2026-03-16
PLOT
Eulalie reads cards in her crumbling antebellum mansion, trying to connect with son Boudreaux who prefers speakeasies to séances. When Thibodaux, Boudreaux’s prospective father-in-law, faces scandal that could ruin his daughter’s engagement, he feigns ignorance while gossip spreads like kudzu. Meanwhile, mysterious Céleste publishes a fake engagement announcement to a phantom suitor. As the web of deception unravels, Eulalie’s occult wisdom helps expose the truth, freeing Thibodaux from false accusations and bringing her closer to Boudreaux through their shared desire to protect those they love.
Show the Plotto chain
- Person
- A Person Influenced by the Occult and the Mysterious
- Action
- Living a lonely, cheerless life and seeking companionship
- Outcome
- Emerges happily from a serious entanglement.
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#910
Idealism
The protagonist seeks happiness in being the pal of their child and in making them happy. The protagonist is ultra old-fashioned, and their child is ultra modern.
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#1151
Simulation
The co-protagonist simulates ignorance regarding a certain compromising event in their life. The co-protagonist, in order to avoid slander and evil gossip and protect their child who is about to marry a person of wealth and social position, seeks to hush up a possible scandal in their own life.
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#870a
Deliverance
The co-protagonist, harassed by gossip that reflects on their integrity, seeks deliverance from false suspicion.
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#86
Love’s Misadventures
The love interest, unmarried and impelled by an unusual motive, pretends that they are engaged to be married to a mysterious stranger and has the announcement published in a newspaper.
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Hello, what is this?
Plottomatic is a daily plot machine designed to demonstrate a new and modernized version of Plotto, William Wallace Cook’s 1928 book and system for generating plots.
What's Plotto and why a modernized version?
William Wallace Cook was a prolific writer who created a strange and ingenious system for building plots: Plotto. I rewrote the manuscript to remove the antiquated 1928 discriminatory language while preserving the original structure and logic.
More info on making this: Plottomatic: rewriting a 1928 plot machine .
How does Plottomatic work?
Plottomatic walks through this new version of Plotto and chooses a protagonist, an action, and an outcome. Then it builds a series of dramatic situations that are chosen using the original Cook logic. Finally, it transforms the finished plot structure into a readable synopsis that adds characters, theme, and setting. That’s the daily plot you see above.
Are you making a new book or an app?
I’m glad you asked! Not yet – but wouldn't that be great? If you want to follow along this little adventure, subscribe to the weekly email.
Acknowledgements
William Wallace Cook wrote Plotto in 1928.
Gary Kacmarcik digitized the original book and created the original and foundational hyperlinked edition.
David Eyk created an XML version using Gary’s work and fixed some cross-reference links. I used this as the source file.
Pankaj Agarwal built a Flutter implementation that helped me shape the data model.
Lynn Cherny wrote an in-depth analysis of Plotto in 2018 that quantified the gender and race issues as well as other structural problems.