All right. It’s official. My muse has ADD. I had a plan for this month. I’d decided to work on a particular book just to kick something (anything) along after a couple of slow months. So of course, all week I was getting ideas for Wolf 2 (not the book I’d picked).
And then last night a title popped into my head. Which I reacted to by thinking “okay cool, that could be a couple of things, let’s write it down”.
And then tonight, at midnight (freaking midnight…I was asleep) I wake up with a first line which is rapidly followed with the idea for a whole first scene. The sort of idea that you think “man, that’s pretty good” and really can’t risk just going back to sleep and waking up with only fog and wisps and it’s lost forever.
So I just started a whole ‘nother book. One that I have absolutely no idea where it might be going or plot or conflict or any of those useful kinds of things. I don’t even know the heroine’s name yet. But the muse is happy. And I’ve even gotten snippets of the next scene. But I so did not need to start another book right now.
Much like I so did not need the diet coke I just downed to wake up enough to get the scene down. Something tells me I’m going to be up a while longer. So much for getting up early in the morning. Writing, I tell you, is not a straightforward thing at all.
>Oh my God, Mel. Can I relate to this!!! I’m doing Nano, BUT my muses keep jumping back and forth between two related novels. And I wake up in the middle of the night with scenes near the end of the book, or the middle, or whatever. NEVER the scene I intend to write the next morning. And my whole writing group is so much more orderly about it. Ha! It might drive you bananas but you sure made me feel a lot better about my muses and my process:) I’m not entirely alone, writing in the wee hours. Of course for you, it’s the next day.
>I write out of order a lot, so that doesn’t bother me. But this book brings me up to five wips the muse is giving me snippets of….oh well, something has to stick eventually.