Shower thoughts and second chances — 1388 words, 48,880 total…

I’m pretty sure I’ve talked before about getting ideas about the day’s work while standing in the shower. Today was a spectacular case of that.

I’d thought I knew what today’s scene was going to be — it was dark, and grim, and scary, and I was all geared up to get in there and get the words, and as I was zipping through my shower (always the step before heading in to work), the still, small voice in the back of my mind said…

What if your Main Character in Terrible Trouble doesn’t go where you planned? 

She and her companion will still be in Terrible Trouble™, you’ll still have “what’s waiting on the other end” waiting on the other end… but…

What if, instead, you make this one tiny change to what you were going to do, and see where that takes you instead?

I held that question in my thoughts as I zipped through the speed version of rinsing shampoo; ran a few possible variants on the tiny change while toweling off (though I’m pretty sure I removed some skin in my hurry to get to the computer); and hit the story where I’d left off yesterday with the new, better, tougher, more-difficult-to-write scene in mind.

I love what I got, in spite of the fact that by the end of it, I was typing through tears.

By chasing “what if”, and by then following the “who, what, when, where, why, and how” of that to their logical  conclusions, today I wrote my favorite scene in the series so far.


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By Holly

Novelist, writing teacher, on a mission to reprint my out-of-print books and indie-publish my new ones.

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Chris
Chris
1 year ago

I hope I speak for everyone here when I say that I really can’t wait to read this! Like, *really* can’t wait, would willingly bribe or blackmail someone to see it, *seriously* can’t wait. I *know* that I’ve got to wait, but I suck at waiting, and you’re not making my natural impatience any easier to live with.
🙁

(And I mean this in the best way possible, of course). 🙂

Also also, I’m doubly interested to see what the series looks like when you’re having to write the whole dang thing without getting much in the of feedback on the individual earlier books in the series.

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