As I said, just copy over your post whenever you have the time.

Sounds good, and I'm all subscribed now too

Great. Hopefully we will get caught up soon, and we can delve into new territory.

I created a FBI partner for Bree's organized crime cases over the summer. You hadn't already given her a partner, right? I want to introduce him, but I don't want to write over any character that already exists, either.

Oh no, no partner yet at all! I'm excited to see 'meet' this new character - cannot wait to see how he turns out!

Yeah, Tanner's interesting. He's pretty much what I did this summer, since our story couldn't continue. He and Ethan actually have a whole big mess planned, which is going to be fun to copy over from hand-written notes...

At some point we are going to need to have a fairly long conversation about whether or not we want to use Tanner as a villain or not, because the end of book one leaves both possibilities wide open. We will need to see which one adds more meaning to the story.

Also. Do we want to start discussing the project that Bree is going to need to build against the Organized Crime leader? The one that she needed Victor for? You definitely get to take point on developing that if you want to, but it may not hurt to have a basic plan in place before we start it.

Conversation sounds fine to me, especially since I haven't even "met" this Tanner yet? But we do need a good villain, so whoever he is, I wouldn't be averse to it after hearing what you have in notes and such.

As for the plans to take down the crime boss, I really have to pull myself together on that one - I was just more waiting to see how Ethan would enter into working for the FBI in the first place, and taking it from there.

We will probably wait to talk about Tanner until you know him a little better. The conversation would be kind of useless if we don't exactly get the full context of the situation. But we will talk about him, I promise.

Okay. Here's how I set up Ethan's entry into the FBI. We can change it, but I kind of set up Ethan and Tanner's interactions around it, so it is moderately important. After Ethan convinces everyone in the FBI of his innocence (Except Tanner (-; ) Ethan leaves. Bree is set back on the task she had before this whole fiasco with chasing him down; trying to find evidence against a mob boss that has a strong presence on the east coast. Without Victor she has absolutely no leads. There is nowhere for her to go. She starts thinking about Ethan then, and what she thinks she knows he can do, and eventually she concludes that she has no choice but to track him down and guilt him into aiding her, because he does show honest remorse for Victor's death. Once she guilts him into it, they start working together in secret (because the person Ethan is pretending to be has no reason or ability to aid Bree) until Bree gets her first big, but completely unprecedented, break in the case. That's when Tanner is going to get mixed up in it, and it is going to get fun and complicated.

How does all that sound to you? I don't have any specifics on the case, just a general circumstance that can nicely guide it.

All righty hon, but I have to be honest and say that Bree was never the type to guilt anyone into anything - that's just not the character I wrote. Of course Ethan will come back to work with the FBI one way or another, and then Tanner will assuredly not like it - we may just have to brainstorm a separate idea for how that happens. Bree's not the whiny, needy type What circumstance would bring Ethan himself back into her world perhaps, that he would make the offer to work with her again?

Ethan is eventually going to come back of his own free will at the very end of what I think of as book one, and at that point he will explain everything to Bree and they will find a more official way for them to work together. But right now he is still convinced that the thing he truly wants is to just get away. Bree's going to need to, one way or another, drag him back for this one mission. Only this one, I promise.

What if she didn't think of it as guilting? What if she just thought of it as logical reasoning? After all, Ethan killed the only lead she had, so, since he can aid her, he should be the one to replace Victor until the case is over. Would that work?

I'll think about the best way to go about it then, I just know I don't want to have Bree perpetually chasing after Ethan (especially not after the nationwide chase we just wrapped up? But I see you understand that, of course). If she were desperate enough for a lead, she might approach him - I could see that. But he might have to be reasonable right back, and realize Bree wouldn't approach him if the circumstances didn't warrant (not, of course, that there wouldn't be a lot of back and forth on that as well).

Don't worry. This is the last point there will be any piece of her chasing him. I don't want it to go on that way forever, either. I just need, one more time, an outside force that pushes Ethan in. For now, that's Bree.

Ethan will be a little bit confused and grumpy when she finds him again, but he'll definitely listen. And, even if she did t mean it that way, the guilt will hold him with her until the case comes to an end. Thanks for being willing to work with me on that. But they are going to get to go back and forth a nice bit.

That sound just fine, we can work with it I imagine! And yes, a very nice bit of back and forth too...

Cool. So, we've got a bit of information about how their interactions for this start. Any ideas on the case itself? I know how it needs to end, but that doesn't really help us in the beginning.

Honestly, I'm just going to have to spend a bit more time thinking about this gangster/crime boss. I've got a bit of a neo-Mafiaso thing going in my head, but far more ruthless I imagine. For the moment, I'm catch up in other places as well, after finishing up some homework too - but I will try to make it more cohesive over the next couple days, see where inspiration takes me as well.

I'd be willing to help if you wanted me to. You don't have to do it alone, and we could build it piece by piece. I just didn't want to make you feel like I was leading you through things again, so if you want to just go for it and make everything up, I'm more than willing.

Actually, with that last post I just remembered Bree's lateral promotion to the Counter-terrorism unit. That, actually, will give me a few thousand or so better ideas to come track down Ethan for this time, and employ him in the future as well.

Cool.

Wait, is she just in counter-terrorism now? Or are we still going to be going after the mob boss? If I recall correctly, most FBI agents worked many things, and had a different partner for each, but I may be wrong.

No, they don't normally work on many different 'units,' particularly with counter-terrorism, but was there some overarching reason to deal with this mob boss? I thought from the beginning, the mob boss who has Vincent put down was, in the end, mostly just a literary useful bit, not essential - or is there something for Bree's "new partner" that is important to what you have in mind?

... Kinda. It is the reason she would need Ethan again, and I imagine that Tanner would have been a long-standing partner. The mob boss just seemed like a good connection to the first part of the story, to make it less of a random element and tie things all together in a nice way. We could probably work around it, but why would she need/want Ethan then? And why would he go along?

I kind of assumed since Bree is the one who's been working the case for years, and she is the one who knows the most about it, she'd be kept on it until they could find a solution, I guess. We can probably work around it, though, if it wouldn't make sense to include it.

A long-standing partner? It might be a little late to introduce him as a long-standing partner, simply because it's been months in story time and he hasn't come up - a co-worker perhaps, unless he's been recently assigned to her as a partner.

And I don't know, how about we just mull it over for a bit, the organized crime or counter-terrorism bit? I'm not necessarily big on having to have every single plot element hammered out before it even happens. Sometimes I just like that touch of the unexpected, the spontaneity that comes along during the writing if you know what I mean.