This is K.M. Island and you are listening to the 180 second episode of the word play podcast.

Last week I finished up the first chapter of the annotated Jane Eyre and send it off to my

editor Rachel Randall at F&W Media. She gave me the green light on what I was doing, which is always a relief.

Since the interim between sending an editor an email and receiving the reply, always provides plenty of

time to chew my fingernails and dream up all sorts of things that are wrong with the submitted work.

But she likes the direction I'm taking the book as much as I do, so we're good to go.

Now I get to buckle down and start pounding out the rest of the first draft.

I'm also plugging along with my rewrite of my historical novel The Deepest

Breath, just past the three quarters mark and now it's full steam ahead to the climax.

I feel like the book is dramatically better this time around, which is always a nice way to feel when finishing up a major edit.

Pretty soon I'll have to send another of those nail-biter emails and see what my

beta readers think.

Use this subplot to bring depth to your story.

The latest post in the video series on my blog suggests the

value of an emotional subplot to bring instant depth to any character. To watch it,

visit my website at W.W. dot Helping Writers Become Authors.com.

New videos are posted every Wednesday.

And now, I hope you enjoyed this week's podcast, the sixth in the series, Structuring Your Story's

Scenes. This installment is titled Variations on the scene.

If writers have one complaint about the whole notion of story structure, it's that it makes

them feel boxed in.

But the great thing about structure is that it provides a solid framework for your story

...