Rising Time: a sample romance plan

Premise

Two rival bakers on the same street have to share one kitchen for a summer after a fire, and they can't agree on anything, starting with what time the oven goes on.

World

Calloway Street runs between the harbor and the fish market in Portland, Maine: a block of brick storefronts where tourists come for lobster rolls and locals come for bread. For eleven years it has had two bakeries facing each other across the street. Hearth sells sourdough and opens at seven. Sweet Calloway sells pastries and opens at six. When an electrical fire closes Sweet Calloway's kitchen until September, its owner rents the overnight hours in Hearth's kitchen, because there is no other commercial oven within a mile.

Cast

Outline

1. Chapter 1: Shift Change The fire, the short-term lease, and the first argument: whose bake goes in the oven first.
2. Chapter 2: House Rules A whiteboard of rules that both of them break by the end of the week.
3. Chapter 3: Gerald Nell feeds Sam's starter by mistake and saves it.
4. Chapter 4: The Wedding Order An order too big for one bakery forces them to work the same shift.
5. Chapter 5: Proofing Mrs. Pak explains why the two shops were opened across the street from each other.
6. Chapter 6: Opening Time Sweet Calloway's kitchen is repaired, and Nell has to decide whether to leave.

Chapter 1: Shift Change

The fire started in a light switch, which Nell Calloway found insulting.

She had prepared for everything else. She had a plan for a broken mixer, a late flour delivery, a summer with no eggs. She had a laminated card taped inside the walk-in that listed, in order, what to do if the power went out at four in the morning with three hundred croissants proofing. Nowhere on any card did it say what to do when the wall behind a light switch started to smoke and the fire marshal closed the kitchen until September.

So at five to three on a Tuesday morning she was standing on the wrong side of Calloway Street, holding a crate of butter, outside a door with a hand-painted sign that said HEARTH. NO PASTRIES. ASK ACROSS THE STREET.

Sam Ortiz opened it before she knocked. He had flour in his beard and a jar of something grey under one arm.

"You're early," he said.

"The lease says three."

"The lease says the kitchen is yours from three. It doesn't say the oven is." He nodded toward the back, where the deck oven was ticking as it heated. "My loaves go in at four. They need the stone at full heat."

"My croissants go in at quarter past three. They need it at two hundred."

"Celsius?"

"Of course Celsius."

He looked at her the way he had looked at her for eleven years, across the street, through two windows, every morning when they both turned their signs to OPEN. Then he stepped aside.

"Butter goes in the left fridge," he said. "The right one is Gerald's."

She did not ask who Gerald was. She had a feeling she was going to find out.

The sample ends here.

Start your own

In WriteForYou you begin the same way: type a premise of a sentence or two and choose from 1 to 12 chapters. You review the world, the cast and the outline, and can ask for changes, before chapter 1 is written.