2026-10-03
PLOT
Mirela Costache abandons her marriage to Boone and flees to Ushuaia as ‘Vera Nunez,' driven by an obsession to expose labor trafficking in the fishing fleet—a cause her community dismissed as hysterical fantasy. In the dive bars along the waterfront, she meets Thiago Lautaro, a union organizer whose quiet intensity pierces her cynical armor. When he refuses her advances, claiming he can’t love someone built on lies, Mirela spirals into reckless gambits: drinking with dockhands, bribing harbor officials, infiltrating freezer ships at night. Her investigation exposes the trafficking ring, but the cost is a knife in an alley behind a cannery. She dies as Vera, her real name surfacing only in the Buenos Aires papers that finally credit her crusade.
Show the Plotto chain
- Person
- A Married Person
- Action
- Seeking to conceal identity because of a lofty idealism
- Outcome
- Makes the supreme sacrifice in carrying out an undertaking.
-
#917
Idealism
The protagonist mysteriously disappears from their own community; and when they reappear among strangers, they bear a fictitious name. The protagonist, seeking to forward an enterprise which those who know them might consider absurd or unworthy, changes their name and goes secretly to a place where they are unknown.
-
#259
Love’s Rejection
The protagonist, when the love interest refuses to marry them, becomes blasé and cynical, dismissive of romance: reckless, goes to the dogs or loses their mental balance in other ways or seeks to forget their unhappiness by indulging in a love for adventure.
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 more info, check out the project page and say hello.
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.