The End and The Beginning

I finished revisions on Fallen and am going to work on a new story. There's always a kind of energy that hits me with the beginning of a book. I usually start with an idea. One of those bursts of inspiration that happen from time to time. This particular idea came to me when someone asked about one of my yahoo messages on messenger. It sparked an idea for a hero and his dilemna. A little writing gave me his heroine. Now I've written 10 pages and I've stopped.

Now I need to know more about these characters as an immortal my hero has a very rich history and I'm loving filing in the details and trying to work out how he became who he is. My heroine has been a mystery to me. Even her name hid from me for some time. She has a name and I know what happens to her mostly, but I don't know why she is who she is. And the big thing is tying her curse somehow to his curse. Once I find these clues the story should start to unravel.

I know the situation. I know who these characters are at this moment. I need to know how they became these characters. I also don't know who the villian is. I'm not sure that the villian will tie into their backstories or not. There are a lot of ways to go with a story. Even after plotting this out, things will change. My characters will seem to take on a life of their own and their motivations might surprise me, but that's what is fun about writing. Change.

Waiting and Working

With the kids home for two more weeks, I'm desperately waiting for school to start. Meanwhile, I'm attempting to write/revise between requests to play on the computer, to play on the Wii, and to fix some food. While my head is in the right place for revisions, I'm trying to get as much done as possible.

It's kind of like when you are in the right mood to go through old stuff. The wrong mood is where you sit and look through the box and think I should really keep this ticket for The Bird Cage. I don't remember who I went with or why I decided to keep it, but I should keep it anyway, because it's sentimental. Hey, my old pair of earphones that only play out of one side. Maybe I can use them again.

The right mood is you pull the box over to the trash can and start pitching. That ticket to The Bird Cage, gone. Broken earphones, gone.

I've been in the wrong mood to revise for a long time. I wrote this book and though I know it needs revising, I don't even know where to begin. Now I'm in the right mood. A friend went over the first bit and pointed out, not grammar or spelling errors, but plotting errors or places where the tension was lagging. While I love when people correct my commas and my accidental word choices, I prefer the type that my friend gave me. It made me open my eyes and really look at what I'd written as a whole and not as a sentence here and there. The scene after her corrections I just finished revising. I'd had it in the heroine's POV, but it really needed to be in the hero's to show his conflict at that time. Though I loved some lines in her POV, I took them out.

Okay before I type this if you've never heard it before I'm not a sadistic person, really. But there are times when you need to Kill Your Darlings. I'm not the first to say this, nor do I expect to be the last. If it doesn't fit, if it doesn't move the story forward, if it is the most brilliant piece of tripe you've ever written, but doesn't do anything for the characters, CUT IT! Move it into a file for special circumstances, just in case you can use it, but get rid of it in this story. It's like throwing away those old earphones and that movie ticket. They are taking up space and while they may work for something else, they aren't working for you.

So while I spend the rest of the day wishing my kids were in school, I'll be killing my darlings in my MS.