Pick your Plot Romance
It worked for kids's books, right? Why not romances. Today: the historical paranormal
(choose one of the red things)
Anna/Belle/Cassandra is a lady fallen on hard times hired to be a governess/librarian/nurse for a mysterious duke/count/marquess/baron. On a stormy, moonless night (no options there, sorry. You can pick snow, hail or rain though.) the carriage she is in breaks down/is held up/falls down a cliff.
She pulls herself from the wreckage/intact carriage uninjured and decides to walk to the manor house/wait for help/ mount the only uninjured horse and rides for help, leaving the groom with the broken leg behind
As she walks/waits/rides she feels a mysterious malevolent/protective presence.
It's as if an unseen hand touches her hair/unseen breath touches her neck/unseen body just at her back makes her skin ripple
You get the idea. Eventually the hero turns out to be a vampire/werewolf/ghost-demoted god/some new creation that's a mishmash of the above.
If he's a vampire he's intense, elegant and unflappable and sophisticated.
If he's a werewolf, he's intense--an earthy animalistic dude.
If he's a ghost-demoted god or maybe the mishmash, he's intense, sad and yet vibrantly sexual. Maybe.
He's mysterious no matter what, and he tends to snarl and grow tense when she laughs or tosses her hair or thrusts her bosom or just breathes. Poor A/B/C doesn't have a chance againt his immediate need to have her with seduction/hatred that turns to love/indifference that turns to love.
Or does she??????
If I could somehow open a tree formation, that would be great. You'd be able to follow the story with him as, say, a vampire then pick options like protects humans/is bitter about humans/hunts his own kind/hunts humans/all of the above over the hundreds of years of his existence.
Obviously A/B/C is his Soulmate but what's his plan? Maybe he is determined to woo A/B/C and make her grow to love him / will take her in a forced seduction/wants nothing to do with her/wants to protect her from his own base instinct and follow the storyline fitting that hero.
What would be even more fun is make it so A/B/C isn't the automatic soulmate and have other women/men/creatures wandering the manor. So it could be the cook/groom/hussy from the village pub/farmer/farmer's daughter/local pixie might be choices for the paranormal guy's destined soulmate.
I wish I could make the tree thing work. The reader gets to make a choice, open new windows--and new possibilities for the story with each click! If it hasn't been done yet (it has to be This is the internet, for god's sake) anyway if it hasn't been done, you can take the idea but give me credit and 60/40/30 percent of the money you make.
(choose one of the red things)
Anna/Belle/Cassandra is a lady fallen on hard times hired to be a governess/librarian/nurse for a mysterious duke/count/marquess/baron. On a stormy, moonless night (no options there, sorry. You can pick snow, hail or rain though.) the carriage she is in breaks down/is held up/falls down a cliff.
She pulls herself from the wreckage/intact carriage uninjured and decides to walk to the manor house/wait for help/ mount the only uninjured horse and rides for help, leaving the groom with the broken leg behind
As she walks/waits/rides she feels a mysterious malevolent/protective presence.
It's as if an unseen hand touches her hair/unseen breath touches her neck/unseen body just at her back makes her skin ripple
You get the idea. Eventually the hero turns out to be a vampire/werewolf/ghost-demoted god/some new creation that's a mishmash of the above.
If he's a vampire he's intense, elegant and unflappable and sophisticated.
If he's a werewolf, he's intense--an earthy animalistic dude.
If he's a ghost-demoted god or maybe the mishmash, he's intense, sad and yet vibrantly sexual. Maybe.
He's mysterious no matter what, and he tends to snarl and grow tense when she laughs or tosses her hair or thrusts her bosom or just breathes. Poor A/B/C doesn't have a chance againt his immediate need to have her with seduction/hatred that turns to love/indifference that turns to love.
Or does she??????
If I could somehow open a tree formation, that would be great. You'd be able to follow the story with him as, say, a vampire then pick options like protects humans/is bitter about humans/hunts his own kind/hunts humans/all of the above over the hundreds of years of his existence.
Obviously A/B/C is his Soulmate but what's his plan? Maybe he is determined to woo A/B/C and make her grow to love him / will take her in a forced seduction/wants nothing to do with her/wants to protect her from his own base instinct and follow the storyline fitting that hero.
What would be even more fun is make it so A/B/C isn't the automatic soulmate and have other women/men/creatures wandering the manor. So it could be the cook/groom/hussy from the village pub/farmer/farmer's daughter/local pixie might be choices for the paranormal guy's destined soulmate.
I wish I could make the tree thing work. The reader gets to make a choice, open new windows--and new possibilities for the story with each click! If it hasn't been done yet (it has to be This is the internet, for god's sake) anyway if it hasn't been done, you can take the idea but give me credit and 60/40/30 percent of the money you make.
Yup, this is why I don't read historicals, present company excepted.
ReplyDeleteI'm picking physical matches for my heroine. Come over and opine!
"Poor A/B/C doesn't have a chance againt his immediate need to have her with seduction/hatred that turns to love/indifference that turns to love."
ReplyDeleteOMG! Kate, you cracked me up. And when I finished laughing, I thought, how fun would a choose your own stock plot romance novel be? I would love to read that book.
I remember books like that when I was in school... you'd read a few paragraphs, then it'd say something like, "If you run, turn to page 19. If you fight, turn to page 37. If you scream hysterically and wet yourself, turn to page 207 and change your britches." They were a blast! We need romances like that...
ReplyDeleteA. You need a chin lift in there with the heroine's laughs/hair toss/bosom thrust reaction options.
ReplyDeleteB. If you're going for a real historical, I demand a caught-in-her-nightie-at-midnight-while-borrowing-a-book-in-the-master's-library scene. At which point the hero (intoxicated on brandy/blood/shifting back to human too fast) must kiss her with tongue/lightly molest her bod/almost nail her on the settee before his bitterness and cynicism force him to send her scurrying back to her chaste bed/into the arms of his disapproving housekeeper/up into the nursery to sleep locked in the closet.
C. Still need a really bad guy upon whom we can blame everything by the last chapter. I suggest the classic dissolute wastrel younger brother/chinless second cousin gambler/greedy steward who is secretly the hero's bastard brother.
Title Suggestion: Dark Hunt, but only if you say it really fast.
And I'm not banned! Well, not yet anyway -- hooray!
ReplyDeleteThe funniest internet 'choose your own stores' was a Pokeymon book that my sons and I stumbled upon about 3 years ago. We absolutely loved it - were devestated when it shut down. I mean, how many other choose your own adventures had the pokeymon 'legless' suddenly transform into 'armless' as well? And fall off the tree. When you needed it to defend you. (that's if you chose the wrong page, obviously.)
ReplyDeleteOkay, you obviously have way too much time on your hands if you can goof around and come up with all that. Get back to work!
ReplyDeleteThis would be a frigging brilliant mind map. I love it!
ReplyDeleteI love it too and am waiting for someone other than Lynn to come up with more possibilities. Not to mention the clicky part. That's beyond me. Html! Ugh. Open new window.
ReplyDeleteheh. "someone other than Lynn" looks like I'm dissing Lynn. NO FLIPPING WAY. .
ReplyDeletenope. Just waiting for the great idea to take off -- like the stomach virus we're seeing work its way through this neighborhood's kids.