Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 239

Chick Flick Bust

I spent this morning helping get the church set up for Advent. My main job was polishing the Advent wreath candelabra and then refilling the candles with oil (instead of using wax candles, we have these things that look like candles but that are actually oil lamps). And then I helped decorate the Christmas tree. It was fun, but I think I may have inadvertently landed myself in the altar guild. I suppose that wouldn't be so bad. It's a rotating thing and not that much work.

My planned weekend of chick flicks kind of fizzled out, mostly because the first couple of movies I chose to watch turned me off chick flicks entirely for a while and I had to switch to documentaries and crime dramas to clear my palate.

First, there was Love and Other Drugs, which was essentially a Lifetime Disease of the Week movie, only with lots more nudity. Lots and lots of nudity and fairly graphic sex. This is not a movie to watch with your parents or with anyone of the opposite sex with whom you don't have a really good comfort zone. Definitely not a first-date movie. A pharmaceutical salesman meets a woman with early-onset Parkinson's disease and has some grand idea that since she must go to a lot of doctors, she could probably provide him good introductions to doctors he could sell to. Somehow that turns into one of those "this is just sex, it doesn't mean anything" non-relationships, but then of course they start falling in love, but then there's her illness, and along the way a new drug that I'm not going to name because it will attract tons of spam comments gets introduced. I'm not sure if this movie wants to be some grand statement on the health care and pharmaceutical industries, some exploration of love and disease, a raunchy guy version of a romantic comedy, or what, but it didn't work for me. I guess I'm just old-fashioned, but I like the idea of the sex coming after you fall in love, not before, and if the characters talk so much about how they don't really care for each other, why am I supposed to care about them or their relationship?

Then there was Going the Distance, which was just lame without trying to be profound and with less nudity, though with enough sex to make it another bad movie to watch with your parents/on a first date. This one's about a couple who meets in New York, has a one-night stand (sigh, I get that the whole no sex before marriage thing has totally gone by the cultural wayside, but does it always have to come before love now?), then decides they want to see each other again -- except she's only there for a summer internship during grad school and she'll be returning to Stanford in the fall, so it's supposed to be just for fun, no deep feelings. Of course, they do develop feelings, so they decide to try to maintain a long-distance relationship. They both work in fields where jobs are hard to find, and she doesn't want to sacrifice her career for a relationship because she's done that once before and that's why she's so far behind in life. So, there's lots of waffling and whining and sulking. I will give this one credit, though, for not having the Romantic Comedy Dash. No one makes the desperate, last-second sprint to reach the other person before it's too late. There's not even a publicly humiliating declaration of feelings.

However, both do show the "falling in love" process via montage to a pop song and both rely on the current gross-out trend of the guy having friends or family members who are the overgrown man-child type who talk way too much about bodily functions and who eavesdrop on the relationship.

After that, I resorted to watching the British series Whitechapel OnDemand. It's about a squad of detectives in the Whitechapel station who find themselves dealing with a copycat serial killer who's reproducing all the Jack the Ripper killings. That part was interesting, but what I really loved was the team. The detectives are a bunch of slobs who may even be a bit lazy, and then they get assigned a new boss who's relatively new and inexperienced but very politically connected and on a fast track to bigger and better things. He's supposedly just in this job long enough to gain that little bit of credibility before moving on in the hierarchy, and the team has zero respect for him at first. But as they investigate the case, they all start gradually changing. He learns a lot and learns to respect them, and they start smartening up their act as they grow to respect him. It was really fun (if a bit gory). I was mostly watching for the team stuff and read while they went through all the Ripper parts, which were a bit much for me.

I had some romantic comedies on DVD, but after those first two, I was afraid to try anything else new, and I wasn't in the mood for anything I had that was a known quantity. Next weekend starts all the Christmas programming, which means Lifetime starts the one time of the year when people are allowed to have happy endings instead of learning that their spouses are serial killers. We get to watch a bunch of Canadian and/or B-list actors (lots of SyFy channel regulars) fall in love in a Christmassy setting. Though I draw the line at any of those "Santa needs a wife" movies because Santa Claus is not my idea of a romantic fantasy.

