Category: Ideas

Make Nice With Your Muse

by Lindsey Loucks, posted in Critique Partners, First Drafts, Ideas, Mood, NaNoWriMo, Sequels, Story Ideas, The Grave Winner, What Gifts She Carried, Word Count, Writing
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

No no NaNoWriMo. I won’t participate in you this year or next year or never but I will cheer for participants from the sidelines.

 

Why? I’m a slow writer, like 1000 words in three hours slow. I try not to stress about making things look pretty in a first draft, but I do anyway. Plus, I have to stop and picture what’s happening in my head. It’s like watching a movie in painfully slow motion.

 

But I’m using NaNoWriMo as inspiration to learn how to not worry so much and speed up the pictures. I’m also using it to get inspired to write after I get home from school. I used to think a sleepy brain tells sleepy stories, but a sleepy brain is the norm now, and sleepy brains still have stories to tell.

 

The story I should be telling is the sequel to The Grave Winner, but it’s still coming together in my head. So my muse has hammered another story into my brain (ow!) while I let the sequel percolate. That’s the story I’m working on now, and I feel like I should make nice with my muse in case it flips me the bird and abandons me.

 

This new story has ghosts in space, in case you’re wondering. It also has some sexy times in it because it’s not YA. The title is A Boy and Her Scratch.

 

The sequel to The Grave Winner is coming, I promise! Please don’t hate me, Fabulous Editor Melissa and my Must Have Critique Partners and my Totally Tubular beta reader and everyone else who has made it this far through my ramblings!

 

Anyone else have a muse? Anyone else pet it and feed it cookies so it won’t flip you the bird?

 

P.S. I voted today!

Borrowing From Real Life

by Lindsey Loucks, posted in Ideas, Real life

A drama-free life is a happy life, so that’s what I strive for. I leave the jaw-dropping plots to my characters. But I do occasionally throw in some tiny details from my life into my stories. For example, spiders. I hate them. They skitter sideways on creepy, hairy legs and are too unpredictable. I will screech and run away whenever I see one. Yet they’re in my current story. Lots of them. Why? Because I’m trying to face my fears. And because two dead spiders, a mama and a baby, are stuck to my garage wall, and have been since I moved in since I refuse to do anything about them. Moms and babies play a large part in my story, so I thought, “Why not spiders?” While writing the spidery scenes, I freaked myself out. So much for facing my fears.

Another thing I threw into the story from real life were lyrics to an awesome song I like to play on the game Rock Band. It’s The Fratellis’s “Creepin’ Up the Backstairs.” Here’s the song:



One line from the lyrics is “Take your brother’s car keys.” That’s why Jo is always taking her brother’s car keys. It fits her personality too.

So how about you? Do you search for drama in real life or strive for drama-free living? What are some things you take from real life to put in your stories?