Do I Know What's Going to Happen?

Whenever I tell people that I'm a writer, one of the things they want to know is: do I know what's going to happen in my books as I'm writing them?  

I think it's an excellent question, but I wonder why so many people think to ask it. It may be because Stephen King said some place some time that he doesn't. Doesn't know. Doesn't outline. (Can someone confirm that?) So perhaps it's a little mojo test when they ask me. 

Test or not, I always tell people when they ask the outline question: No. No, I like to be surprised. I should outline, but I don't. I can't. No, really. I couldn't possibly.

Except that this week, I'm outlining my WIP.  What I'm hoping is this: If I have all the sequencing stuff that drives me crazy out of the way,  I can go wild with the language and the other juicy stuff.  It'll be like the poetry forms I've been playing with lately, sonnets and sestinas. You have the end rhymes or words, you have the patterns, and then you take advantage of that structural safety net to be daring in your content.

If that doesn't work, I'm back to banging words together and seeing what happens. 

At It (Again)

I'm at it again. Another presentation---filled with sight and sound---is being created on my laptop, and this one, I'm sure, will be seen in its full glory next week at the

VEMA Rappahannock Regional Conference

because this time, I have the correct connecting cord (mini-DVI to VGA, if you must know.) I will, however, again be backing up everything to a PowerPoint DVD, on the off-chance that this cord flunks as spectacularly as the last three. I feel simultaneously like the most careful and the most daring presenter in the world.

I'm also working (more slowly) on the YA poetry manuscript I burned through after the SCBWI NY conference. 40 poems! Yippee! On the other hand, I have only a vague idea of how they tell a story. Not-so-yippee. Must work on this. Actually, I love working on this.

And I have completed a pass at an outline of New Recruit that my editor requested. I need to clean it up a bit, and also scribble madly in my novel notebook everything that came to the surface as I did this. An outline is never simply an outline. An outline is like those x-rays they take at the dentist to detect hidden cavities. Yup, I see all my novel's flaws in stark contrast to what I had hoped it was. I knew this would happen, which is why I had to trick myself into doing it by importing the manuscript into Scrivener, and using the synopsis function, so I could have those cute little index cards to push around and play with. *

On the other hand, I had moments as I was re-reading my manuscript for the first time in two months, of not recognizing my own writing. Oh! That's good! Look how she did that! That's when I know the story is working---when I don't recognize the hand behind it.

*Anybody else out there use techno-gadgets, like presentation or writing software, to motivate themselves to tackle a task? I feel as if I might be a geek amongst Luddites.