Plotting Session! Oh, boy! Oh, boy! Oh, boy!

No, that's not facetious, though you all know how I feel about plotting, and the "Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy!" are actually my mentor's words. Four of us are going away to commit Story Magic (a plotting system developed by Laura Baker, Laura DeVries, and Robin Perrini several years ago) in a couple of hours.

Three of these folks have plotted together before. With Maggie Osborne. With Jasmine Cresswell. Big names in the Colorado writers' community. But I never was asked (well, I usually had a day job and little time).

My buddies (also crit buddies for the last umpty-ump years in one of my 2 groups, the other of which diminished until we combined and I only have one), are now ALL published authors. Janet Lane recently sold her incredible Emerald Silk (medieval historical romance) to Five Star, which will be coming out in November. Janet is, simply, The Plot Queen. She'll make us dig several layers for motivation and we'll craft the proper events around that. She always reads my rough drafts for holes.

The others are Peggy Waide (who wrote Regency historicals and is working on other genre books now), and my mentor, Kay Bergstrom (writing as Cassie Miles and Earning Her Living By Her Pen for a long, long time). Kay is also very good at plot. Peggy and I are strict pantzers. I am hoping that our different personalities will bounce off each other and we will have a fabulous session.

The absolutely BEST thing about plotting with others (this will be a 2 day intensive plotting with 4 stories), is that THEY come up with completely different stuff that would NEVER occur to me. And, well, I'm usually off-the-wall in terms of strange ideas, also pretty good with characters.

So I'm excited. And Kay's excited. Oboy, Oboy, Oboy. We'll hop into Peggy's SUV and head up to Janet's time share in the mountains away from the Denver heat, and you know, though the drive is only about an hour and a half, we'll ALL talk and talk and talk and talk about WRITING!

Nobody's eyes will glaze over after 2 minutes! We don't have to stifle ourselves or be polite and drift away from the all important topic of My Book. With Other People I watch carefully to see when I start boring them...

So, since I won't be back until Thursday night (probably late), I won't be posting tomorrow. Don't know what the facilities include -- oh, except a hot tub. Gotta run and pack my suit!

May your writing day be full of pleasing excitement.
Robin