Starting the Weekend Early

I felt somewhat "off" all day yesterday, for reasons I'm not entirely sure of, but it looks like today will be better. For one thing, I got up at a slightly more reasonable time without having had realistic nightmares, and then my e-mail has been working. The main thing I need to do today is read, and it's a lovely, if chilly, day today -- one of my two favorite kinds of fall weather. It's what you might call "crisp" -- so I think I'll take another long walk and then sit in the woods to read. I've got Black Forest ham, good crusty bread and a few treats. I've been trying to de-spice my Thermos to carry ordinary tea. I thought the lingering spice scent might have come from the chai I took last week, but then I remembered that this was the Thermos I took to cold weather football games when I was in high school, which means it carried a lot of spicy tea.

It wasn't real spiced tea, though. I hadn't started learning about tea or drinking it (other than iced) at the time, but one of the popular "gifts from the kitchen" in those days was this spiced tea mix that involved lemon-flavored instant tea, Tang, cinnamon and cloves. You mixed a couple of spoons of this mix with hot water for hot, spicy tea. It was very popular as a teacher gift, presented in jars or tins, which is why we had a lot of it. It sounds hideous to me now (instant tea! Ew!), but I recall liking it quite a lot, and it made for a good warm drink while sitting in the stands during a football game. And now my Thermos smells like that stuff. It seems to have permeated the plastic. But it's been soaking with baking soda all week, and I think any traces of spice smell are all in my mind. If not, I guess I'll resign myself to bringing spicy teas on my walks.

I had this whole deep analysis of the fairy-tale themed shows currently on TV planned, but I suspect it would have gone epic, and I'm not really in the mood to do it justice now. That's the kind of thing I have to write the night before, and last night I was at dance class. Maybe I'll put it together over the Thanksgiving holiday to have to post some day in December, when I hope I'll be busy with income-producing work.

So, instead, I'm going to head off on my afternoon walk/reading time, then tonight it's a good TV night, and then a weekend of chick flicks.

Yep, it's Thursday

I'm really understanding Douglas Adams and his inability to get the hang of Thursdays. I started my day by oversleeping extremely. I got to bed late last night, then had very realistic nightmares. I had the hardest time dragging myself out of bed this morning. There was whimpering.

And then I couldn't get into my e-mail. I could occasionally get into my personal account that I use for most business, but my domain name account just hangs. Mostly, I get fan mail there, but that's the address my potential new client has been contacting me at, so I don't know if they're trying to reach me today. I got desperate enough while trying to get into my main e-mail that I resorted to trying to set up Outlook so I didn't have to use webmail, but that hasn't been successful. There's some security setting that isn't working, and all the online troubleshooting is for the Windows version of Outlook that's one year older than the Mac version I have.

I think this is all a sign that this should be a reading day. Or I should start my weekend early. I'd already been looking forward to the weekend because it's the last one in a while in which I have no appointments, obligations or plans. I'm thinking it's going to be a chick flick extravaganza. There are some movies on HBO OnDemand, and then I have DVDs I've never watched. I also have popcorn, something pink and sparkly, good bread (finally!), cheese and chocolate, plus ingredients for pizza. I may even get out the pink, fuzzy bathrobe (it sounds like I'm really into pink, and I'm so not, but sometimes it just works).

And all of this sort of counts for work (well, not the food, but the movies) because a couple of the ideas I'm working on kind of fit the mold of romantic comedy, but with a twist, and looking at "normal" romantic comedies is part of the research.

I think tomorrow will also be another long walk. I need to escape into my fantasy world for a while.

Now to go read and maybe my e-mail will repair itself while I'm gone.

Ideas: Is it Enough?

I had a reader question that coincided with something I'd been thinking about, so I'm going to talk about ideas. Not where to get ideas. If you're having to ask where you can get ideas, then maybe you're not cut out to be a writer. Every writer I've ever known has had far more ideas than could ever be written in one lifetime. Ideas are everywhere, and they come constantly. The hard part is turning ideas into a book, and that's what I'll talk about.

