Showing posts with label Civil War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Civil War. Show all posts

Friday, September 4, 2020

Plot Bunny Mob

Plot bunnies are everywhere. In everything. In everyone. In snippets of conversations overheard in what passes for public these days. There's no need to hunt them. If you're open to them, you'll stumble over them at every turn. A little like tripping over a cat who wants to be fed.

Plot bunnies carry no malice as far as I can tell. Might they be distractions wrought by a brain desperate for a bit of cognitive conservation of resources? Sure. Human brains consume a crazy high percentage of the daily calories we consume. We're designed to want to shirk heavy mental loads. So along come plot bunnies to tempt us to follow them into the weeds in a day-dreamy daze. They could also just be the delight of human brains that are designed to take a bunch of disparate data bits and combine them into new and interesting patterns.

I can't say I notice that plot bunnies strike more often while I'm supposed to be working on something else. In fact, quite the contrary. For me they mob me when I'm already doing something else - something like taking a walk, washing dishes, vacuuming the floor - anything physical that requires low cognitive input. Ideas come gamboling out of nowhere. So it pays to have a strategy for handling them. Otherwise, you end up starting twenty bijillionty things and finishing exactly zero. Don't ask how I know this.

I pat my plot bunnies on their furry little heads, smile, and say, "It takes a number, and it stands in line." The idea gets jotted down in barest form - a few sentences - just enough to spark the idea back into life at a later time. The file gets a name and gets remanded to a folder with the imaginative name of "Story Ideas." 

Have I ever mined that folder? Indeed, I have. The Nightmare Ink books were an idea languishing in "Story Ideas" folder when I hauled it out and got to serious work on it. The books and the original plot bunny bear only the slightest resemblance to one another. When a bunny graduates from the "Story Idea" folder, it gets a name of its own that serves as the working title for whatever it's going to become. 

It means I have plot bunnies in various stages of metamorphosis. Some are still itty-bitty things nibbling grass. Others have turned into the Vorpal Bunny of Antioch. They've got these big teeth. I have one of them chewing on me right now. It looks a lot like Frankenstein's bunny, being a mishmash of Civil War historical, fantasy, and a little horror. It doesn't know what it wants to grow up to be, so we just keep staring at one another over the pages of the SFR I'm contracted for. So yes. Sometimes, the plot bunnies start looking a little like the clown from IT.

Friday, July 12, 2019

The Dream List

Y'all, I just turned in The Book I Thought I'd Never Finish. Does that one count? No? Okay. Projects I want to work on:

1. For a decade I wanted to finish the arc of the SFR series I started in 2010. Now, thanks to The Wild Rose Press, I get to do that. We'll see whether it was worth the wait. At this point, there are only two books left to write - one for Colonel Kirthin Turrel and one for Her Majesty Queen Eilod Saoyrse. That's about all I can say about those books at this point.
2.  There are a couple of hot novellas that happen in the same story universe as the SFR novels. I have two of those stories at least half done. Now I want them finished. The sexy shorts are a lot of fun. I find them to be great palate cleansers after the bigger novels. But these guys don't have a contract. The novels do. So these two take a number and stand in line.
3. There's a little piece of weird sitting on my hard drive called The Curse of the Lorelei - It's spy versus spy during an oddly haunted Civil War. It's meant to be a slow burn romance that takes a couple of books to pay off. I have the first book done, but it needs a little finessing before it sees the light of day. But. Contract for other books, right? Again. This book takes a number and stands in line.

All of this is predicated on the notion that I never again have an idea that grabs me by the throat and threatens me into writing it.

Friday, October 21, 2016

Family Stories

Because last week was the anniversary of my grandmother's death and because I am in nearing the end of a draft on a story set in New Orleans, I've got family on the brain. In part, because my mother's family is from the south. And in part because both in the story I'm finishing and in my life, family plays a complicated role.

This photo at right is of my grandfather Watson. He's the man on the right, in the suit and tie. This is in Arkansas, taken just after a church meeting. I have no notion of the year. Of all my family ties, my relationship with him was one of the least complicated. He and my grandmother both believed that my sister and I could do no wrong. We had an advantage, having both been born in Alaska, so far away form either set of grandparents. I met my maternal grandparents for the first time with I was five. I think they thought they had five years of spoiling to make up for. They were lovely people who accepted me without question and without fail, simply because I was their daughter's daughter.

But you know, they had six children. And those six children all had children. Some divorced, remarried and had still more children. By the time I'd come along, some of those children had married and started having children. That's a lot of people to have in the house at Thanksgiving. It's also a lot of people with a lot of different opinions, some diametrically opposed to my own. There are interdependencies and drama and accusations of terrible things. Dynamics of love and jealousy, rivalry and kinship are etched deep into the people who make up the family. We are mostly Scots/Irish and in the south, the clan identity never quite gave way. Your blood is your tribe for good or for ill. In reality, it's both. We have a body of stories in this part of my family - stories like Four Brothers Come to America and Marry Four Brothers. It was a headline in a local paper when a many times great grandfather arrived from Scotland. He and his brothers married four sisters whose last name was Brothers. When the Civil War came around, the entire line died out save for one lone boy who'd been too young to enlist. These make up a huge portion of our identity on Mom's side of the family. They're intertwined with the complicated side - like the occasional display of bigotry. I don't get to embrace one and ignore the other. They are part and messy parcel of the family.

And I'm not here to get up on a soapbox about anything. What I want is to have this complex, sometimes maddening, but ultimately loving and fertile ground woven into the story I'm finishing because it so defines the Southern experience and I suspect a big portion of the Civil War - in that it sundered families, both from an ideological stand point  and from the stand point that so many men died. The heroine of the story is already an orphan. She has no idea who she is. But she knows family. Crazy, maddening, loving and protective family. She'll do anything to protect them. Anything.