and figuring out which events are going to get filtered through which point of view, I discovered that I need to have some sort of additional plot-thread specifically involving Barbara and Margerit because they spend an entire summer (and their chapters in one of the POV rotations) separate from the other characters, so they need something to do with their time. I'm not quite sure what yet, but I'm willing to leave a few things to serendipity. It's worked quite well for me so far.
So we have the primary romance thread. Unlike DoM, this isn't a sweet "first love" situation, but more of a pursuit-and-misunderstandings among somewhat more mature characters. Then there's the development of Antuniet's alchemical "great work", with all its speed bumps, failures, and successes. Woven in among this is a thread concerning Antuniet's foreign antagonist, with his shifting goals and strategies, not only aimed at her but at meddling in Alpennian politics in general. Alpennian politics is another main thread, as the various factions are still hashing out (metaphorical) territory and tactics in the post-succession era. Not only are the carry-over protagonists from DoM inescapably tangled up in politics, but Antuniet's key goals require taking sides. And one of the prospective claimants to the throne from the previous book has his own thread braided into several of the strands. A more minor thread follows Margerit's continued development as a designer of mystery ceremonies.
And when I started laying all this out in the spreadsheet and figuring out which events are going to get filtered through which point of view, I discovered that I need to have some sort of additional plot-thread specifically involving Barbara and Margerit because they spend an entire summer (and their chapters in one of the POV rotations) separate from the other characters, so they need something to do with their time. I'm not quite sure what yet, but I'm willing to leave a few things to serendipity. It's worked quite well for me so far.