The first trick is figuring out which ideas are enough to sustain a story. Not all of them are. A story needs conflict, and the longer the story, the more complex or strong the conflict needs to be. A novel needs a conflict that isn't easily resolved, that may be able to change or grow and that will affect the main characters on multiple levels, both internal and external. Dealing with this conflict should require the characters to make some serious choices that will change them in some way. When evaluating an idea, think about the potential for conflict and how the conflict might be resolved. If the conflict could be resolved if all the main characters just sat down and had a conversation (and there's no good reason for them not to have that conversation), then you don't have the kind of conflict that can sustain a story.

A novel also involves a lot of events. A good way to see if there are enough potential events to flesh out a novel in your idea is to make a list. See if you can come up with a list of at least twenty events that are inherent in your story idea. These don't have to be entire scenes -- several events could occur in one scene -- and you don't have to develop these events into one scene, but you need to figure out if stuff can happen.

But if your idea doesn't contain all the conflict or events you need to develop a story, that doesn't mean it's a useless idea. I often find that two different ideas may merge to create a solid idea. I have a lot of ideas floating around in my head at any given time, and every so often one may come to the surface and I'll think about it. I may add something to it when I think about it, and if it's still not "done," then I'll let it go back into the general mix. That's where ideas may collide or merge with each other and turn into something I can build a story on.

Ideas also need some input. Research can give you the kind of input that will add flesh to an idea. Even if you're writing about a subject you know, research will help spark additional ideas. Read about the setting -- time and place. Read about business types or careers related to your story. Read memoirs or biographies about people similar to your characters or who had to do the kinds of things your characters may have to do. I often find myself reading about historical situations even for books that will be in a contemporary setting, since history does tend to repeat itself. A war, conflict, crisis or other event may have parallels to something in my idea, even if it's on a much smaller scale in my story. You can also research elements that show up in a story -- music, art, various cultures, food, clothing, technology, etc. This kind of research may help you find sources of conflict or ways to add layers to the conflict in your basic idea and may give you ideas for more story events.

Even if you've got an idea that can sustain a story, turning an idea into a novel takes a lot of work, and that's what I'll talk about next.

Re-entering the Business World

I had a very business-y day yesterday, dealing with the paperwork to start my new freelance job, and the fact that it's been a long time since I've had to deal with this kind of stuff really showed. First, I needed a new cartridge for my laser printer. The old one still has some juice in it, but it made messy print-outs. It was fine for internal use, but it wouldn't work for something that had to be scanned or faxed. Then I went to fax the documents (these were PDFs that had to be signed, and I don't think I have the software to add a signature to a PDF, so that meant I couldn't do it without hard copy), and my fax machine totally died mid-way through. No dial tone, no read-out electronically. So I resorted to scanning on my flat-bed scanner, which meant a multi-page document took a while. Then I discovered that there's some kind of disconnect between my scanner and my new computer, even though I have the current driver for the scanner. The document would look fine in the preview window of the image capture application, but then the actual scanned document would be just a bunch of wavy lines. I resorted to scanning to the old computer, then transferring the files to the new computer to e-mail them.

Since my color ink jet printer is also dead, I may get an all-in-one fax/scanner/printer/copier. Most of my fiction work has been done entirely electronically, with no need for printing or faxing. The normal business world may be different. Both the fax and the scanner are at least ten years old. I probably could have tinkered with settings to make the scanner work, but I didn't have the time or patience and went with what I knew would work to send the documents I need to start work.

I'm hoping for a little less stress/hassle today. I'm also looking forward to immersing myself in fiction for a while. I have brainstorming to do, which means getting out the crayons and colored markers and letting myself get wildly creative. I want to apply some of the techniques I found in that book on creativity I found at the warehouse sale. After yesterday being all business, a good creative day should be fun.

