Crazy Train

I think it’s time I admit that 2008 has been a transition year for me in my writing.  I know it’s not New Year’s yet, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about today.  2007 was the year to get myself back into it and give my work the serious focus it deserved and to finish a book that had been on my plate for a decade.  I haven’t accomplished what I’d hoped to this year, but that’s not to say that I haven’t done anything.  Through all of my stops and starts and rewrites and tangents, I think I’ve learned a lot and become a stronger writer for it.  I’m thinking through plot more, coming up with deeper, more complex sorts of stories and characters.  And, it seems, I am taking a vacation from the traditional romantic suspense I’ve been working so hard on the last two years.

I was already hit over the head with the idea for a werewolf story that I now have a pretty fleshed out wiki on.  I’ve been wrestling a bit with how to reconcile my love of romantic suspense (the traditional cops/FBI variety) with the paranormal.  Zoe’s been saying I should just write paranormal romantic suspense, which was the idea, of course, but I was trying to figure out what that means for me.  And today on the five minute drive back to work from lunch, it hit me.

Why not create an entire society of paranormal beings–everything from folklore around the world–and have some sort of paranormal style FBI to police them?  Then there’s no more fretting about procedure because I’d be making it up.  And I wouldn’t be limited to a particular paranormal being because I could cover them all as I chose.  So my brain has been just a-churning on worldbuilding as I try editing this journal article for the evil day job.  I’m starting to realize that this is sort of a…well in science, we’d call it a paradigm shift.  It’s not just a blip–oh I’ll work on this for a while–it’s a real change in focus for me.  I keep sort of nibbling at Til Death, but my head keeps coming back to the paranormal stuff.  Which means that all my carefully thought out marketing strategy of building a name for myself in a very specific small southern town romantic suspense kind of niche is…well not entirely wasted, as I think I will come back to it at some point, but was a bit putting the cart before the horse.

Whatever.  I’m a long damn way from published.  Other than this blog, I don’t have a formal author website up, though I have my domain directing here.  I’ll sort it out when it comes down to it.  It’s all moot unless I have something out there to shop.  So starting in January, I’m going to lay down some realistic goals for 2009.  For the rest of this month, I’m going to worldbuild, keep nibbling at TD, and focus on finishing course design for this class that starts in January.

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