“Is it true you have a chair at the Council of Genres?” asked Thursday5 with a sense of wholly unwarranted awe in her voice.

“And a table, too. As an Outlander I don’t have the strictures of the narrative to dictate my actions, so I’m quite good at forward planning and—Hang on a moment.”

Recalling Landen’s writer’s block, I ducked into a bric-a-brac store full of plot devices, props, backstories and handy snatches of verbal banter for that oh-so-important exchange. I made my way past packing cases full of plot twists and false resolutions and walked up to the counter.

“Hello, Murray.”

“Thursday!” replied the owner of the store, a retired gag-and-groan man who had worked the Comedy genre for years before giving it all up to run a used-plot shop. “What can I do you for?”

“A plot device,” I said somewhat vaguely. “Something exciting that will change a story from the mundane to the fantastic in a paragraph.”

“Budget?”

“Depends on what you’ve got.”

“Hmm,” said the shopkeeper, thinking hard and staring at the wall of small drawers behind him, which made it look a little like an apothecary’s shop. On each drawer there was a painted label denoting some exciting and improbable plot-turning device. “Tincture of breathlessness,” said one, and “Paternal root,” read another.

“How about a Suddenly a shot rang out? That’s always a safe bet for mysteries or to get you out of a scrape when you don’t know what to do next.”

“I think I can afford something better than that. Got anything a bit more…complex?”

Murray looked at the labels on the drawers again. “I’ve got a And that, said Mr. Wimple, was when we discovered…the truth.”

“Too vague.”

“Perhaps, but it’s cheap. Okay. How about a Mysterious stranger arriving during a thunderstorm? We’ve got a special on this week. Take the stranger and you can have a corrupt local chief of police and an escaped homicidal lunatic at no extra charge.”

But I was still undecided.

“I was thinking of something more character-than plot-led.”

“I hope you’ve got deep pockets,” said the shopkeeper ominously and with a trace of annoyance, as the line behind me was becoming longer by the second.

“How about the arrival of a distant and extremely eccentric ex-military uncle upsetting the delicate balance of the ordered household?”

“That sounds like just the thing. How much?”

“He was pulled out complete and unused a few days ago. Took a lot of skill to pluck him out of the narrative without damage, and with all ancillary props and walk-ons—”

“Yes, okay, okay, I get the picture—How much?”

“To you, a thousand guineas.”

“I get the uncle fully realized for that, yes?”

“He’s over there.”