It's also apparently Clean Out Your Refrigerator Day, so if I can find the hazmat suit, I may give that a shot. It's the freezer that's the real issue. I have a vacuum sealer, which means I have a bad habit of buying in bulk, sealing and freezing, and then forgetting what I have and buying more. December may be "live out of the freezer" month.

The Magical Land Across the Bridge

I did eventually drag myself out of the house to take my hike/walk, and I'm glad I did because it was pretty much a perfect day. I discovered that they've created a new way to get to the trails along the river from my neighborhood, and that makes it much easier to get there. There's a kind of canal/lake down the side of the neighborhood, and then the levee, and then the river basin where the park is. Before, the only way to get to the park was to go to around the lake, so it was about 40 minutes of walking from my house to get to the park to then start the walk in the woods. Now they've built a bridge from the middle of the neighborhood, at the end of the walking path that runs by the library, so I can get all the way to the park without walking along or crossing surface streets, and it's only about five to ten minutes beyond the library (I didn't time it, but that's what it felt like).

There's also something kind of magical about it. It reminds me of Stardust, where there's the Wall outside the village, and on the other side of it is a magical world that you can't really see from our world. In this case, there's a levee, and you can't see what's on the other side. You cross a bridge (iron, to keep the fairies on the other side out, of course) and climb the levee, and from the top, you can see both the neighborhood on one side and the forest on the other.

Here's the view of the bridge and the neighborhood from the top of the levee:



And then you follow the path (it sort of seems like it should be made of yellow bricks) down the other side of the levee, and it feels like the "real" world disappears as you enter this new world and follow the path into the woods:



The path stays mostly away from the river (probably because the river tends to flood), but there are spots where you can glimpse it between the trees:



I was out for about two and a half hours, though I did take a few breaks. There are occasional park benches, and I stopped to eat my sandwich, walked a bit more and then stopped to eat my apple, and then before I headed home I sat and had tea and cookies while reading a bit. It was just the right weather for it, warm enough to be comfortable but not warm enough to get hot with the walking. By tea time it was just slightly chilly. I haven't thoroughly explored the whole area. For instance, there's a non-paved path that I don't think is meant to be an official path, but there aren't any keep-out signs. I saw a couple of armadillos rooting through the underbrush, and there were a lot of squirrels. I will have to make a habit out of this. Last summer, they were doing a sermon series at church about sacred spaces -- the places that feed your soul and make you feel close to God -- and there was some discussion about beach vs. mountain. I think I'm a forest person, though I need some water in my forest, like a stream, river or lake. I like the whispering sound the wind makes as it blows through the trees, the crunch of leaves under foot, and the way the sunlight filters through laves and branches to dapple the ground. I think it would be good for my soul to escape to my magical land regularly.

And to top it all off, I was able to salvage a loaf of bread out of the starter that didn't really start. It did eventually get bubbly, but I figured it wasn't enough to make the whole recipe rise, so I improvised. It wasn't the best bread I've ever made, but it was just enough to enjoy with my cheese.

Then I had a very busy weekend and I would love to hibernate today, but I have to do some forms for this freelance gig, and my printer just completely ran out of toner, so I must leave the house.

Thwarted Plans

I'm starting to rethink my grand plans for the day. It started last night when I stopped by the grocery store after ballet class to get supplies. They had all their gourmet cheeses on sale, along with Black Forest ham. My plan was to get some French bread to make a sandwich to take on my hike and then to have with my cheeses and maybe a glass of wine for dinner. But they were out of French bread. Because I don't deal well with having my plans thwarted, I came home and decided to make my own. It wouldn't be ready for a lunch sandwich, but I had some sandwich rolls in the freezer, and I'd still be able to have my cheese for dinner. I like to make a rustic bread that uses a starter you have to make the night before, so I mixed up the starter right away. For a moment, I contemplated leaving it at room temperature instead of in the refrigerator and then getting up in the night to make the dough before going back to bed while it rose (you can leave the starter at room temperature for 6 hours or in the refrigerator for 14 hours) so I could have bread for lunch, but I'm glad I decided not to because when I got up in the morning (at a reasonable hour), it turned out that the starter didn't start.

