The Writing Process

It occurred to me last night, as I was coming to an important decision regarding Wonderland, that I have a writing process, of which I was not aware. It goes a little something like this:

1) Have fabulous idea, fall immediately in love with it, make several notes.
2) Write a few chapters, crumble to tears because there's no love there for the main character, and I'll never have a good idea, because all the ideas I have are CRAP.
3) Spend a few days varying between "This is crap" and "This is brilliant", still go on loathing main character.
4) Procrastinate, ignoring any further work on work-in-progress. It wasn't a good idea anyway.
5) Give up procrastination, write one fantastic, amazing chapter that restores hope and also makes me like my main character.
6) Decide that I should write a rough outline, even though I constantly insist that I don't write outlines.
7) Begin working seriously on manuscript, finish it, love it, love the main character, let readers check it out & watch in awe as they love it too.

I did this exact thing with Vlad, and last night, as I was deciding to begin an outline for Wonderland, it occurred to me that I'm doing it again with Dillon. The good thing is that I'm on number six and number seven is looming just ahead. The bad thing is that, if this is my process, I'll have to face this list again and again and again and again.

Writers are sickly masochistic.

Now...where's that outline?