I don't remember plotting taking so long. Well, I didn't really plot the last book. Sometimes a Fox was a treasure hunt with only the barest thread of any other plot in it. I probably spent the most of the pre-writing plot time making up the riddle-clues.
And the previous A Fox's Wedding was mostly James Bond plotting. It was a caper novel built on the idea of "have this actress do action stunts until a cult leader thinks she's Indiana Jones," and that gave me a lot of leeway to come up with a spot in Japan I wanted to do a scene in, then come up with an excuse to be there.
The current book, The Early Fox, I'm trying to be much more deliberate with plot. I'm trying to not have incidents but actually have logical advancements in the story. In fact, I'm almost upset that I now have four places I really want to put in the story even if I have to warp the plot around to make them happen.
One thing I have, though, is the advantage of iterative plot. It is like iterative research, and for a book like this (which taps both history and real-world geography) these are closely associated. I don't have to solve all my plot problems now; I just have know they are NP-complete. That is, that they are roughly equally solvable and finding those solutions can happen in polynomial time. And that's enough strained math analogies for one blog post.
I am glad I am this certain. I just ran into another young writer agonizing about plotting, and I can both remember and anticipate spinning wheels for days and weeks if I worry now, for instance, about what it is my "angry activist" character asks of Penny that sends her down to the WIPP at the southeastern corner of the state.
In short, this is the point in plotting where I can just write, "Penny does something cunning here" in the knowledge that when I get to that point, the story may have changed enough that I don't need her to be.
Or that, by then, I will have thought of something that's cunning enough.
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