I took a week off to wallow in the plight of Dante and Lulu over at General Hospital*. (Please, General Hospital! Please stop putting holes in Dante! I can't take it!)
I'm so out of practice in sending mss out into the world, but I do remember how important it is to become invested in a new project as soon as possible. So today is going to be "What Next" day. I've got a file full of ideas but nothing that's really jumping up and down and saying "Write me! Write me!" Maybe it's too soon after finishing TDB to have that excited feeling. It will come, I'm sure. Maybe I just need to open a couple of them and work on each one a bit until one of them takes off. That sounds like a plan. And right now, a plan sounds good.
The problem is that the three front-runner ideas are sooooo sketchy, and that terrifies me. See, TDB (aka HOS) started out very sketchy, just an assemblage of pretty things I wanted to toss into a book and twirl around with. Plot? Who needs a plot! We have carriages and balls and pretty dresses! Yeah, that didn't work out so well.
So this week might be about taking each idea out for a test drive, a little waltz across the floor and see if one of them takes off.
*And one of these days, I have to write about what I've learned about storytelling from soap operas. But right now, I feel like I'm learning more from reading the message boards than from the shows themselves. It's so interesting to gauge what works for viewers and how they interpret the characters and their actions and motivations, what works for them and what doesn't.
