Something in the Way She Moves...

A non-writing friend asked me what inspires my stories, or inspires me to write.

(I admit, I felt all AUTHOR for a moment and could imagine myself being asked this while standing in front of a group of fans at a reading.  Please forgive me my momentary plunge into fantasy!)

My answer came quickly; music, photos, great books, dreams and watching people interact.

She smiled and looked at me with humor in her eyes - a look I know well now.  I get a little, ummm, excited sometimes when I get going and it's highly amusing to some of my friends that, after never talking about it - I can't stop talking about it.  (That's what I chose to believe at least).

Music - although music inspires me WHEN I'm writing, it's often not the inspiration on what to write about.  It absolutely sets the mood and gets my mind in the right place. You can check out my playlists for NORMAL and BITE ME on the sidebar of their homepages.  This is music that I either write to or reminds me of my story - something that makes me want to write.

Photos - This is kind of a big one for me.  I love photography.  Something about how people see the same world so differently becomes clear in a photograph. My parents used to laugh when I used to take my oldest daughter to have her photo taken every month as a baby, because I fancy myself an amateur photographer and she was already the most photographed baby  - ever.  To me though, having her photo taken by another photographer allowed me to see her in a different way. 

This is probably the main reason that I do castings for my books.  Sometimes it is an actual celebrity in my head, sometime it's just how they look in one particular picture or a look they have on their face that makes me think of that character.  However.  I find a lot of inspiration from photography - settings, houses (UNTITLED actually has a whole architecturally rendered floorplan of the MC's house), faces, smiles - even the mood of a photo. 

For instance:  This photo of Joe Jonas and Demi Lovato, it's just freaking fantastic.  I believe that it is photoshopped (I do not take credit for it) and I don't know where it came from otherwise I'd give that person a big ole shout out.  This photo has inspired many a new scene in NORMAL. 

The rest is fairly self explanatory - seeing how people interact, listening to their speech... all inspire scenes and moods in my books.

The single most important one though - are my dreams.  Almost every single one of my SNIs started out as a vivid, movie-like dream.  Something that grabbed me and didn't let go.

Revival

I'm apparently not very good at killing people off - the first person I killed just got up and walked away.  I guess that's one way to avoid the dilemma of what a bunch of teen/twenty something girls do with the bodies of the evil-doers they slayed.   LAME.

I made it to 13K.  I failed hard at NaNoWriMo.  I'm okay with that.  Life got in the way.  Flu, Family, Food...  it's all good though.  Really.

Here is where I stand.  I love BITE ME.  I love Leigh and I have fallen in love with Natalie.  Hard.  Sophia was supposed to be my darling, but Natalie clawed her way into my heart.  I'm not giving up on them - but I do need to let them go for a while. 

Jacob, Andrew and Aly are plagueing me.  "Edit us" they cry from the dark recesses of my dreams.  I kid you not.  They stalk me in my dreams.  Maybe it's because Nick Jonas is going out on his own on a solo project that I feel all emo about my little characters right now.   My little Andrew set off on his own too, well, until this last draft anyway.  I'm seriously stressing about how Nick J will be received by the world.  Am I still talking about a Jonas brother?   Maybe it was the 37 hours I spent in the past week, in a mini-van with 3 obsessed Jonas fans.  Can I say Jonas anymore times?  Jonas??!!!

Something else surprised me this month (this month of epic NaNo failure).  I'm ready to edit my first novel, the one fantastically titled "UNTITLED."   It hit me, this last week in particular, that I'm ready.  Maybe it was being back in my old stomping grounds where the book was originally conceived and outlined over a decade ago.  Maybe it was the copious amounts of Tryptophan - or it could have been the beers.

So, BITE ME is trunked temporarily.  NORMAL is back on the hacking block to get redded up for betas and UNTITLED will see the light of day again.  SOON.