First off, I want to thank everyone for their birthday wishes yesterday!

I had a great day and we went out for Japanese for dinner for something different that the kids and I’d never had before: Shabu Shabu, which is named for the “swish” sound the meat makes when you drag it through the boiling water.

So what’s this have to do with a breakthrough? Not much, really. Except that I’ve been looking at this story as a single big chunk of meat plopped down on the counter. Wrong. It needs to be sliced thinly to bring out the marbling, the texture and flavor. It needs a variety of veggies on the side to season it. And most importantly, it needs that pot of boiling water to steep in, to meld everything together into something tasty and new.

Dare I hope that by forcing myself to face this story head-on this week (see boiling pot reference), I’ve managed to push through past the stale synopsis on Wikipedia to something interesting, fun, and that will qualify as a romance (see the something tasty and new reference)?

What I realized is that everything I’ve done so far has been solely for my benefit. The majority of what I’ve cluttered up my brain, blog and hard drive with regarding this story so far will never see the page in the final story. I don’t consider it wasted time at all because I had to know it and work through it to find the story that was hiding underneath.

Unfortunately, what I did realize is that I’ve mostly abandoned the approach I was trying to take. I still think it’s very puzzle-like in trying to determine what goes where, what A means for B, and why C has to happen before D can. But thinking about the “layout” and who and what need to populate the story have been pushed aside in my quest to find the story I want to write itself.

Now that I have an overview of what I want to do (and it might not look like it contains all the same plot points as before, but they’re still bouncing around my head and woven in and around what is there. The original folktale seems to be mostly backstory and supporting details for the hero’s storyline, but the heroine is taking over the show and what the story is about has changed because of the decisions I’ve forced the characters to make and the histories I’ve given them.

So, back to swishing these poor characters around. Mmm… it’s starting to look like soup… I mean a story! What do you think?

Alexander can’t help helping others and when he learns a woman has been kidnapped from the old gypsy woman he rescued from a ditch, things start to go wrong. He finds the woman, but Anthea refuses to leave before she can recover the key to her father’s breeding program that was stolen by her “captives”. Meanwhile, the matriarch plans to force Anthea into marriage with her eldest son because of her own impeccable bloodline. Eventually, Alex figures out that he needs a little outside help in order to help solve Anthea’s problems and that he likes her as she is. Alex and Anthea manage to escape with the key but the family pursues them. Will society’s notions of propriety trap her forever or will true love free her to be her self.

Oh, and you can expect to hear a lot more about a couple of my presents in the future: DH got me Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting and my mom got me a copy of Nancy Kress’s Beginnings, Middles & Ends.