Category: Story 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!

R.I.P., W.I.P.

by Lindsey Loucks, posted in Story Ideas
Credit



I recently resurrected the first novel I ever wrote. It had been collecting dust on my flash drive. The characters were quiet inside my head compared to the obnoxious ones who want me to tell their stories next. So I picked the story up to get everyone else to hush. It worked, at least for awhile.

Now, the voices inside my head are shouting plot twists at me that have nothing to do with my first novel and everything to do with the ones they want me to write. And I’m starting to listen to them.

Maybe that first novel wasn’t meant to be resurrected. Maybe it will always be my first completed novel with crater-sized plot holes, inconsistent characters, and a lack of structural sense. And maybe it’s okay to just let it exist in all its imperfect glory on my flash drive. Some writers trunk their first novel forever, right?

There are some hidden gems in it, I think. But maybe those gems are kriptonite and my Super Girl writer skills can’t touch them yet. Maybe they’ll stay hidden until the day I turn into Super Woman. Then those gems better watch out!

So, at least for now, I’m saying goodbye to Pause so that I can properly listen to the chaos inside my head. Rest in peace, WIP. To my critique partners, I apologize. 🙁

Does this happen to everyone else? Have you trunked your first novel? Do you ever have so many voices inside your head that you want to reach in there and duct tape everyone’s mouth shut?