At first, I thought maybe I'd done something wrong, and I was thinking about starting over with a regular French bread, but then I thought before I started that, I ought to test my yeast. It turns out that the yeast I just bought last week was dead. I put it in warm water with sugar, and nothing happened.

I think I've talked myself out of making bread because I also need to make a batch of cookies today. I'm currently wavering on that hike/long walk because the wind was looking pretty gusty, but it seems to have calmed a bit, so maybe I will go. This is one of those things I keep saying I'm going to do but that I never end up doing. Things may get busy for me in the coming weeks if that freelance opportunity comes through, so I may as well take a "vacation" when I can get it. I have good ham and cheese, even if I don't have good bread (this neighborhood really needs a good bakery -- about the only bread I can buy without getting in a car is naan). I can make a small Thermos of tea, I've got some Honeycrisp apples and I've got some slightly imperfect cookies. It's a lovely day, even if there is a strong breeze.

There, I think I've just talked myself into it. Now to make my picnic lunch.

Preschool Social Dynamics

I managed to hit the sweet spot in timing for running errands this morning. I got gas without needing air and artillery support, even pulling right up to a pump (though there were at least two pumps that were blocked by people parking badly at the pump they were using), and then hit Target when it was nearly empty and there was no line to check out. Meanwhile, I got an incentive to clean my desk and keep it clear. In the dollar section at Target, they had a desk blotter 2012 calendar, with plenty of space on each day for appointments, plus room around the edges for notes and to-do lists. Now I just need to clear off enough desk space to be able to fit it and keep it clear enough to keep using it. I think the space for notes and lists should eliminate some of the stuff that goes on my desk.

We had a very trying night with the preschoolers, thanks mostly to preschool social dynamics. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a Wild Kingdom type show, observing the creatures as they interact with each other, except they don't let me have a tranquilizer gun. To start with, we had a clingy one in tears because she didn't want her mother to leave. I ended up with her on my lap, crying on me, for a while, until the rhythm band instruments came out and she forgot she was sad. Then we had the weirdest game of musical chairs I'd ever seen. Since the last time we played that, the kids were crushed and devastated when they were out, we decided to let the ones who were out play instruments. While we still had one or two who were actively competing in the game, most of the rest preferred the instruments. We'd stop the music and have three chairs remaining empty while the kids just stood around, refusing to sit in one because they wanted to be out. We ended up having to stop the game because no one was playing. Then once we were playing the instruments, the social dynamics came up. We were trying to rotate through who got instruments like the drums, small cymbals and wood blocks and who just got the sticks, but then there were those who refused to give up their instruments when it was time to rotate and those who refused to participate when they just had sticks. So we had to take up the instruments and move on to something else.

Then we have a very odd best friend dynamic. There are two girls who are apparently best friends and do everything together. They even carpool to come to choir. One seems much older and more mature and is a lot more confident (she's also really tall, the size of some of the first graders) while the other one still has a lot of baby to her, she doesn't always participate and hangs back shyly. Strangely, though, it's the little one who is dominant and knows it. The other one who seems so much more socially advanced will defer to the other one on every decision, wants to do whatever the other one does and seems much more desperate to have the other one as her friend. We had an activity where the kids needed to find a partner, and the one girl just assumed that her best friend would be her partner, but her friend refused. I think she thought she'd then get me as her partner, but I told her I was the teacher and wouldn't be anyone's partner. I sensed some serious hurt feelings about to kick in, so I paired off the rejected one with a girl who didn't yet have a partner, and they made a good team, but the rejector refused to work with anyone. I think maybe next time we'll have to assign partners or do some kind of random selection because letting them choose turns into a political mess. I could have used that tranquilizer gun. I may need to work on helping that one girl be a little more independent of her friend. Her dad seems to be aware of the situation, and he's been working on it, too, but maybe separating them some in choir will help.

If I get desperate enough to go back to school and study child psychology, I think I have the makings for my dissertation field research.

