Deja Vu All Over Again

Shout out to Yogi Berra, who sadly passed away this week! I have lived by his wisdom my whole life (yes, when there was a fork in the road, I would take it).

As I mentioned last week, I’m starting to write a new book. The catch is that it’s not really a new book, at least, not to me.

This is, in fact, a rather old book—I actually started writing it in 2009. The thing is, it really wasn’t working. Not for me. To be honest, I can’t quite tell you why it wasn’t working, but I do remember that after I wrote the first five chapters of the book, my interest in it just fizzled out. And if I’m not interested in writing the book, you can be sure no one will be interested in reading it. So, I stopped writing it and went on to another project.

But the concept was a good one—a young woman, terrified of falling, is forced to rent and live in an apartment where one whole wall is just windows. She can’t even step into the apartment without feeling like she’s going to fall out of it. It’s terrifying. But she has to live there (blackmailed by her boss to cover up an illicit affair of his). In order to rid herself of this fear, her best friend asks a co-worker who can hypnotize people to put the heroine under. He does, and she travels back in time to a previous life. From there we learn how she got this fear of falling.

It’s really a fun and interesting story; time-travels are always different and entertaining. And, of course, the book fits into my Vallen world very nicely (I’ll tell you about that next week).  Because of all this, I just haven’t been able to get the book out of my mind in all these years. I’ve kept telling myself that I would dig into the story and my preparations for it and find out why it wasn’t working, why I lost interest in writing it. I promised myself that I would write this book.

So, here I am, keeping my promise. As I do so, though, not only am I having fun rediscovering the characters I created earlier (not too bad, if I say so myself), and I’m recreating and deepening the plot I had sketched out earlier. As I’m doing so, I’m making sure that my characters are deep, three-dimensional people with plenty of good points and bad, and I’m complicating my plot as well.

I’m thinking that that might have been my problem before—the plot wasn’t very well thought out. Oh, most of it was. The main concept was very well developed. But the subplots, which, in this case, are the supports of the main concept, were not. They were too predictable. Too easy. I’m making sure that that’s no longer the case.

Of course, the hardest part about writing this story for me is that most of the action takes place in modern day Washington, DC. I have the hardest time writing contemporary stories. The problem is that I’m writing about a world we all know, so if I screw something up everyone is going see it and call me out on it (or worse, the book will become a wall-banger). I’m also worried about dating my story.

Already, what I’d written is dated—I have my hero checking his Blackberry. Why? Because five years ago you couldn’t imagine a lawyer without one! Today? Not so much. So, I changed that to be a generic phone. But what if something else comes out five years from now. Immediately, my story will become old and outdated—laughingly so! Unfortunately, there isn’t anything I can do about that, but it worries me. At least when I write a historical what I’m writing is deliberately outdated. It’s supposed to be that way. This is a good thing. Not so with contemporaries. Yikes!

So, here I am breathing new life into an old story and hoping for a miracle to happen and it turns into something wonderful. What about you? Have you resurrected old stories from their graves? How did that turn out for you?