Here is a catalog of the outlines and notes I make for each of my stories. With each, I will discuss some of the helps that I have found useful so you can as well. Part of making a story enjoyable to the reader is giving the reader the sense that...
Physically describing battles, whether hand-to-hand or vehicular battles are tough by nature. And quite naturally so! This medium is imaginative, and it is only conveyed to the reader's imagination by words, not pictures. This is where movies run, but prose crawls. For that reason, it is my opinion that physical battles must be short in the description, but heavy on influence for the characters involved. In other words, use as few words to give the greatest punch... all puns intended. You will see in these notes, even before the story was written, I had drawn the space battles so as to completely understand what I was going to describe. This was incredibly helpful and if you have read my stories, I hope it kept the scenes interesting and understandable.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
In the top right is the name "Herrah Otlell." This was Terah Otlell's original name, but as I wrote the outline, when I arrived at the scenes with Hera Syndulla frozen in carbonite, I realized I had too many Hera's. Another benefit of writing an outline before jumping right into the story.
If you are careful to look, you will also see multiple "number" changes for the PZ droid. At last, it settled on PZ-85.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Here are the dogfight diagrams. Again don't judge the quality of the dogfight on the quality of the drawings. :) Now that I think about it, I cannot remember if I drew these out before I started writing the story, or if they were drawn at the time of writing "The Flight of the Falcon" chapter. Either way, they were drawn prior to writing the action sequences.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I will say, a good friend SaphireAlena had given me dogfight notes that also helped these scenes immensely. Good research and good friends are always beneficial. You will also notice a coffee stain that I decided to leave out of the final draft. :)