But today is cookie baking day, and since tomorrow is supposed to be really nice and I have nothing urgent to do, I think I'm going to pack a picnic and take a long walk/hike over to the river. We're starting to get some fall color, and I want to walk in the woods.

Unwelcome Twists

I've been freakishly productive this week, getting through everything on my to-do list, accomplishing house cleaning and even being fairly creative. Monday I cleaned my kitchen pretty thoroughly, and in spite of cooking dinner both Monday night and last night, it's still clean. Yesterday, I cleaned out my bathroom/closet area. My bathroom is kind of like a dressing room, where it's a fairly large room (for a bathroom) that has the usual bathroom stuff plus closets and open space in front of the closets, with mirrored doors on the closets that work kind of like fitting room mirrors. I put a chair in that area that was originally intended to be for sitting down while putting on shoes, but it turned into The Chair of Doom, where clothes I took out then changed my mind about, clothes I wore so briefly that I don't need to put them in the clothes hamper and sometimes even clothes I just need to fold and put away after doing laundry go to die. It was spilling over to the floor, and I made the room a lot neater by either putting away or washing everything that was on the chair. I also cleaned out the floor of one side of the closet, and I emptied the secondary Chair of Doom in my bedroom. Today's task is a little more daunting. I plan to clean my desk and the area around my desk.

While doing all this mindless work, the creative part of my brain kicked into high gear, and all those Inconvenient Midpoint Ideas were bobbing to the surface. I realized that some of the research for two of them overlaps, in spite of them actually being very different kinds of stories, so I can research two potential stories at once.

Speaking of midpoints, when I was talking last week about being leery of buying books at today's prices because so many have disappointed me, it wasn't something that the preview feature for e-books would help with. What I've found happening a lot lately is that the book makes a sharp turn about midway through and becomes something entirely different that isn't anything like what was mentioned in the cover copy or set up in the opening chapters. I can sometimes deal with a sharp turn into a darker story when the characters remain true to themselves, so that I can still like the characters I liked in the beginning, even if they're going through much more difficult stuff. But what I've seen a lot of lately is the characters themselves changing midway through a book, in addition to the story changing, and in a way that bothers me. I'll be going along, enjoying this fun adventure with characters I like, and then suddenly one of the main characters turns into a demon (it's so often a demon) and starts killing the other characters, and I'm saying, "But wait! I thought he was the hero! Okay, so he is killing the bad guys, but he's also killing the good guys -- including that girl I thought was perfect for him -- and bringing the world to the brink of destruction. I did not sign up for this!" I'm not a big fan of demon stories, but most of them are good enough to put it in the title or in the cover copy, since demons are apparently big now and a lot of people like them. But these are in books where there's no hint of demons previously. It doesn't have to be demons, though. It's just anything where the characters seem to abruptly change and start doing things that make it impossible for me to care about them.

Sometimes it strikes me as the author having an Inconvenient Midpoint Idea and just incorporating it into the book he's writing, since he's totally stuck at the middle and isn't sure what to do. It's like, "Hey, I know! The hero turns into a demon and kills everyone!" And then the editor's response, instead of being, "Um, did you maybe get your manuscript pages mixed up? Because the second half of this book doesn't seem to fit the first half. And we've already designed and printed the covers," is more like, "Wow! It's so unexpected! I love it!" I suppose it is unexpected if the hero turns into the villain and attacks the heroine midway through the book instead of falling in love with her and teaming up to defeat the bad guys, but to me it's not a very satisfying read. I get nervous now whenever I reach the middle of a book, and I'll skip ahead and read a random page to make sure the main characters are still more or less the same people they were and that the word "demon" doesn't come up too often. I was reading a book yesterday that made me really nervous as I neared the middle because I could see the possibility of things going wonky, but it ended up working out okay -- enough that I may actually buy a copy after getting it from the library (it's from a publisher whose books tend to do that sharp veer into "Huh?" so I was leery of buying it and didn't read it until the library finally got a copy). I'm not sure how to avoid this kind of trap since the usual book-buying tricks don't seem to work. About the only thing that might flag this is the reader reviews on Amazon, but I so often tend to disagree with them, and it seems like the reviewers think the twist I hate is brilliant writing.

