A Change of Plans

*BUWAHAHAHAHAHAHA*

*cough*

So I started this March Madness thing with ONE book I intended to write... and I wrote Friday, and I wrote Saturday. And I found I was even boring MYSELF trying to force this thing out... I've come to the conclusion it just really needs a lot more stewing than it's had.

Flathead Lake, Montana (my setting)

What is this STEW I speak of?

This is normal for me. I have ideas with some regularity. In fact I put all those ideas in a spread sheet last week, and in addition to the five 'I will write this book' ideas I had on my writing project list, I had another thirty ideas written in some detail, about half of which I think are viable writing projects. But the ideas that work BEST are ideas I have that rattle around in my head a while, then marry new ideas, and sometimes even MORE ideas, until suddenly I have a nice, happily complex plan.

So after forcing out 5000 words of Shooter (which will be named something else), I decided to go with the one I felt compelled to start last week that has been niggling my brain for almost two years now.

Has anyone seen this?

Behind Endangered

Some of you may have heard me talk about the Tomorrow book series by James Marsden. It begins with Tomorrow When the War Began and is about a group of Australian teens who go camping when school gets out... and when they come home, their home town (all of Australia, actually) has been invaded. They become secret guerilla warriors fighting against the (always unnamed, but foreign) invaders. The series caused me to have vivid dreams and my imagination was captivated by the idea of something in the US with similar flavors since then. (and this was before I was even actively writing)--I'd love to see the movie version of this—or is it a TV series? Has anyone seen it?

The next piece of the puzzle happened when my husband was working in his home health job. We only had one car, and he worked 12 hour days... and on the weekend, I definitely didn't want to get up and take him at 7 am, so I was walking to pick up the car at about ten in the morning and a helicopter went over. We normally see the Michigan Life Flight helicopters with some regularity, but other than that, they are a game day only kind of thing. This isn't Portland where every news station has it's own hovering a couple times a day. We're a suburb where it just isn't that common. It was a little weird... I felt very exposed, and I got home and write the first chapter of this book... I knew I wasn't going to write any MORE of it for a while, but I had a flavor... a set up... a feeling of what the first moments would be like if we were invaded.

The book went on my list of possible options, but I kept feeling like I really needed more to it. I wasn't ready for the story... and then last weekend I had one of those wacky dreams that get the ball rolling. By the time I was out of the shower I realized it was a second strand to THIS story, so I came down and got on the computer and started it... Then in my files of potential stories, I found my third strand.

So now I have three primary characters (two of them with siblings), all of whom will meet up in the mountains of Montana by Flathead Lake... and will need to be warriors of sorts (mountain guerillas--see there is the play on words that gets me to 'endangered'), in this brave new world. I don't have my ending yet, which makes me a little nervous. I definitely prefer to know how the story ends, or I can end up with a big floppy thing to sort out, but I will try to put in my thought on that early this month so I figure it out before I get there.