Plot Outline in process…

Outline: (Story elements)
1. A man and a woman, married, but not to each other, are bloggers.
2. She writes highly confessional, explicit and personal pieces, not revealing her name or the name of the characters in her pieces. Her writing is eloquent, her stance humanist. She sees deeply into those she meets and expresses their foibles and struggles with imagistic prose. She writes in a hip contemporary idiom, and recycles much of the vernacular. We learn that she has a possessive husband. We learn that she draws and keeps a “book of demons.”
3. He also writes explicit personal pieces of a confessional nature. He, however, names some names. His writing style is unlike hers; he writes with an ear for Dickensian oratory, revels in classical forms and the sound of his language is an older sort of poetry. He himself writes under a pseudonym. Both blogs do not permit comments, followers or email response. They’ve gone to great lengths to remain anonymous. They are, however, public.
4. He discovers her blog by accident. He begins to read her assiduously. Her gossamer wisps of prose, heartbreaking and deeply felt sketches, lure him in.
5. He begins to echo her turns of phrase in his own writing and blogging. He uses her blog in his Lit course at the college where he teaches. This outrages his colleagues.
6. He begins to make an effort to learn who she is. Much information about pipl/spokeo searches, web stalking, and invasion of privacy. Perhaps he could pay for information, aware that he’s crossing a rubicon. Perhaps he could consult his “Sister In Law” in government, finding a federal database inadvertently at his disposal during a visit. Information is revealed, but it is also inconclusive without a name.
7. At length, she makes what he considers a mistake: she branches out, lured by a friend with a site on an online ‘zine. She uses her real name, and in her bio, she mentions her blog. From this he learns her name, and confirms her location, her address, her phone number and marital status. He Google Earths her and looks down at her roof. Yet he does nothing with this information. He waits and thinks. He rereads her posts, going all the way back, and in a big soliloquy, ponders the implications of making contact. He feels her pull, he feels her power, and he feels an affinity.
8. She does none of these things. She’s begun to fantasize. Unbeknownst to him, she’s feeling increasingly trapped by her increasingly erratic husband. She writes a series of pieces on fantasies in which she seems to indicate that she’s writing to the fellow blogger that reads her. She is not; it’s just a coincidence. She writes a piece on longings. Her fantasies are passionate and humanist.
9. Her ‘zine posts feature a comment box. Deliberating for a period of days, composing many drafts, pasting them lovingly into that comment box and then deleting them, finally lets one stay and hits send. It is a brief a note, expressing his admiration for her writing. He writes it in such away that it makes her, in the law office where she works, have to sit. He writes her up on his blog. His colleagues are appalled. She is overjoyed and feels the pull of some much needed encouragement and approbation. Her husband now learns of the blog. This sends her husband deeper into his questionable behaviors. He gets access to her computer and stews about the bloggers. He feels cuckolded in a certain way. He feels that he’s losing control of his wife.
10. They begin corresponding by email, and as Facebook friends, they find themselves out in public with their affinity. It is now manifestly mutual, and they are hyperlinking to each other with abandon.
11. Both spouses, picking up on all of this, become very testy. When they fight, the accusations fly. Further detail about spouses:
-He gets along beautifully with his wife. She is warm sensitive and intelligent.
-Her spouse travels and when he’s around he’s increasingly abusive. He thinks nothing of invading her privacy. Thus, she’s worried about her own safety at the same time her fantasies about escape emerge.
12. They decide, after a period of discipline and deliberation, to throw some of their caution to the wind and meet. They talk on the phone, and the sound of the voice does nothing to mute their passion. She sounds like a siren calling forth as muse. He sounds like her father, a charming and ascerbic man. He reminds her of her father, whom she adores. Her husband finds her phone while she’s in the bath and dials the mans’s number. He hangs up, saying only, “wrong number.” He’s got her cornered and he hits her for the first time. But he travels, and that cannot be helped. He’s off on a trip, leaving her to call the man again. The man’s wife, listening to one side of one of these phone calls, is increasingly aware of her husband’s struggles. She speaks to him in a heart to heart. She gives him the right to go to meet his muse.
13. They meet at a restaurant beside the highway at a midpoint between the location of their lives. It is twilight. They expect a chaste, but charged encounter. It is like a scene from the Lisae C. Jordan affair, a close encounter with heat. Standing side by side, they are overcome by lust and decide to check into the little hotel next to the restaurant. It doesn’t go as planned. Her husband calls, and after words, she’s on the phone with him in tears. He begins also to feel remorse and weeps. They back down from their edge carefully. There is a lingering kiss, and then they part.
14. The spouses become the beneficiaries of all of this pent up sexual energy. After hitting his wife, the salesman realizes he is getting into bad juju. He backs down.
15. They have now become alarmed that their passion might destroy their long-term partnerships and they decide to impose a period of silence. They blog their separate ways.
16. She writes, then sells a major novel, turning the blog and other writings and drawings into a book.
17. Her novel, which has echoes of their near affair, takes off. She’s on all the talk shows. He stops watching television.
18. He buys the novel and gobbles it down.
18A. Her husband becomes all the more enraged by her success. He begins beating his now public figure wife in earnest. She gets a restraining order, but manages much of this, especially its seriousness out of the glare of the media.
19. He attempts to write her fan mail, but can’t get it in the snail mail. His emails to her are all met with silence now. Her Facebook is awash. Her tweets are on the nightly news. She’s so hot.
20. But then, news flash, she’s hurt somehow. (Plane crash? Shooting? Car accident? Does she ski?) It soon becomes clear that she’s been a victim of domestic violence. It turns out that her husband, violating the restraining order, got into the house and a) killed the cats, and b) having driven her to assault, hit her in the back with a chair, sending her down a flight of stairs. She is not expected to recover.
21. He stares at this news on CNN. His wife, sitting next to him, observes him as the tears run down his cheeks. He tries to hide it, but she knows. She knows that he has deep feelings for his muse, and also that she is stricken. She knows, because he tells her, that they did meet that one time, but that “nothing happened.” Not nothing, the wife insists. The discretion was really only a subtlety. The wife meditates on the situation, on the cattycornered couch.
22. His wife envelops him with a hug, but he wiggles out, gets up and heads for the kitchen. After awhile, she finds him leaning over the sink. She makes a speech about the nature of passion and humanity. No one can keep everything all bottled up. The passions are inexplicable. She asks if he wants to try to visit his amour sucré, his muse, his now stricken and lost affinity in hospital. He shakes his head. They hug. Fade to black.