Step 2

First crisis: Wilder warlord who claims Ariel bond. Her take on the situation is best summed up by her first words to Sir Christopher: "Better your whore than his queen". With the hunting part's men leaving, it's harvest time, Aluric tracks the group
Ariel plays head games on Sir Fredrick, play off his greed and envy to move the group to the Italian Alps.

Second crisis:After an increasingly harrowing chase they find sanctuary in a monastery. Things get tense when a monk realizes Ariel is a real deal pagan the sort the Pope wants for his Dark Army. The friction is growing between Christopher and Fredrick grows. even as they hunt,

Third crisis: Fredrick's Betrayal of Christopher. Fredrick leaves Christopher to die on a hunt and kidnaps Ariel to Rome when he expects wealth nd status. Surrounded on all sides by enemies he tracks his only ally in the world to put a blade between his ribs.

Resolution: The force all converge at an isolates Abby in the Italian Alps, a clearing house for the real pagans the Pope wants. The twist is that is where Ariel sister is. and she all these people here to spring her sister, and as many of the prisoners as she can.

I need to woork out a timeline for th encroaching Winter and some of the geography.

Notes for Back Into the Woods....

A few thoughts.

Ariel can't work her wammy on Sir Christopher because of the binding spell between them. She can play head games on Sir Fredrick, she have foreseen that he betrays them.

She resists foreseeing the future, down that path lies madness... or is the future always in motion? I need to suss a better mechanic for this.

I need to work out Christopher's dire wolf abilities and a timeline for them.

A Scene has the following three parts

A Scene has the following three-part pattern:
1. Goal
2. Conflict
3. Disaster
A Sequel has the following three-part pattern:
1. Reaction
2. Dilemma
3. Decision

Three Good Scenes......

Over at Anthony Lee Collins blog I followed an idea down a rabbit hole. The traditional adage that "every scene must serve' to advance the plot - or actually the story - falls within the Hawks's quote.
http://u-town.com/collins/?p=3640

"'m always leery of the advice I read here and there to get rid of any scene in a story that doesn't advance the plot. You could very easily end up with a very efficient engine that goes straight ahead, never slowing to look at the scenery and never turning to follow any interesting side roads."

Once again someone has overshot Occam's Razor.

Back to the tangential rabbit hole.


Another way to look at the '... and no bad ones.' is the poker truism that it's not the hands you win that count; it's the hands you don't lose.

In Absence of Malice, the Sally Fields character and subplot undercut the main plot.

In Alien vs Predator: Requiem spent too much time on the Pizza Boy and His Wayward Brother teen movie subplot which stalled, then overbore, what should have been the main plot - the returning vet trying to reconnect to her daughter and a small town sheriff dealing with missing hunters and a rash of pet, then homeless persons, disappearances.