Today is one of those crunch time days. I’ve a week to finish my taxes, and while finishing them is easy to do, I’ve been putting it off and off and off . . . well, I’ve not been doing them. So I have to finish them today, before I do anything else, because money makes the monkey dance, and I’ve got a couple of steps in mind that it should do for me.
Which means when I’ve finished . . . back to the grind.
It’s a hard thing, what we do every day. Sitting down and thinking of things to say, then putting it down in a format that works for us. It’s really a job, and it can sometimes be a little bit of a chore, but it’s also something of an obsession. If you do this long enough, you find it impossible to get the words out of your head, to silence the voices that are filling your brain with conversations of people you’ve never known before, but you’re certain that before the day or week or month is out, you’ll have a very intimate connection with these unseen individuals.
Yesterday those voices got to me. I had time to kill during the day and I pulled up FreeMind, my mind mapping program, and started to think about this new chapter I said I was going to do for Couples Dance. I wanted to see how it worked, how I might come up with something that, when time came to write the sucker, I’d have a good idea about what I wanted to do.
Now, I don’t do this for every chapter I write. But I was curious about seeing what might spring from my semi-fertile mind given have the chance.
In thirty minutes I had my chapter outlined.
All the software did was make my idea visual; the rest was all me. I was pretty surprising to see where I went with it all, and how easily it flowed. So when I returned home and finally got to writing, I looked at my mind map, thought about the words I needed to say, and about 50 minutes later–bang! I had 1251 words down, and a new chapter was on the way.
But the whispered didn’t stop there. As I finished up the evening with other things–yeah, I have a life, and I tend to give it too much leeway to get me into trouble–the whispers kept up. This idea about maybe doing a YA novel about my precocious role playing character Kerry . . . yeah, I couldn’t shut down the ideas. The whispers had really come to me yesterday, showing me how I could change something here to make it fit with my universe, how I could add a little there, and it would be a very simple matter of taking much of what I already know about Kerry and Annie’s first year up to Yule and putting it to paper in a way that really, truly, makes their story something I could call mine.
Well, The Muse’s and mine. She’d never let me get away with saying it was all me behind their creation. And she’s be very correct.
And even as I was laying down for the evening . . . yes, I have a new chapter started in Couples Dance. And it should be a good chapter. But as I was getting ready for bed the whispers told me, “You know, you have room for another chapter after Chapter 8, and it doesn’t have to be a long one, but . . . you know it works if you put it in there.”
I didn’t need much convincing, because when I gave it about two minutes thought, it did indeed make a lot of sense.
So it does appear I will have two version of this story: one with the original ten chapters, all edited and nice and neat, coming it at about 37,000 words . . . and another version with twelve chapters, that might, when it’s all said and done, be about 10,000 words longer. That later we’ll see, because I don’t actually know how much I’ll have to say within the confines of those two little worlds.
It’s only a matter of a whisper here and there before I find out, I suppose.
