Get Out Of My Head!

Dear Shell,

Here I am, knee-deep in revisions on Dragon Eye, and my mind keeps wandering away to another world. Or rather, it keeps wandering away from that fantasy world that I created and trying to sneak back into the world we know so well. My mind is telling me that I have another story to write, one based in this world, not in the fantasy one where my characters wait patiently for me to change their lives...again.

I think it is because I have finished the first draft of Dragon Eye that my mind feels that it is free to wander into another story. It tells me that it can revise, polish, and fine-tune Dragon Eye while still exploring and telling a different story.

Of course, my mind tried to drag me away several times during the writing of the first draft. It forced me to create seven different files with the beginnings of seven different novels, plus notes to go with them. But it was not very insistent with those stories. It was happy once the basic idea was written down and then set safely aside for another day.

And now, does it open one of those files? No, now it insists THIS story is the one that needs to be told. My mind has offered up options for the beginning, and has stated how one of the chapters near the end should be. But it has not told me what the ending should be. Maybe the ending does not exist yet.

Curious now? Maybe you're sitting there thinking I'm crazy. I wouldn't blame you. But remember this, a writer is one of the few that can claim to have voices in their head telling them what to do, without being thought insane and being locked away. Those voices are the characters that we can't resist, the characters that tug at our heart strings, that send chills down our spines, that cause gales of laughter or buckets of tears. Those are the voices we love to see in print, that we love to cuddle up with on the couch as we lose ourselves in the world that the writer created.

The stories are there, they beg to be written. We just need to be strong enough to pick up that pen and write.


Grabbing her pen,
Shell