The Story Loom of My Brain

So I uploaded Blindsight all over the place this week and am already up to something like 700 downloads.  The responses I’ve gotten make me wish Revelation was already written!  But my newsletter subscriptions are up.  There’s been a modest spike in sales across platforms.  I am satisfied that the story is doing its job and making people curious.  All those people who talk about the benefit of having free shorts out there…totally right.  As it happens, back when I was writing it, there was a detail about Ransom in the story, regarding his backstory, that I had to explain to myself because it would be important to the plot of Revelation. That led to the kernel of an idea for a short story about HIM called Dragonbound.

Last night I sat down to take the notes from that past brainstorming session with Claire and turn them into a loose outline.  I’m not ready to write it yet, but when I have an outline in place, my brain can start weaving in information and threads while I’m working on other stuff (yet another reason I’ve become a serious plotter–Pot is amused as hell about my conversion).  So as I was sitting down working on that outline and looking at my notes, I started seeing all these threads, tiny details I’d thrown into other stories (some out, some not) just for the hell of it, stand up and start waving at me like HEY I’M IMPORTANT!  I FIT OVER THERE!

It seemed prudent, at that point, to open up a file and start an event timeline that began with the advent of Mirus history and carried me through to the present in the story world, making a list of all these major events in the history, questions that need to be answered, how various things connected, which story stuff appeared in.  And suddenly those random details I’d thrown in for the hell of it actually MEANT SOMETHING BIG.  It meant I could clearly see my metaplot from Forsaken By Shadow, all the way through Mick and Sophie’s novel (not Devil’s Eye, their full length novel that will be set after Revelation). I’m starting to get a clearer picture of the chain of increasingly bigger baddies, and who the groups and individuals may be that are the main antagonists in future books, and overall the series itself is coming together, almost like I did it on purpose with all those random details.

God, I love when that happens.

13 thoughts on “The Story Loom of My Brain

  1. Oh man, don’t you just love when things fall into place? It sounds like everything is coming together for you, so yay! Congrats on all the downloads too, that’s epic.

  2. I’ve long believed (So, about four months now.) Mick was the center of the Mirus universe. Things coming together as they are is good news for me too! Excellent work Kait.

  3. Your brain just never stops, does it? LOL. It’s great to always be thinking of something to fit in your stories.

    Thanks for letting us know how the short is doing. I think a lot of authors are thinking about doing free short stories and aren’t sure if they will be effective.

    1. The kicker, to my mind, about using free short stories and having them BE effective is to make sure that they’re GOOD WORK. Just writing something in your story universe and half-assing it won’t work. Short is hard because it has to pull off SOOOOO much more in a short time space. Everything line does double and triple duty, having to imply all sorts of things you’d usually spend several lines or a paragraph on. I’ve seen too much short work that someone just threw together and put out there to put out there, and I think that backfires on the authors who do so. Short work, be it freebies or part of an anthology or whatever else you might do with short stuff, has to be GOOD, not just merely unsucky.

      1. It’s REALLY HARD to write a good short story. You can tell that by how anthologies usually have some really good stories, some okay stories…and sometimes some that leave you wondering what the point was.

  4. Glad everything is working out for you! I love it when everything falls into place. Only other writers understand that feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment.

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