Gideon Plan: A Different Way of Writing
One of the hard parts of being a writer is coming up with a writing process that works for you. Some writers come up with a story outline and then write. Some create interesting characters, throw them into a bad situation, and then sees what happens. Me– I write in bursts.
Let me explain what a burst is. When I start out with a story, I only have a general idea of the plot, characters, and setting. Then I start doing research. I find pictures, books, movies, and other things that inspire me with settings, characters, and plot. When these little inspirations strike, I write them down. I call them bursts.
Bursts are usually short bits of prose that have no connection to a whole butt sounds like something that would be in the story. For instance, the burst might be a line of dialogue one of my characters say. It might be part of a situation that I see in my mind that I see unfolding in the story. The important part to understand is that bursts just kind of hang out there with no true context, however, they are often strong, fresh, and have a good honesty to them. When I get a whole bunch of them, I link them together and the next thing I know, I have a rough draft of a story. I then go back, fill in the details, flesh out areas that are a little lean, and ax things that don’t belong. This gives me my first draft.
I stumbled upon this process by accident. I think it may have evolved from my video game experience where I like to develop by iteration. Basically this means you take a good idea, add a little that makes it better, add a little bit more, add a little bit more and then eventually you got a great game. Some call this Miyamoto’s Box (of Nintendo fame).
I’m attaching here an example of some bursts. This particular group has to do with Percy, one of Gideon’s Rangers. Percy is a British adventurer who recently joined the team when they were in Italy, just before the Civil War. Percy poses as a war correspondent for London’s The Times and travels freely between Union and Confederate lines. This allows him to spy for Gideon. A bit of an arrogant ass, he is highly trained and dangerous, and carries specialized equipment for his espionage missions. While behind lines, he uses the alias“Archibald Strickland.”
When I first wrote these bursts, they were not in order. I cleaned them up a little so you can read them easier. My bursts are not usually this easy to read and I’m about the only one who can decipher them.
How about you? What’s your writing process? I’d love to hear how you create!
Note: Thanks to Brian McNamara and Kathleen’s McCormick’s input on Percy!
Gideon Plan Update
Its been awhile since I’ve posted and I think I should go ahead and put up something–for those of you who are following me (let’s see I think there might be one of you)–here’s whats going down with the Gideon Plan.
I’ve been doing a lot of research and have written about thirty scenes that may or may not make it into the final story. I have learned a hell of a lot about the Civil War during this time and based upon what I’ve learned, I’ve made some changes to the story premise and characters. Here’s a few of those.
Charles Gideon is the antagonist (it was William Talbot, but he wasn’t fitting with the theme). His character is based primarily upon Nathan Bedford Forrest (with a touch of Stonewall Jackson and Chatham Wheat). He’s frontier-tough and a military genius. Unlike Forrest, he has gone to West Point (which historically would probably have been a deadly combination if it were true). He got his start with irregular warfare as a member of the Second Dragoons during the Mexican War fighting Mexican guerrilleros. He’s fought as a filibuster in Mexico and Nicaragua and as a mercenary in Italy. He’s a charismatic fanatic who believes God has made him the instrument in the expansion of the supremacy of the white race and the southern way of life.- The secret society, the Knights of the Golden Circle, is prominently featured in the story. Gideon’s guerrillas are the military arm of this Order.
- There is a Union cavalry officer who is trying to find out who these mysterious guerrillas are at the peril of his life.
- Gideon’s core group of guerrillas are men he has fought with for many years before the war and represent some of the toughest sons-of-bitches the world has seen including a Texas Ranger, a sharpshooting mountain man, a Cherokee tracker, a British Adventurer, and a bare knuckles and knife fighter from New Orleans.
- Gideon is recruiting men of exceptional skill and courage who possess an unfaltering belief in Southern Rights and liberties from the ranks of the regular Confederate military.
- As the war proceeds and the south’s plight becomes more desperate, Gideon’s guerrillas take on a more sinister character. This creates a fraction in the group as well as with the rest of the Confederacy.
