Holy Ugliest In Girl In Town Batman!

First up, there was an actual TV show they came out in the late sixties called "The Ugliest Girl In Town". How do I know this? I have the theme song sung by The Will-O-Bees on a 45 (either ColGems or Columbia label).

Anyways back to the topic at hand, this book (which is available for purchase and at the end of this particular series, I will tell you why you should buy this). As I mentioned at the close of this post, I called my dual plot line "the ugliest mess that you ever laid eyes on."

The reason as to why, is that the execution was fatally flawed. Instead of the person dropping through the trap door and having their neck instantly broken, the person fell through the trap door and either they flailed away for a good couple of minutes while slowly strangling death or their head became horribly disattached from their body stayed stuck in the noose while the body fell to the ground spewing great quantities of blood.

What I should have done with the secondary plot line was to make each story interlude its own stand-alone chapter. I mean each section was a stand-alone piece of flash fiction....{click here to read a pre-written insult for this writer}.... so whenever I needed to switch plots, I would have an instant chapter break.

But because I had no clue in what I was doing, I simply switched gears in the middle of whatever part of the story I happened to be writing without any regard for structure or continuity.

As an aside, unlike what I know now, back then I did not know what I was doing. You name it, chances are that I didn't do it. Please keep that fact in mind as you read this series.

Another original idea I had for the dual plots (you're gonna love this one so much that you will want to grab me by the ears and shake some sense into me), was to have the both of them take place not only during a different time frame, but also during two different seasons.

Don't worry it gets more confusing.

1} Different time frames: plot #1 takes place over the course of a week (I think); plot 2 takes place over the course of two days, then jumps three months and covers another day, jumps a few weeks before kicking in with another day or two for a conclusion.

2} Different seasons: I made plot #1 summer, plot #2 winter.

3} And just for ha-ha's (remember, clueless in Connecticut here), I had so many characters moving in and out of both stories that I frequently lost track of who was who doing what to who when.

Finally after I got both plot lines figured out (outline, what's an outline), I got busy writing the story.

Writing the story will be the theme of the next post in this series. In the meantime, a question for all is this:

Besides writing something out of your comfort zone, was there any kind of particular plot device that no matter what you did, you could not make work for an entire story?

What I mean by plot device is pretty much like what I described here: a man writing a short story within the frame of the overall story.