At 09:17 AM 2/24/98 -0500, you wrote:

I've been thinking about my plans for my fanfic works-in-progress,
and it led me to ponder a simple but valid question:
How do you plan out a good fanfic?

A good fanfic? I don't know if I'm qualified to answer.

Sometimes I just ahve a particular scene in my mind that I
want to share. in the case of "Orange" I really wanted to
have Akane warming her cold feet against Ranma's legs.
(My wife does that, I don't know where she keeps her liquid
nitrogen either.)

That's all I had planned.

  -SO-

In order make that work I had to find a reason for Ranma
to have bare legs, (Drenched clothes & a borrowed yukata)
and a reason for Akane's feet to be really cold.
(spending a few minutes on the laundry porch.)

The drenched clothes led to the supermarket event, and
the laundry porch to an innocent mystery. (Who pulled
Ranma's pants off the clothes pole? see "A Conversation
with Nabiki" for the answer to that.)

So that simple scene led to Ranma spending the night,
which lead to all night horror films, Kasumi extracting
a promise from Akane & Ranma,  Nabiki offering Akane
'protection', and a near-lemon encounter.

I thought most of this through before I began to
write, (Although the Nabiki gag came later) then I 
set out to describe that evening from beginning to 
end, with believable conversation tying the events
together. (I came from a big family, so I know
how families talk.)

As with most of my stories, I wrote a couple of
paragraphs past the 'end' and trimmed back to
a scene that seemed to work.

The funny thing is, the cold feet scene was
not itself important to the story.

J.

BTW, I lost use of my Psion 3A for a while,
It fell out of a go-cart I was driving at
Thanksgiving and was run over by another driver.
(VERY tragic story, although I was able to pass
half the feild) (See, I really do carry
it everywhere.) 
I sent it to Psion and they did a great job
of fixing it, but it came back with a new
fangled spongy keyboard and every time I tried
to thumb-type on it I ended up hitting mutliple
keys "Sdo weverytrhing lookwed lioke thisa."
Next time I'll remove the keyboard before
I send the system in for repair.
I recently swapped the keyboard with another
system (My wife liked the new soft feel)
so I can finaly get on with "Yellow".


  So far Nabiki (sweatdrop) has finally
  met up with Mariko. Ah, young love.