Ideas are Everywhere

 A question writers often get asked is "Where did you come up with your ideas?"

For me, the general answer is 'everywhere'.  If the question starts with a 'how', the answer changes to 'no clue, they're just there'.  Where?  Everywhere.

Orson Scott Card* is attributed with saying: "Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any."  I don't necessarily ascribe to that.  I think I'm a good writer, but I don't get five or six ideas EVERY DAY.  I think I'd go nuts if I did.  I'd be like a puppy with a dozen different toys all thrown at him at once... GAH!

I do get ideas a lot.  The really good ones... the ones that won't leave me alone... they go into a Word file.  Most of the ideas never make it there.  

News stories often make for good ideas.  Especially for crime fiction.  Natural Causes got its kernel from a crime story that made headlines.  Of course, the book totally diverges from the real story, but the kernel is there.  

Sometimes, the ideas just come from my brain noodling through things.  Like with Early Grave.  I started with the idea that I wanted to do another SCIU novel and then I got to thinking about how I could write a suspense novel with a serial killer that's premise hadn't been done to death.  (pardon the pun)  I came up with the idea that someone was killing old people in nursing homes and making it look like the deaths were natural.  But I didn't want to do an Angel of Death thing.  This killer actually hates old people and wants them dead.  Then I remembered I'd sent Ned Washington to Toledo at the beginning of Fertile Ground.  Voila!  Plot, MC, Setting and we're off to the races.

Sometimes something that happens to you will give you ideas.  Accidental Death was an assortment of experiences, people, and events over the course of my life that rolled themselves into a novel.  

Of course, AD actually started with the basic question 'What if...'  The 'What if' is often a valuable source for ideas.  In the case of AD, the question was 'What if a death that they ruled was accidental wasn't?'  And it sort of snowballed from there.  

Every rare once in a while, I'll get a story idea from a dream.  That's where Untitled Fantasy came from.  Of course, the end product isn't much like the dream.  Hell, I can't even really remember what the dream was about.  I know I got out of bed afterwards and wrote down the crux of it and then when I got up, I transferred it into my Ideas file.  And then I started writing the book.  (Which took me a huge amount of time to finish.)  Like I said, for me, the dream ideas are rare.  Mostly because my dreams are too weird to translate into a story people would want to read.

So, really, ideas are everywhere.  If you can't see that, you're probably going to have a hard time as a writer.  Oh, you could still write.  Some writers only ever have one good idea and one good book in them.  Look at Margaret Mitchell.  She only ever wrote one book (even if some of her other scribblings have now been published) and it was BIG.  If that's your course, if you find yourself NEEDING to write that one book, do it.

Me?  I'll be over here fending off new ideas so I can focus on writing and editing the ideas I already have in the works.  Which, right now, means getting off my dead ass and working on this crazy fantasy idea I dreamed up.  

What about you?  If you're not a writer (yet), what ideas do you have that could be made into a story?  If you're already a writer, where do your ideas come from?

*If you're not familiar with Card, he wrote ENDER'S GAME.  Yes, the one they made into a movie.  He wrote a bunch of other stuff, too.  Definitely not a dude who was short of ideas.

Updates and Decisions I'm Not Ready to Make

Well, I finally finished the edit notes for Untitled Fantasy.  And I counted them, finally.  30 pages of notes - college rule, single side - for roughly 97000 words.  Or 1 page of notes per approximately 3200 words worth of story.  

As always, some are as simple as noting that a comma needs to be inserted or removed.  But I really try not to hit the simple stuff on the first draft.  Most of it is bigger stuff - rewriting a line, etc.  Some of it is huge, like rewriting an entire scene.  

All in all, though, this is a solid book.  Nothing that makes me want to scrap a whole chapter or anything.  

Okay, so maybe I'm unsure about whether to leave a large chunk of the end to the next book.  I'll either figure it out myself or let my readers tell me what they think.  But that's down the road a ways.  

