I haven’t been here in a long, long time. Barnes and Noble, that is. Sunday mornings are sometimes spent at home, doing laundry and working on stuff while Superman takes the spawn to religious school. Or they’re spent buying groceries and running errands while the spawn are in religious school. Or, sometimes, but not lately, they’re spent at the Barnes and Noble writing.
I worked on some articles today (I write for Helium.com on a variety of subjects, nothing fancy.) Wrote a new “How-To” Guide for Helium (on how to apologize to your girlfriend, of all things!) and I checked out the shelves for my books.
Didn’t see any.
Saw books by Lauren Dane, Cynthia Eden and Beth Kery — oh, and I did see Naughty Bits 2 so I guess I am on the shelves here after all. Checked out the final two books in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series. Looked at all the teen books. There’s really a plethora of paranormal teen fiction out there right now, just the kind of thing I loved as a teen and still do. Also lots of books about angst and woe. Guess what, I like that, too.
Tomorrow I’ll get back to working on By Its Thorns, and I have confidence I’ll get back into the groove. I feel…overflowing…with ideas lately. I write them down. Sometimes I even plot them out a bit. I keep a notebook of idea snippets, though lately I’ve taken to writing a plot synopsis on the computer instead of doing it long-hand, and I made a folder on my hard drive to save all these “proposals.” My problem is not lack of ideas, but too many.
It’s a good place to be. Full of ideas. Full of the feeling I could actually write most of them, that the ones I really like, the ones that have been hanging around, in some cases, for years, are good ideas. Viable. They’ll be good books, if I have the chance to write them, which really depends on a lot of things, since some of them aren’t in genres for which I have current contracts and would therefore require I get new! exciting! contracts!
I’m all for that.
I don’t want to write the same kinds of books forever. Rather, I do — I want to keep writing what I love and what I think I’m maybe a little good at, or at least decently skilled. But that doesn’t mean I want to write ONLY those books. I have a lot of books in me and the drive to write them.
One of the problems in becoming complacent, in writing the same sort of books over and over, is that I could forget how to write something else. Like, how exciting it is to follow a different path, not the same formula (and listen, there’s always a formula, or else how would you be able to do the same thing over and over?) — to remind myself that I don’t have to keep to the restraints of certain genres, or I don’t have to limit myself to one certain kind of plot point; that some things in some books are necessarily more important than in other kinds, and what will simply not work in an erotic romance is totally fine in horror novel.
Yeah.
I like that.
I want to keep doing this for a long time, and I don’t want to run out of enthusiasm. I don’t think I’ll run out of ideas. I guess you never know. But for now, I have notebooks and documents full of some crazy, crazy ass shit, ya’ll.
Write on!
M
February 28th, 2010 at 6:38 pm · Link
Bring it. Can’t wait.
March 2nd, 2010 at 11:48 am · Link
@Rosie: ROSIEEEEEEE! hi!
March 16th, 2010 at 12:38 am · Link
I’m a big fan of yours and I look forward to whatever spills out of your mind, whether in a book or in a blog post.
This, I have to say, is the most inspirational thing I’ve read lately. I personify myself as a romance writer. And sometimes, I forgot that romance is many things.
That writing in itself, is many, many things. Mish-mashed into something fantastic.
Thanks for that reminder, Megan. Looking forward to everything you come up with!