Friday, March 30, 2012

But first an outline

I think it might be almost time to start my new project.

The problem with being a writer is the constant influx of story ideas. In my case, they're all ideas for novels, which take a relatively long time to write. Sometimes I think an idea is a short story idea, and when I start writing it turns out I've got a novel idea after all. Sometimes I think an idea is ripe, and I get five or ten or fifty thousand words in and realize I only had half an idea. (Outlines help with that problem, but I don't always do an outline.) I always intend to come back to those half-done projects (like Little Sparrow and How Christopher Kaplan Learned to Lie and Adventures in Zoology). But time is short, and there are always new ideas crowding in.

I was messing around with the sequel to Misfits, which has a working title of Unsung Math Genius. But I'm hesitant to write too much on it while I'm still querying agents for the first book. I don't want to jump the gun on the direction the series takes.

So I've been doing some editing and a little bit of writing here and there instead. And then BAM! An idea smacked me upside the head. It's YA, probably SF/F although that's an aspect of the plot I haven't resolved yet (the bad guys could be aliens or zombie type monsters or real life terrorists, depending on where I want to take the story).

Last night I figured out the main characters' names. Tonight: outline time. And then the first words.

2 comments:

Paula RC said...

I know just want you mean, K.C. I'm hopping between three novels and a pocket novel at the moment, but I would love to get my teeth into a short story too.

I found a short horror story I wrote sometime ago on my computer and thought I might play around with that and get it ready to send out to a competition only to find I had turned it into a novel idea. I started to read it, then add a bit and then... Hey Stop! leave it back and finish off the others first. I just wish an agent or publisher would get hooked on my work in the same way.

Good luck with your writing project, K.C.

K.C. Shaw said...

Hehe, that sounds so much like me! I'm afraid to start a new short story for fear it won't turn out very short.

Good luck with your projects too!