I'm also playing with the idea of adding to the beginning because right now, it just sort of throws the reader into the thick of things without a whole lot of set-up.  (Not the main thick, but sort of the beginning thick.)

I had hoped to have this phase finished by the end of October, but somehow it reached the friggin' 18th of the month and finishing this phase in the remaining 13 days seems problematic.  We'll see how it goes.

And I need a title.  I had a list of potential titles, but I just looked at it and they all suck.  I'm not sure what in my head thought 'Time of the Twins' would've been a good idea... There's a Dragonlance book with that title already.  Nope nope nope.  Not riffin' off that series and don't even want a hint it's anything like those books.  Derp.  It's bad enough I've already got my name lending the impression I'm nursing at the Brandon Sanderson teats.  

Speaking of which, I might publish this under my maiden name.  B.E. Meissner worked for me when I was a maiden, so why not now?  

And I'm playing with the idea of trying to get this published through Baen or something.  Gah, the idea of querying makes me want to hurl.  But they have resources I don't have, so going with them would get me a better cover than I can afford.  It would definitely get me better exposure.  The question is whether they'd want an old self-pubber like me.  :shrug:

Decisions, decisions.  On the upside, I have a lot of work to do before I have to make a decision of any kind.  Yay for turtle speed.

Anything Can be a Weapon

 On FB the other day, I saw people arguing about whether or not keys were an effective weapon against assault.  You know the idea, I hope... Hold your keys with the points sticking out between your fingers and if you're assaulted, go for their face.  One dude was totally against it, saying you'd be better off going barehanded than with your keys because the keys could mangle your hands.  P'shaw.  I'd rather chance hurting my hands to inflict maximum damage on my attacker than not.

But the thread got me thinking...  In fiction, and in real life, anything can be a weapon if you're sufficiently motivated.  In the movie Die Hard II, John McClain kills an attacker with an icicle.  In The Presidio, Sean McConnery's character beats a guy up using only his thumb.  In Grosse Pointe Blank, the MC killed a dude with a pen.  

There's a reason jails make people get rid of their keys, pens, belts, etc. before entering.  Hell, prison shanks are made from damn near everything.  Sharpen a toothbrush and there ya go.

My aunt once stabbed her husband with a fork.  Not to kill him, mind you, but to keep him from eating the last piece of pie.

When I'm out alone at the lake, I make note of the various things within reach I could use to defend myself if need be.  I have a nasty fillet knife in my tackle box.  I have another nasty knife in my go-bag that I sometimes transfer to my pocket.  And I trained myself to be able to pull it out and flip it open one-handed.  I also carry pepper-spray.  I might not always be able to reach those, though.  So I look elsewhere.  Any rock or stick will do.  Hell, at the end of the book Red Dragon, the MCs wife hits the killer with a fishing pole - complete with lures at the end.  If you've never accidentally stuck a fish hook in your hand, you don't know what exquisite pain that can be.  In that case, the pain was sufficient to distract the killer and allow time for someone else to kill him.  Yay.

If it's pointy, a person can be stabbed with it.  If it's heavy, a person can be pummeled with it.  If it's sharp, they can be cut.  In Red 2, the Asian assassin kills a guy with origami, for petesakes.  Who says paper can't be a weapon?  LOL

The idea isn't necessarily to kill the other person.  Especially in a self-defense situation.  The idea might be as simple as giving yourself or your characters a chance to get away.  Stab the villain in the face with your nail file and run like hell.  Scratch them with your car keys.  Poke them with your stiletto heel.  Hit them with your purse full of whatever.  (In 101 Dalmations (the live action one with Glen Close), the heroine's purse was filled with stones she was collecting to pave her garden walk.)

Expand your idea of what can be a weapon and use it to enrich your fiction.  Or save your own life.  Whatever works for you.

What are some other unusual weapons you seen or read about?