Maybe I just have bad taste.

I let myself spend most of the past couple of days reading mostly for fun, but today will be more of a work day, with desk cleaning and research reading.

Tinfoil Hats and Inconvenient Ideas

I may need to start wearing tinfoil hats because either I'm tapping into other people's brainwaves and picking up on their ideas or other people are tapping into my brainwaves and picking up on my ideas.

The latest case: Yesterday I was taking advantage of having some free time by cleaning my kitchen thoroughly. As so often happens when I'm doing mindless work, an old Inconvenient Midpoint Idea bubbled up to the surface.

As an aside, an Inconvenient Midpoint Idea is one of those shiny new ideas that strikes just when you're slogging through the middle of a book, when you've passed the fun and excitement of initially creating the characters and discovering their world but you aren't yet at the exciting conclusion. You're doing the hard part that requires thinking and planning, and at times you're tempted to write "and then the aliens landed and killed everyone. The End." The Inconvenient Midpoint Idea is The Other Woman of writing. The book you're working on is the reality of what happens after the initial thrill of the idea, when it's work that's sometimes tedious. It's the very non-glamorous part of writing. But then that shiny new idea pops up, and it's all fantasy. It doesn't yet have all the work and thinking attached to it, and it's easy to forget that if you pursue it, eventually it will be the book you'll be slogging through when yet another idea pops up. A lot of potential writing careers are sabotaged by the Inconvenient Midpoint Idea when writers are lured by the shiny new idea that's so much better than the thing they're working on, and as a result, they never actually finish a book because they jump to the new idea when things get hard.

This particular Inconvenient Midpoint Idea hit me in the spring this year, and it was particularly inconvenient because it was an idea for a sequel to the book I was working on. There was no point in even stopping to consider this idea until I finished the current book and sold it, but that didn't stop it from consuming my brain. I did a big brain dump, just writing down everything in my head about it, and that allowed me to submerge it in my subconscious so I could get back to work. Since I've finished that book, that idea bounced up for further consideration.

And that's when I realized that my idea is very similar to a couple of things that have come on TV between then and now -- things I had no idea were coming when I had this idea. Considering production schedules, I'd guess they were gearing up for production, maybe finalizing the initial scripts, around the time I got my idea.

Of course, these ideas would have been in development for some time, but then so was mine. It actually started with a dream I had years ago when I essentially dreamed an episode of a TV series. I liked some of the plot elements of that dream and mentally played with them off and on, figuring out how they might develop over a hypothetical season of the series (yes, this is how I amuse myself). I really liked the story I came up with for the "season finale," and then I started trying to figure out how I could take that story and remove it from the universe of that series, file off the serial numbers, cast new characters and make it an entirely new story. I'd already stolen another aspect of the daydreaming that came out of this dream for something else, but this one was more difficult.

So the Inconvenient Midpoint Idea that came probably around the time these series that turned out to be based on something really similar were going into production was about how that concept could work with the characters I was writing at the time, and then I knew how I could make use of that concept, with it being the natural follow-up to what I had planned to happen at the end of the book I was working on. That turned it from an "idea" to a "story idea."

And, no, I'm not telling what it is because I think by the time I'm through with it I'll be the only one who notices the similarities, but if I say something, then that will be waving a red flag so people will be looking for parallels or similarities. If it ever gets published. And, no, the idea doesn't have anything to do with fairy tales, so that's not the trend I subconsciously plucked out of the ether. There was one thing I was planning to throw in as what would have been a subtle inside joke that I will have to change because that will make the comparisons more obvious now, but while I'm exploring similar things, the actual story will end up being very different.

But, really, I may have to shield my brain when I'm working. I don't like having to twist so hard to avoid looking like I'm copying. It's bad enough that the book I was reading yesterday turns out to have some thematic similarities and even similar terminology to a book I wrote last year. It's different enough that I might be the only one who sees the similarities, but it's still disconcerting.