After wiping out six hours of work on my first attempt at doing flowcharts for the sequel to Weekend Plans, I decided to try making a much larger flowchart on a much larger piece of paper.

That… did not go well. For multiple reasons.

First of all, the best way to do a flowchart for a choose-your-own-adventure story is to make it look like the reverse of a championship bracket. Don’t reuse page numbers or events; just keep creating more trees until you get to the end. Then, when you actually do the outlining, you can determine what pages you can reuse.

Secondly, this flowchart only has page numbers, so I had to keep everything straight in my head regarding what was actually happening, without any references. You may be able to see, if you look carefully, some scribbles in green; those are my notes about what was occurring at that time in the flowchart.

Third, and most importantly, doing the flowchart this way highlighted even more errors than I’d thought I had. Anything with a black and red circle around it indicates that there is no appropriate branch written in the outline, which would have meant I needed to write more pages. The book was already at 506 digital pages (a “digital page” being a section of book that ends with a decision tree), which would have easily put it at over 600 printed pages.

So I scrapped the entire outline, and all of my flowcharts, and started over. More on that tomorrow.