Finally ready

According to the MySpace horoscope for: Saturday, April 7, 2007, Pisces (Feb 19 - Mar 20)

"Although this may be a day off for you, you are likely thinking about your position at work or about long-term career goals. Be bold in your thinking now, for your current ideas will likely blend your desire for success with your willingness to work hard. If nothing else, map out a strategy for your days and weeks ahead."


That’s pretty much what my desk calendar said, too. I take this to mean that it’s a good time to begin work on that second novel, that the ideas I’ve been entertaining this week are the right ones, and that my time of putzing around has come to an end.

Now it’s not like I haven’t work on book 2. I have. I have a solid beginning to an aimless story that simply won’t come together in my head and some great scenes that don’t fit in anywhere. I have a title I don’t like (THE GHOST CRAB) and a vanilla villain who is no match for Mason.

Now here’s the thing you might or might not know about Pisces: we can be tenacious if we want to be. I should have shelved this book a long time ago (right after its conception in late 2005, to be exact). I should have stopped backing up THE GHOST CRAB file last year. But I didn’t, because I knew there was a good story in the jumbled mess of scenes somewhere. I kept coming back to it, again and again, taking notes, jotting down ideas, trying to figure out how to do in the villain.

I tried working on THE PROTECTOR revisions in the morning hours and writing on THE GHOST CRAB in the evenings, but that didn’t work. I had trouble keeping the guys apart. Mason and Soren in book 1 are different from Mason and Soren in book 2, but they’re still Mason and Soren ... confusing, ne?

So I didn’t work on it, and I didn’t think about it, and I began fearing I had only one book in me (ridiculous idea, trust me). I totally bought into the “sophomore curse.”

Then I took a long vacation and relaxed.

I didn’t start writing THE PROTECTOR with a finished plot. In fact, I didn’t start THE PROTECTOR with an entire book in mind. I had an idea and a premise. I sat down and started writing, and it grew from there. So that’s what I’ll do with THE GHOST CRAB.

I woke up one morning this week with an idea that pulled together the disconnected stuff I already wrote. I went over my notes and had that great “wow, this is a neat stuff, I can’t believe I forgot I came up with this” experience.

Now I have no idea if my tenacity is going to pay off. I could be making a huge mistake and THE GHOST CRAB is destined to suck, no matter how much work and effort I put into it. But I have a feeling book 2 will end up just fine :-) I’m a good writer, I have a solid idea/premise (oh, and a new villain who is fully capable of kicking Mason’s ass) and the sophomore curse isn’t deadly or there wouldn’t be any second books around. There are plenty and I fully intend to have one, too.