[G J Lau]

I didn't have an outline, but I did have a very solid sense of how the story began and ended and how it got from one point to the next. But like battle plans, outlines are greatly modified by the flow of events. As others noted, the plot flows out of itself after awhile, based on your deeper understanding of how the characters think and react and the subconscious percolation that is always going on.

One thing I had to have was a very detailed inventory of each character: when they were born, when they got married or had kids, when they died, where they lived, what they looked like. Don't laugh, but I would download images from the internet of people who I thought looked like my characters. I also downloaded floor plans of places where I thought my characters would be living. Made it easier to plot their movements.

I'm hoping that the lessons learned from the first novel will make the next one much easier to develop and write.