My muse is either very fickle or very smart.\u00a0 Or, perhaps,\u00a0I'm either exceptionally stubborn or exceptionally stupid.\u00a0 More likely, it's all of the above.<\/p>\n
I had a plan.\u00a0 I blogged about my plan last time.\u00a0 I was working on a new historical romance.\u00a0 Once\u00a0it was done or (at least) well underway, about the beginning of next year, I was going to stop and do an edit of Griffin's Law<\/em>.\u00a0 The next to be published Griffin's<\/em> is complete and has been resting pending an edit.\u00a0 Griffin's<\/em>\u00a0is a contemporary romance set in a law school and is sort of a crossover between E-mail Enticement<\/a><\/em> and a historical.\u00a0 Okay - if you insist- think of Griffin's<\/em>\u00a0 as the Grey's Anatomy of the legal profession.<\/p>\n Anyway, I've been hard at work writing my new historical.\u00a0 Rather, I've been trying to be hard at work on the historical.\u00a0 I've been coming home after work and opening the computer to the MS<\/a> every night.\u00a0 I've been opening it faithfully every Saturday and Sunday morning for the past few weekends.\u00a0 Sometimes, I've even written a few lines on it.\u00a0 But inevitably, after a line or two, the story leaves me and I start sneaking over to my desktop to play Snood<\/a>\u00a0or Solitaire.\u00a0 Or flipping over to check sales on Amazon<\/a>, Createspace<\/a>, Scribd<\/a>, Smashwords<\/a>, etc.\u00a0 Or getting sucked into something on Google News<\/a> that I keep in customized form as my homepage for Internet Explorer.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n After a while, I'd feel guilty for doing whatever it was rather than writing, and I'd go back to the MS.\u00a0 And I'd manage a few more lines before something lured me out of it again.\u00a0\u00a0The whole thing did get me some unusually good sleep.\u00a0 I wasn't getting pulled away from the land of dreams by lying there and plotting dialogue in my head.\u00a0\u00a0 As Miss Snark would have said, something in all of that should have hit me over the head with a cluestick.<\/p>\n But no cluestick\u00a0loomed on the horizon.\u00a0 Just me, and my\u00a0creative conundrum.\u00a0 Oh, and my plan.\u00a0 Don't forget the plan.\u00a0 I had plotted my course and I swore upon the altar of\u00a0all of the deep fried, refried\u00a0crabs in the universe that\u00a0I would stick to the plan.\u00a0 \u00a0So there I sat, day in and day out, just me and the flying Snoods.\u00a0<\/p>\n See it was my plan.\u00a0 When I made it, I didn't need no stinkin' Muse and I didn't consult no stinkin' Muse.\u00a0 I used logic and reason in plotting a path.\u00a0 And I learned all over again why I'm not a plotter.\u00a0\u00a0Some writers never sit down to start a book without a pretty complete outline of all of the major plot points.\u00a0 Those writers know where they're going before they get there. It's hard for me to understand them or to imagine how they do it, but may God\u00a0Richly Bless Them and all folks in the universe who are careful and organized.\u00a0<\/p>\n I sit down with an idea and my keyboard and I know it's going well when my characters take over to tell the story.\u00a0 I'm not a plotter, so why didn't I know I wasn't a planner either?<\/p>\n The distraction didn't work and none of the Snoods\u00a0hit my thick skull hard enough.\u00a0 So Muse got desperate.\u00a0 She recruited -----MR. BRICK<\/a>.\u00a0 And we all know, Mr. Brick always gets the job done.\u00a0 So Friday night after work, I gave a deep sigh and opened my keyboard, never knowing that the cohorts in crime were about to strike.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n They were devious.\u00a0 It started as\u00a0just another bout of Muse's distraction.\u00a0 Only this time, instead of Snood, Solitaire or Google News, Mr. Brick struck my head or my mousing finger or both.\u00a0 I frittered away time by reviewing some\u00a0of the files in \"my documents.\"\u00a0 And EUREKA -\u00a0\u00a0 Muse finally got her way.\u00a0 I landed on one I'd started sometime between E-Mail Enticement<\/a><\/em> and A Sixth Sense of Forever<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n It's a contemporary romance\/legal suspense that follows in the footsteps of E-mail<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 Yes, Virginia, it occurs where love and law intersect.\u00a0 There's a love triangle, a family law firm and a murder.\u00a0 The hero's gonna be charged with killing his brother and there's gonna be a trial.\u00a0 A real, live murder trial.\u00a0 I'm sure there's also gonna be a Mary Anne style over-the-top high drama happy ending.\u00a0 It's just that right at the moment, I don't have the\u00a0vaguest idea what it'll be.\u00a0<\/p>\n See, there's no plot, no outline and most definitely -- no plan.\u00a0 There's just me and my fingers itching to get back to the keyboard because I can't wait to tell the rest of the story.\u00a0\u00a0By the Great Green Toadfrog - I can't wait to find out what the rest of the story might be.\u00a0 All I know is that if I have fun telling it, I believe you'll have fun reading it too.\u00a0<\/p>\n I seriously hope Muse lets me get back to my historical.\u00a0 I loved the story, loved the characters and thought and think it'll be a great tale.\u00a0 But for now, Muse seems to want me to linger right there at the intersection of love and law.\u00a0 As she usually is, Muse is probably right.\u00a0 There's a great goobeldy gob, frog kicking humongous pack of great writers doing historical romance.\u00a0<\/p>\n However, there aren't\u00a0quite so many writers out there with law degrees who\u00a0tell tales about what happens when love and the law throw down.\u00a0\u00a0I'm not sure if its Muse or Mr. Brick gifted with the marketing genius.\u00a0 Maybe it's a combination.\u00a0 Just what have those two been up to, anyway?\u00a0 Should I look forward to some buff little creative.....err,\u00a0 Mricks?\u00a0 Bruises?\u00a0 Musey B's?\u00a0<\/p>\n Guess I should have suspected that Muse and Mr. Brick would get together sometime.\u00a0 In a few months, if my skull survives, y'all can look forward to a Myrtle Beach Murder Mystery where once again the law learns that tangling with love can only lead to one place -- a happy ending.<\/p>\n So,\u00a0I leave you with one piece of advice.\u00a0 In an insane world, planning and plotting is the most insane, inane waste of time.\u00a0 Instead, just follow the Muse wherever she leads.<\/p>\n You may not wind up where you thought you would, but you're bound to be someplace interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My muse is either very fickle or very smart.\u00a0 Or, perhaps,\u00a0I'm either exceptionally stubborn or exceptionally stupid.\u00a0 More likely, it's all of the above. I had a plan.\u00a0 I blogged about my plan last time.\u00a0 I was working on a new historical romance.\u00a0 Once\u00a0it was done or (at least) well underway, about the beginning of ...continue reading \"Cohorts In Crime\"<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=656"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":702,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656\/revisions\/702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}