This is all for now. I hope to get another sample chapter up soon.
Gideon Plan-Chapter 1
So, here’s something different (for me anyway). I’ve had this idea for a story bouncing around in my head for the last eight months. It started out with my fascination for steam punk. I soon began to imagine a James Bond type character in a Steam Punk setting using Steam Punk technology. That evolved. I began to imagine something more along the lines of a GI Joe type team set in a Steam Punk setting using Steam Punk technology. I ran with that. Off an on, I have done research and piddled around with a few idea. About a week ago, I posted the story’s premise (see below). My wife really liked it, so I went ahead and wrote the first chapter. I’m actually pretty pleased with it so I thought I’d post it here. It hasn’t been edited at all. No one else but me has looked at it. If you have any comments for it, go ahead and throw them out there.
NOTE: This chapter was written some time ago when the story concept was still young. A lot has changed since then. Still, I’m leaving it up because its neat to look back on where one came from. Also, its also pretty well written if I do say so myself. 🙂
The Gideon Plan Mystery
In 1865, during the closing days of the American Civil War, Union troops descended upon the Confederate Capitol of Richmond. The soldiers found Confederate officials burning government documents. What was salvaged exposed a Confederate initiative known as the Confederate Secret Service. The documents contained many projects that were deemed uncivilized for 19th century warfare including missions of espionage and covert operations. One of these documents mentioned a special project known as the Gideon Plan. Information is scant, but it is noted that William Yancey, Confederate diplomat to Europe in 1861, was able to secure two loans from private investors in France and England to finance this plan.
There had been many theories what the Gideon Plan may have entailed, but for the remainder of the 1800s and all of the twentieth century, the Plan was shrouded in mystery. In the fall of 2008, the estate of William Porcher Miles, the Chair for the Confederate Congress’s Military Affairs, discovered previously undisclosed memoirs written by Miles in his later years. These memoirs were donated to the National Civil War Museum on Christmas 2010 and shed considerable light on the Gideon Plan. Some historians are saying the documents will turn Civil War history on its ear.
The memoirs reveal that in addition to the Yancey loan, as part of the Confederacy’s Partisan Ranger Act of 1862, a special appropriation was set aside to fund the Gideon Plan. Historians were stunned to learn that in all, almost 15% of the Confederacy’s military budget was spent on this project from 1862 to 1863. Miles explained that the plan encompassed the use of a small squad made up of elite sharpshooters recruited from the regular Confederate army who were equipped with experimental weapons and trained in espionage and infiltration techniques. The members of the plan were responsible for no less than a dozen particularly dangerous behind-the-line actions during the Civil War between 1862 and 1863 including the destruction of the Gatling Factory in December of 1862, a failed attempt to destroy the Springfield armory in 1863, a rescue of Stonewall Jackson a week before he was accidently shot by his own men and involvement in the assassination of President Lincoln. The project was 
abandoned when the Confederacy’s faltering economy could no longer support the project and the congress repealed the Partisan Ranger Act. Miles made special note that some of the squad members committed treason and defected to the side of the Union shortly after the squad was disbanded. It was Mile’s opinion that these members had an important hand in the planning of Grant’s Overland Campaign that led to the eventual end of the War. Additionally, he espoused the theory that these members continued in the service of the United States military and were responsible for extraditing many of the Confederate officials who went into hiding after the war. He also believed that these members had military covert roles in Mexico, Santo Domingo, Cuba, and elsewhere in later years.
Miles’s belief seems to be substantiated by a mystery that has plagued Western Union archivists for years. Between the dates 1865 until 1904, over 300 instances of coded messages written in American Morse code were intercepted as far away as Istanbul and Seoul. Though these messages remain to this day undeciphered, all make use of the word “Gideon.” As of yet, neither the Department of Defense nor the Department of State’s archivists have commented on any of these documents.
The Writings of Dan 