Science Fiction Romance Novella-Plus Builder

This tool will help you plot your own science fiction novella to short novel from beginning to end, and you can reuse it multiple times. It is designed to give you 14 chapters plus an epilogue and yield a word count of 35-45,000 words.

Includes

Excerpt

Concept

The first thing to decide is if this will be a standalone SFR, or if it will be part of a series. In the 35-45k range, these are often part of a series. The most common setup is an overarching plot that spans several books, but with a different couple in each novel getting their own story and personal resolution for their relationship. It’s a bit tricky, because you’re writing to tell their story while keeping the overarching story moving along as well. I’ll use my own “Wounded Warriors” series as an example.

The overarching theme is a group of shifters, who were subject to government experimentation, are trying to stop the group that’s marked them for death to keep them from talking. In book one…

Ch. 1

MMC’s POV

There are two ways to handle this. You can make chapters one and two short chapters to get an intro to each character before they meet, or you can have the meet-cute in the first chapter. The advantage to giving them both an intro chapter (as long as it doesn’t drag out too long) is it gives you a chance to do some subtle info-dumping and worldbuilding, so your readers get an idea of the worlds from which they come.

This chapter should be doing something to advance to the point of where they’re meeting. Alternately, you can have them meet early in the chapter and then spend the rest of the chapter having him think about it. Or you can have this chapter be an overlapping chapter where they meet, and then in chapter two, you retell the meeting from her perspective.

Questions to consider:

How do they