The joke’s on me, but it’s a good one

When I made my April Fool’s joke last week I thought I was making a joke. I thought it would be funny to claim I was turning to writing teen paranormal romance. And I figured it would be more convincing if I came up with a sample idea of something I planned to write.

I just didn’t expect I’d end up liking the idea. Granted, there wasn’t much of an idea there, but it took hold in my imagination and has been driving me batty ever since. Now, I suspect some of that is due to my current novel having stalled out at the moment because of pressures at work taking up my writing time, but I can’t blame it entirely on that.

The thing is, I’ve had several disparate pieces of stories bouncing around in my brain for some time now, and I’ve never quite been able to fit them together to make a coherent story. Enter my April Fool’s joke. I’ll have to call my protagonist “Lucy”, because she’s evidently the missing link.

Anyway, this sort of experience just reinforces Michaelbrent Collings’ philosophy that Writing is more than just writing. He claims there are many activities we do during a day that actually count as writing, such as going to a movie, or reading a book, or watching people at McDonalds (or experiencing the criminal booking process at the local police station after watching people at McDonalds a little too intently). In this case it was writing a completely unrelated blog post, which engaged the creative part of my brain, which in turn seems to have reveled in this solitary un-forced moment of invention.

It’s like it’s a dog that’s been chewing the same old bone for weeks simply because it’s the only bone, and it has to be chewed. If you give that dog a new bone, even if it’s smaller, it gets excited about the new bone and wants to devote all its time to chewing it. My brain has never let this new story idea get very far away ever since I first wrote it down.

Now it may turn out it’s still not large enough an idea, even when combined with these other elements, to achieve critical mass for a story, but it’s getting closer. It’s also mutating as it goes. I’m not sure it’s a romance any more, and the paranormal aspect is up in the air. Also, the teen part may go, too. It’s still early to tell. Such is the nature of ideation.