We talked about starting Bob’s new book.
In e-mail, we have just discovered that we never had a floorplan for the first Agnes book, which I realized when I tried to reconstruct it from the book and realized it was impossible. Moral: Always have a floorplan.
How funny. That’s the book I have the best memory of a floor plan—big entrance hall, big kitchen and a bedroom on the main floor, a porch, door to basement in kitchen, underground tunnel, then its either two or three bedrooms on the second floor and a bedroom and bathroom in the attic. I think there is a balcony on the second floor. Not sure about location of other bathrooms.
I haven’t read it in a couple of years. But I bet if a bunch of us drew floor plans they would be remarkably similar.
Debbie, me too. Maybe Jenny didn’t detail it out like Maybe This Time, but I could make it work in my head. And I wanted that attic bedroom.
What makes it not possible?
Shane and Agnes move from the kitchen directly into the housekeepers room, so there’s no hall in between the rooms.
When Agnes opens the door to the room, there’s a bad guy in the hall that Shane shoots.
There’s another bad guy in the kitchen later that Shane drives into the hall.
As far as I remember, there’s no living room. I knew there was a dining room off the kitchen at the front of the house, but nothing ever happened in there.
There were at least four bedrooms on the second floor, and a house wide verandah/balcony off the back bedrooms, but the screened porch on the first floor doesn’t extend the width of the house because Shane climbed in the housekeeper bedroom’s window.
I can see a floorplan with the dining room on the front right of the house and the living room on the front left with a wide hall running between them, with a staircase going up to the second floor, the former stair to the basement underneath, but I can’t get Shane and Agnes from the kitchen directly into the housekeepers bedroom and still have Shane firing from that doorway into the hall.
Bob’s solution for the second book is just to set everything in the woods.
Can the housekeepers bedroom have two doors, one into the kitchen and one into the hall?
It can have anything. There’s just no reason for them to go into the hall. They were moving onto the screened porch to sleep because the air conditioning went off, so they’d go through the kitchen.
As I remember.
But as Bob always says, it’s his book, he can do anything.
Can’t he climb in the window from the porch?
I see your problem—but it’s still true that I ended up with a very clear mental image more than of most of your books (or any others for that matter).
I don’t know. Have to ask Bob if he’d do that.
At this point, Bob’s going to say, “The house is YOUR problem I’ve got the woods.”
If these people end up getting married in the woods, you’ll know why.
This fills me with happiness. Thank you
Floorplan or no, Agnes is my second favorite book of all time. My favorite book of all time is Maybe This Time. It seems you can make it work either way.
I’m so enjoying reading your and Bob’s discussions about your WIPs. I can’t wait to read the finished books. Seeing some of the work that goes into the writing adds to my pleasure on reading the completed story. And I can hardly wait to read Shane, and Anna, and Nita, and all the others.
What a great chat. 🙂 Now I have to read Agnes again.
Me too…
I think the moral of the story is never *look* for the floor plan. I think most people are just going to map it onto a physical place they already know anyway, and then slap on some mental renovations to make it work.
Yeah, that’s great until somebody else tries to write a sequel and e-mails saying, “Did we have a floorplan?” Nope.
I imagine the room arrangement the same as Jenny does, except switching the right with the left. I pictured the left (kitchen side) with a lawn heading down to the dock and the right (dining room side) with a lawn heading down to the activities area — chapel, Two Rivers’ bedroom (was that in a converted barn?) and the wooded area where what’s his name get stabbed with the kitchen fork. I remember Shane going with Rhett from the dockside of things through a wooded area to the road and bridge area.
I probably made all of this up. My only point is that many readers will make up details that work unless you throw in a real blooper. I think the non-hallway between the kitchen and the housekeeper’s room isn’t a problem.
I definitely didn’t notice it until I was trying to figure out a floorplan for Bob.
The weird thing is, I could see those scenes in my head while I wrote them. You’d think I would have noticed there was no hall outside the housekeeper’s room.
Hey, it was half his book, let Him draw the floor plan. Especially since he plans to revisit the characters without you. But maybe you should ask for some veto power over Agnes.
He had Shane’s half, so he could draw me a map of the area. The house was Agnes’s/mine.