What Drafting Steps Keep A Fiction Novel’S Plot Coherent?

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Her name was Cathedra. Leave her last name blank, if you will. Where normal people would read, "And they lived happily ever after," at the end of every fairy tale story, she could see something else. Three different things. Three words: Lies, lies, lies. A picture that moves. And a plea: Please tell them the truth. All her life she dedicated herself to becoming a writer and telling the world what was being shown in that moving picture. To expose the lies in the fairy tales everyone in the world has come to know. No one believed her. No one ever did. She was branded as a liar, a freak with too much imagination, and an orphan who only told tall tales to get attention. She was shunned away by society. Loveless. Friendless. As she wrote "The End" to her novels that contained all she knew about the truth inside the fairy tale novels she wrote, she also decided to end her pathetic life and be free from all the burdens she had to bear alone. Instead of dying, she found herself blessed with a second life inside the fairy tale novels she wrote, and living the life she wished she had with the characters she considered as the only friends she had in the world she left behind. Cathedra was happy until she realized that an ominous presence lurks within her stories. One that wanted to kill her to silence the only one who knew the truth.

Vera fought for her life in the apocalypse for ten years. Ten brutal years left her disfigured, hungry, and almost broken, but she still clawed her way through it. She killed zombies, ran from mutated animals, starved, bled, and learned humans were often more dangerous than monsters. Then her brother, the only family she had left, betrayed her. Vera thought death had finally come. Instead, she woke up inside a trashy book she once read to stay sane while the old world fell apart. A book with a twisted plot and too much drama. And because her luck had always been terrible, Vera did not wake up as the heroine. No, of course not. Her second chance was to become the hated second female lead, pregnant, unwanted, and written to die when the plot no longer needed her. Her babies were supposed to die too. Even the three men who got her pregnant were written as future corpses, all to push the story toward spoiled women and one psychotic male lead. But Vera was not the woman from the book. She had survived one ruined world. She had not walked through radioactive rain and eaten mutated food just to cry over fantasy characters or beg for love inside a stupid plot. So Vera adapted. She accepted her punishment, took her three unborn babies, and left for the garbage center without making a scene. Everyone thought she had been thrown away. Vera saw a chance to make money, protect her babies, and build something of her own. Now the woman meant to disappear is building a wasteland empire, breaking the plot, and driving three men insane because she no longer chases anyone. By every rule in that world, Vera should be dead. But dying a second time was never an option.

The day I announced I was quitting writing, the entire internet celebrated. Everyone except my girlfriend's rumored boyfriend, the famous mystery author, Bryan Vega. In a short video, he looked genuinely regretful. "This is all a misunderstanding. I’ve always admired Kobi’s work, and I hope he’ll come back for the sake of his readers." I turned off my phone and ignored him completely. In my previous life, the web novel I wrote was identical to the mystery novel he published. People online called me a plagiarist and wished death on my whole family. I tried to defend myself, posting my drafts, outlines, and timestamps. Yet, it didn't matter. The last edit timestamp on his document was ten minutes earlier than mine. Just those ten minutes destroyed me. The messages never stopped. Strangers flooded my inbox with insults. Some even showed up at my house and threw paint on the walls. Years of nonstop harassment dragged me into depression. My parents tried to clear my name, but obsessed fans hunted them down and murdered them using methods copied straight from his novel. In the end, on the very day his book won a major award, I sealed my windows and burned charcoal, ending my life. And then, I opened my eyes again. I had returned to the day my new book was supposed to be released.

The novel is mainly about the forgotten British poet/writer named C. J Richards who lived in Burma/Myanmar in colonial times and he believed himself as a Burmophile. He served as I.C.S (Indian Civil Servant) and when he retired from I.C.S service, he was a D.C (District Commissioner) and he left for England a year before Burma gained its independence in 1948. He came to Burma in 1920 to work in civil service after passing the hardest I.C.S examination. He wrote several books on Burma and contributed many monthly articles to Guardian Magazine published in Burma from 1953 to 1974 or 1975. Though he wrote several books which had much literary merit to both communities, Britain and Burma (Myanmar), people failed to recognize him. The story has two parts: one part is set in the contemporary Yangon (then called Rangoon) in 2016 context and a young literary enthusiast named “Lin” found out unexpectedly the forgotten writer’s poetry book and there is surely a good deal of time gap that led him into a quest to know more about the author’s life. The setting is quite different comparing to colonial Burma and independence Myanmar (Burma), early twentieth century and 2016 which is a transitional period in Myanmar. The writer’s life is fictionalized in the novel and most of the facts are taken from his personal stories and other reference books. It is a kind of historical novel with a twist and it has comparatively constructed the two different periods in Myanmar history to convince readers, locally and abroad more about history, authorship, humanity, colonialism, and transitional development in Myanmar today.

One moment he had just read the strangest book he had ever come across, the next he was stumbling into the world of that same book. Now Mars is trapped in a fantasy world as a nobody, and the gorgeous, cruel Crown Prince who just kidnapped him thinks he's a spy. Keith Elarion's solution? Keep Mars under his personal, infuriatingly attractive supervision. Mars’s plan is simple- survive, avoid the plot, and find a way home. But the prince is nothing like the two-dimensional villain from the book. Keith is all intense green eyes and confusing, rough kindness, and he’s decided Mars is his to keep. When Mars accidentally unleashes a power he should not possess, he becomes the key to a conspiracy that runs deeper than the novel ever revealed. His meddling changes everything, accelerating a plot that was supposed to take years. To top it off, a cryptic bird-god just told Mars he's not just a lost college student. He's the son of the goddess who made this world. To save Keith, stop a divine war, and maybe finally kiss the man he falls hopelessly in love with, Mars has to do the one thing the book never planned for: he has to rewrite fate itself.