A while ago, I nattered about living in the next book. I was trying to emulate my hero, Anthony Trollope, Tony the T, The T Man, The Teester! (Okay, I'll stop.) I was thinking of a couple of possible next books, actually, not one; both of them have been hanging around on my hard drive for a number of years, in partial form.
Today, somewhat out of the blue, a new book blossomed into ... well, not existence. Potential existence. Serious ideahood. Virtual bookhood. (The B Thing! The Bookster!) It would be mainstream, light but not frothy or shallow. Interesting characters, with a central story line that I've actually been thinking about for a long time but didn't know if I'd ever have a way to write. And it should be possible to do it with a lot of humor, even though the basic subject is quite serious. I love writing humor and do it only rarely in fiction. My last novel, Business Secrets from the Stars, was all humor, as many yucks per page as I could cram in. One reviewer complained that there were too many yucks. Hmph. I had a ball writing it, though. Interestingly, that book begins with its protagonist, Malcolm Erskine, getting an idea for a book and being sort of possessed by it. I'm not possessed with this one, but I am entranced by it.
The seduction part is that I'm eager to get to the new novel (which I'll refer to by an in-house code, just as software companies do for forthcoming releases: BBC) and I'm suddenly feeling impatient to be done with Time and the Soldier so that I can jump into BBC. Gotta fight the temptation to switch in midstream. The end of TimeSold is ... well, sort of almost visible. Must be self-disciplined!
2 comments:
The one I'm working on now hit me like a freight train while I was tooling around with an idea that might have been the Next Book. The idea for my first book sort of evolved over time, so being smacked with an idea ready to go was one hell of an experience.
Of course, J.K. Rowling claimed HP hit her all at once, and some folks took that as confirmation that her books were indeed dictated by the devil. Oh, who am I kidding -- I'd LOVE it if someone accused me of that one.
It's a nifty feeling.
Of course, it's probably niftier, in the end, for Rowling than for the rest of us.
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