Unexpected Inspiration

nspiration is a tricky thing, and there’s always all kinds of advice about it. Don’t wait for inspiration to write, seems to be the most common, yet interestingly one of the first questions people ask is where do you find your inspiration? One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that actually you don’t. Inspiration finds you. Sometimes it finds you in a painting, or a song, or a movie or a novel, or even in real life circumstances. But more often than not when inspiration does find you it is almost always at the worst possible time, and generally when you can’t get to a pen. Sometimes inspiration finds you in the dead of night, when you’re attempting to sleep. Believe me, I’ve been there. Many times. For instance, a few days ago I happened to be surfing one of my favorite websites, Tumblr, as I often do, and came across a piece of fan art, a simple, seemingly innocuous drawing that I liked, but didn’t really ring any bells right then. It was not until a few hours later, as I was in bed attempting to sleep, that the story formulated itself, and before I knew it, I was up like a shot, pulling up my laptop and a text editor (I generally don’t like to start in Scrivener when it’s just an idea or possibly even just a passing thought), but as I continued to write it, I realized that not only was it not going to be for book 3 (as I had sort of hoped) it was the start of what would be the first chapter of one of the books I had intended to start after book 3. The one with the sequel, no less, and the one I had wanted desperately not to write, after book 3. A part of me however, knew that it would be the first thing I wrote, simply because it was so fresh in my mind and I am genuinely excited for the book. I love the idea and the concept and it’s definitely soo much different from what the Secrets of Witches trilogy is, I think the reason that mentally I wanted to hold off on it was because it would come with a sequel which means that I pretty much will have to work on that before I can work on the other project which is taking over my mind. Don’t I?

Is there any kind of rule with sequels that there is with series that say if I know that I’m going to make a sequel that I have to write it before I write anything else? It’s not as if movie directors stop making movies between their sequels, so why should an author?

This is not by any means to say I have control over which book comes next, frankly, the fact that I wrote about 3k words out of the blue for this book could mean nothing. It could just be a passing notion or a jumping off point for me. Maybe I’ll get the inspiration to write the sequel directly after or maybe the other book will jump out at me. Either way, I still have to get the final Secrets of Witches novel done before anything else.