Strangest thing…

Ok, well, as you know, I lost 100 pages of edits to “Commoner Days”, my fantasy YA WIP, and Chris located the file on the laptop.  Now we just need the budget to restore it.  This is great news, because I’m simply having a terrible time getting off the ground with anything new, and this sense of “unfinished but maybe marketable and definitely good” is killing me.

SO I decided to return to my Holly Lisle course and go from there.  Good.  So I’m looking for an assignment and found a bunch of notebooks I hadn’t utilized. Also good, because I just committed to start journaling.

Well, in one of these notebooks, I had done a series of 1-3 page vignettes.  Some of them were related to WIP ideas, and some were stand alone.  I got to 2 of these stories, which were based off of a later sequel to “Commoner Days”.

My God, it was good.  Firstly, there was a romance that the princess began that was forbidden to her that makes a great opening.  (Let’s just say it involves her highness’s boobs.)  Secondly, there was a part from later in life where she is raising a child with a genetic condition, let’s just say it resembles autism.  I had *completely* forgotten that I had put that into this character!  In fact, Nareezia (sound it out) is amazing, and I adore her.  She’s a lot NOT like me, but all my protagonists are me in some sense, she’s just the furthest distance from me.

The caveat is that you’re not supposed to write your sequel after you write the original, just in case.  However, in this case the sequel is a generation later, and while my CD protagonist Jonni shows up, it’s her grown granddaughter’s very different story, start to finish.

Hm, not sure what to do with this.  I’ve given up on the romance right now, the time travel plot is boring the snot out of me and no, I can’t figure out how to combine them as mentioned the other day.  And, I’m no further along in my paranormal story.

I said I was going to start journaling, but maybe fleshing out some writing of anything is the way to do.

On the upside, I did find a bunch of notebooks that are empty, so I can start exercises and “journaling” there.

Tags: work in progress

Inspiration where you find it…

I’ve had a hard time recently coming up with an idea for a novel that I really feel passionate about.  If I have to jump in and recreate a “don’t look down draft“, then it has to be something that, at this point in the game, I’m fired up about, right? There’s plenty of time to lose my inspiration in the editing phase…

I’ve been stumped for a way to jump start the process and had been considering an artist date (not really something I can schedule at present), working through some courses, and doing loads of freewriting.  Then during a long drive on Sunday, I got the idea to combine some of the recent ideas I’ve had (time travel idea, dark immortal idea, woman looking for God idea). The idea started looking like a Piers Anthony book I read once, so I knew I was not quite on the right track but it did fire me up a bit.

Then last night we watched last year’s “Wolfman” with Benicio del Toro and Anthony Hopkins.  It is a seriously flawed film but the lighting set decoration and period costumes really set the tone of the film and made me forgive a whole lot of things.  In fact, it fired up something inside, because it’s a period I’m a bit fascinated with.

Then I went to bed, opened my notebook and with a pen I started writing.  I took my character from 2 of the above stories and a modern day scientist inside a 16th century castle in a massive, ornate bed several hundred years old (the movie’s influence)  and…

It was like magic in a bottle.  I didn’t even write a page, and i have no sense of where it’s going, but I for sure have a don’t look draft.  Even left it on a cliff hanger!

ok, now to write…