Plotting the plot.

I'm 20 thousand words into The Dead Spend No Gold, the sequel to Led to the Slaughter.

I'm back to my steady, no excuses, 2000 words a day word first draft pace.  It sometimes -- most often -- takes all day to get there, in spurts.  Lots of down time.

Yesterday, I was writing a fairly quiet section, and my mind kept wandering to future plot points and it made me realize I need to write those ideas down.

This story is coming out differently.  The first book more or less followed the actual events of the Donner Party.  It was written in 1st person journal-type accounts.

This book is going to be 3rd person throughout.  It's completely made up, using different true events mashed together.  I wanted to include the Indian genocide, gold mining, frontier towns and women, and of course Bigfoot.

I've got enough of a start and enough of the elements, that it's time for me to start to outlining a little more fully.

Sometimes I have a kind of thematic idea of what the book is going to be.  For instance, Led to the Slaughter was a "survival" story.

Death of an Immortal was a "redemption story."  I knew that I wanted to test the main character by driving him down, down, down -- until he was chased by everyone, had no resources, no friends, no hope.  Then slowly bring him back, because of the moral choices he makes, not in spite of them.

I think moral center of this new book is the treatment of Indians -- and by extension, the creature who is known today as Bigfoot, but in the story is called other names.  It is simply defending its territory, after all.  The Indians had respected that, but the white man is invading.

I also kind of want the end plot to be a "lost patrol" kind of thing.  A group of men, (and two women), venture into the mountains where they are stalked and killed, one by one.  (I also have a bit of Grendel motif going...)

I'm going to do probably more research on this book than I did on Led to the Slaughter.  I wanted to stick to the basics with the first book, but this book probably could use more detail in more places.

The way I do that is to write out the first draft, get that down, THEN do the research and insert the pertinent or interesting details into the story.  A little ass backward, perhaps, but it works for me.  I have enough of a general idea of the history of the place that the plot doesn't do anything inappropriate -- and if it does, I change it.

I can always feel when a book is going to be a book, and I've felt that way from the beginning of this one.