While I had specific plans for May, they’re not at all what happened. At the same time, I can’t say the month was a bust, either.
But while I did get the outline of Headwaters done, as assigned, every time I started drafting I found myself making excuses. I needed to update a web site. I had a random idea about Legends Lost. I did a scaled-down relaunch of the professional blog. I even reorganized the writing file folders on my computer. Bottom line, even though I kept opening the Scrivener project, I only wrote three scenes.
By mid-month, I’d figured out that my subconscious was probably trying to tell me something.
All right! I finally shouted at my muse. I’ll go ahead and work on A New Horizon since you want me to so badly! But then we’re doing something original. You hear me? We are not only writing fan fiction this year!
The words promptly started to flow. As of this writing, I’m still in the middle of Act I, but it’s coming along nicely and I have some chapters out for beta reader availability already.
While working on that, I also realized that Legends Lost, which is a fan fiction series, and Magic Monaghan, which is an original cozy spy-fi series I’ve had under development, exist in the same universe. They’re just three generations apart; between that and the fact that there’s enough fictional history to create significant differences between the two, they exist on opposite sides of the fan fiction/original fiction spectrum.
That was what my subconscious had been trying to tell me: everything is related.
It was an outgrowth of a realization I’d had several months ago: The Roscaran Chronicles exists in the same universe as The Iron Rose — even though only the former is mine. It was the work of a whole three paragraphs to retrofit Roscaran to Iron Rose, and while I’m still working on them separately, they’re now sharing the same folders on my hard drive.
Understanding that the same thing had happened again turned the key in my head and helped me figure out that, at least for right now, I only want to be working in these two universes. The good news is that The Perfect Daughter is an Iron Rose story.
Despite that, my concern about strictly writing fan fiction is a legitimate one, and after a lot of thought I decided that while I’m going to go on and finish up the first draft of A New Horizon, just to get it out of my system, I’m going to stick with its original February 2027 release date. That will give it time to “bake” for a while, which is something I noted that All That Mattered could have used. So, once it’s done, I’ll wait until sometime around the end of December or the beginning of January and then re-visit it.
Between the two, I’ll go ahead and draft not Headwaters, but the first book of the Magic Monaghan series which is titled Zero Potential.
In other words, I’m going to ride this wave that my brain has come up with — but I’m going to do it my way. And I am determined that work on Headwaters is still going to happen sometime in the next 12-18 months. I am nowhere near ready to put it on a shelf permanently, and I mean it when I say that I don’t want to solely be a fan fiction writer.
Primarily? Sure, perhaps. But not solely.
Stay tuned to see how well it goes!