Flickers of Light

coliN00B via Pixabay

This new book is determined to come to me in vague, disconnected snippets at the most inopportune times. It's only fair, I guess, as that's how the character came to me in the first place -- out of nowhere and on the beach. 

Thank goodness she's stubborn enough to show up amid the chaos of the end of the semester, where Monday and Wednesday blog posts have been nudged into Tuesdays and Thursdays by the piles of papers to be graded. Okay, it's a virtual nudge, since the papers are all online, but you get the idea. These delayed posts were hard for me to come to terms with since I rarely miss a Monday or Wednesday post here but, since the deadline is self-imposed, I've come to accept that it can be temporarily flexible, too.

But I digress. Which is part of the problem.

Anyway, the other morning, in the shower, a bit of setting came to me. An important bit of setting that will be so much fun to create that I've been chipping away at a mental visual ever since. It's really unusual that setting comes to me unbidden, as I'm not a visualizer by nature, but this one was such a fun twist on a typical space that I feel free to make it as unusual as I can without causing my readers to hurt themselves suspending disbelief. Creating this setting has already led to the creation of backstory for the characters who inhabit it, characters who will keep my stubborn, hide-and-seek character company.

It's been a long time since I was at the only-a-blank-page-in-front-of-me stage of a novel, and it's honestly a little hard to remember what that felt like. Still, it feels as though this book is going to be different. Like Marita, this character has a bit (a tiny bit in this case) of a previous character in her, but I'm determined that from there, they'll part ways completely (except for that stubborn part, but that's what happens when the author is a Jersey girl).

Perhaps even better than the setting revelation, was the next little hint this new character dropped, answering a question that's been nagging at me for quite some time.

Where the story should start.

I wish I had time to devote to putting these details on the page in a cohesive fashion, but, for now, I'm just getting them down however I can. Meanwhile, I'm loving these little surprise revelations, grateful for the tiny writer voice demanding to be heard over the clamor of end-of-semester details. That tiny voice gives me hope that there's something really exciting to look forward to: a new world, inhabited by new characters.

All of them, undoubtedly, with minds of their own.