I Had This Wild Idea

That I’d be able to whip out the harbinger over Easter weekend. What a fool I was.

So, here I sit, in the ruins of a very fun Easter party, ignoring the dishes and writing my March update as if it were March still. I am in the business of make-believe, after all.

What I’m Working On:

The Thief novel is still in the hands of my agent. I’m ignoring all the gloom and doom on Twitter about how hard it is to sell a middle grade book right now, and I’m actually looking forward to sending it out to editors.

But, since that part is out of my hands, I spent the first few weeks of March prepping for the Fiction Festival in Marysville and working my way through a stack of novels on vacation. After months of edits for Thief, I was craving getting lost in a good book. Story grip always fills up my creative well and gets me excited for the next project.

And that project is [redacted]!

It’s all mine for the moment. I’m filling up a journal with mood notes and What Ifs and character sketches and plot snippets. It’s one of my favorite parts of writing; in fact, I decided to make all the attendees of the Fiction Festival Workshop follow my method for assembling a story, too, and it was a blast. Hopefully I’ll get to run that workshop again.

If you’ve followed along with me for a while, you' may remember that I was also brainstorming back in August of 2023. What happened to that story, you might ask? I shelved it, at least for now. I realized I didn’t actually want to work on that story at the moment, and so I put away that notebook and gave myself permission to wait for a new idea to strike. And it has.

I thought about setting myself a deadline (brainstorm in April, outline in May, do a fast first draft over the summer), but I have so many different obligations at the moment that a deadline would only stress me out. So, since I don’t have to work on a deadline at the moment, I’m taking my sweet time.

What I’m Reading:

Strangely enough, I read five books this month that involved time travel or amnesia or secret/stolen identities or broken relationships or some Venn diagram of the above. I read both Recursion and Dark Matter by Blake Crouch in record time, partially because of the relentless pace of the narrative and partially because I was so stressed out I needed to know how they were going to end. These are definitely adult sci-fi, and there is a certain level of unavoidable bleakness inherent in both concepts, but I’ve been reading a good bit of literary fiction recently, and it was fun to pick up a high concept, commercial thriller for a change.

Speaking of commercial, I also zipped through What Alice Forgot in a day and a half on a beach in Mexico. Another amnesia book, I found this one surprisingly compelling also. The main character is close to my age and station in life. It was a sobering look at what can happen to a marriage and a person if sins aren’t deal with for a decade. If pettiness and selfishness are indulged rather than forsaken. I’ve found myself thinking about the book more than I thought I would after the fact.

Also while on vacation I read The Likeness (it’s part two in a series but I was told I didn’t necessarily need to read the first to understand the second, and that was correct). This one is also adult, and probably the closest to a literary thriller that you can get. French has some lovely turns of phrase, and while some of the characters felt hyper-stylized, I was all in on the plot.

The last book in the Venn diagram would be To Say Nothing of the Dog, which was an audiobook repeat for me. Victorian comedy of manners meets time travel and a touch of romance. It’s delightful. Highly recommend.

Writing Tip:

Save the discards.

I’ve mentioned this in the past when it comes to revisions: I keep a file called “Deleted Scenes” for each novel because then it doesn’t feel like I’m really throwing all those beautiful words away. I’m saving them! For later!

But this works on a project level also. I have quite a lot of story ideas written down in various notebooks in my office. I have character sketches and plot summaries and quick pitches and more. It represents dozens if not hundreds of hours of daydreaming. And it’s vitally important work, because it helps me figure out what I can write, what I want to write, and what I will hopefully revisit later. Basically, I’m doing the same thing my kids do when they squirrel away bits of string and broken chalk and empty toilet paper rolls. Someday, I’m going to look at all the things I’ve accumulated and get a really great idea. Or maybe I’ll decide it’s finally time to throw that half-used gel pen away. Either way, all those notebooks are for future Christine to deal with, and for right now, I consider them time well spent.

That’s all for now! I promise to return at the end of April with another recap. I promise I won’t wait until April 31st.

Christine