Updates... Finally

Sorry that it's been a couple months since I posted here.  If you've been following along over at The Writing Spectacle, you know why.  If not, I was helping a friend prepare to move.  That's done now, so I am trying to get back to my regularly scheduled life.  Which means writing... or rather writerly pursuits.

Yesterday, I picked up Untitled Fantasy again and got back to making edit notes.  I was a little over halfway through.  Now I'm a little bit more over halfway through.

I feared I wouldn't be able to get back into the groove after six weeks away, but I picked up right where I'd left off and it was like I hadn't ever stopped.  Which was totally cool.  Usually my brain is all like 'what the hell is happening here' and then I'm forced to go back and figure out where I left off.  Yay for brain cooperation.  

This is still a behemoth and I still have 42% of the book to make edit notes on, but I'm progressing again.  Now, let's see if the notes I made in July and August make any sense when I circle around and start inputting them into the manuscript.  

I've also been playing with the idea of writing that Christmas short story set in my genie world.  Don't get your hopes up.  I started that thing a few years ago and never got back to it.  But it would be a nice thing to finish and get out there in the world in time for the holidays.  We'll see.

One thing I really need to do is get back to marketing, but I'm not sure where to start and how well any of it will be received after all this time.  I mean, it's been a while since anything sold, so the rankings are in the basement and generally, whether we like it or not, that means people are less likely to want to take a chance on a new-to-them book with craptastic rankings.  It's best to market when you have a reason to market - like a new book out.  Since I don't have a new book out and I'm not going to any time soon, I guess I'll have to make up my own reasons and go for it.  Halloween is always a good reason.  Maybe I'll do a sale on the genie books around Halloween.  Maybe the model books.  We'll see.  Stay tuned.

Also, looking forward, we have a little less than three months to the end of the year.  Yeah, I know you don't want to think about that, but I need to.  Spreadsheets arem't going to make themselves and all that.  

So, what's on your plate these days?  What's up for the rest of the year?  Any plans?  Or are you hiding from the 2022 workload for a bit longer?

Last Day for FREE Genie Awesomeness

Today's the last day to get Wish in One Hand for free.  Well, until the next time it's free.  Which probably won't be until 2022.  So, if you want to read it for free and don't want to wait, I suggest you hie yourself to Amazon and download yourself a copy.  Tomorrow the price goes back to $3.99.  Save yourself four bucks.

Just do it.  You know you want to.

Upcoming Book Birthday!

Lest you think I have, in my total immersion in this fantasy, forgotten my other books...

On Wednesday the 18th, it will be Wish in One Hand's book birthday.  Six years old.  Just a wee babe in the scheme of all written materials but probably, in book years, middle-aged or something.  

To celebrate, starting Monday, this first of my forays into urban fantasy will be free for five days.  If you enjoy it, I hope you'll pick up the other three books in the series.  

As always, all my books are available through the Kindle Unlimited program, so if you're into that, you can get all the Once Upon a Djinn books free with your subscription to KU and read to your heart's content.

Enjoy!

The Book... Err... Books

 Just so you know, I'm not dead.  And I really am working on the book.  Books.  Whatever.  

Okay, so it was a book.  As in singular.  Now, I think it might be several books.  A trilogy of books.  Each would complete an arc for the characters, with the overall main arc completed in the third book.  And subsequent books will follow the overall arc for these characters and this world.  

If I'm right, it'll go like this: 1) Training at the Academy 2) Hero Stuff 3) Epic Battle Stuff.  

Not sure if I can pull it off as three whole and complete novels, but I'm digging deeper into everyone and everything.  Fleshing it out.  Making it real.  And re-writing the beginning.  As I do this, I know it's going to be a behemoth if I leave it as just one book.  So, the idea now is to make this one book into three books.  We'll see how that goes as I keep making notes and writing new words into the beginning.  

Fantasy... it's a bear, but it's so much fun.

And hey, since I'm not sleeping, I have plenty of time to write.  Right?