NovelMaster Version 2.0
Mike suggests Christopher Vogel’s The Writer’s Journey; it sounds familiar, but I tend to pick up bad habits from these how-to books so I’m trying to cut down. (That reminds me - it’s time to summarize The Wrong Prequel in the first sentence.) I was thinking that it might be instructive to take a good book (say, Komarr) and outline it after the fact, for a real-life example of subplots, viewpoint characters et cetera, but I was too lazy to do it today.
Instead I just wrote up my outline and tried to add subplottage. I’m not sure when I figured out that the sorta-bad guy would win after all. I may have been influenced by Charlie Stross’s description of his Bad Guys Who Study The Evil Overlord List, in a subthread of that thread on rasfc (rec.arts.sf.composition) about the wacky NovelMaster writing method: Writing a Space Opera: the blind panic method.
I need to write the first 40,000 words before I hit the blind panic stage.