This morning, my head ran through about a thousand excuses why I should put off writing this new book in February… I need to write/ sell more stories, I need to put more freelance queries out there, I need to do things like eat and sleep… but for some reason, I didn’t like any of them. (Perhaps I liked the ‘eating and sleeping’ part a little, but I’m a Navy vet… I once went two months consuming nothing but fresh coffee, burned coffee, and re-re-reheated instant potatoes, so I’m already acclimated.) That means today, I have to plan everything and get ready to write tomorrow morning.
Stories are perhaps as difficult to craft as a novel, even if they don’t take as much time to write, but the easy part of a story is that there only needs to be one big question in the plot… what if a card magician is suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome and performing his last show, but wants to pull off a flawless version of his daughter’s favorite trick? What if the delusions that mental health patients see are real, and need their own place to stay when their person completes therapy? What if cars became too prohibitively expensive to buy but are now being sold on a ‘micropurchase’ plan? Those are all questions that can be handled in a handful of pages. Maybe a long story can get away with only one central ‘what if,’ if it’s a complicated one. But a novel needs to answer each ‘what if’ with a few ‘what nows.’ And that’s what I’m scrambling for today. I have about six or seven active folders in my new Scrivener project with about a paragraph or three each, and every time I add one character or idea in there, I have to think of two or three things that can go wrong with that. Meanwhile, while I’m typing on one idea, my Muse is pulling out another seventeen, and I should actually be working on those documents and outline scraps instead of typing this, but I had to send a short note out to the real world first.
So, that’s enough for now. Expect tidbits about the forts of the west and perhaps English and German mythology over the next few days, because my book sits at the intersection of them.
Quote for the day:
It’s splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts.
– Gustave Flaubert