I’ll admit it: sometimes writing isn’t entirely fun. Sometimes it is hard work. Sometimes it is painful, when the words I am wrestling with on the page are unmalleable, ugly, colorless clay compared to the perfect story in my mind. [Of course this isn't always the case. There is plenty of fun during the actual writing too, though I am always looking for ways to improve my level of fun. The brilliant Laini Taylor wrote an inspiring post about this recently in her blog. Her book Lips Touch: Three Times was also just nominated for the National Book Award! Congratulations, Laini!]

There is, however, one part of the process that is almost always composed of untarnished fun and excitement: the pre-writing, the brainstorming, when ideas and images are flickering around my brain and I am free to cast my net of dreams out into the sea of ideas and see what I catch. I haven’t committed to anything, so anything is possible.

That’s where I am right now. I had been waffling between two ideas for my next project, which I will be writing for NaNoWriMo. I very much want to do a sequel for my space circus, because that world and those characters are enormously fun to write about and I care about them quite a lot and want to find out the rest of their story. But there’s another idea that’s been drifting around the edges of my mind, looking all shiny and bewitching. It’s a very different sort of book: darker and more romantic. And I think it wants to be written in third person, with a somewhat more lush storytelling voice. My last three books have all been first-person, so the thought of third is a bit scary. I’ve written plenty of third-person novels, but they are all unpublished. I am not entirely sure I can pull off third-person successfully. But one of the things I want to do as a writer is to try new things, and to challenge myself. NaNoWriMo seems like a perfect time for that. I’ll be writing so fast hopefully I won’t have time to be scared!

So here’s what I’ve got:

• A new inspirational desktop image (of the historical site of Bam, Iran).
• A new inspirational playlist (lots of Dead Can Dance, and a bunch of new discoveries courtesy of Last.fm: Irfan, Azam Ali, Vas, L’Ham de Foc, Stellamara).
• My two main characters and their emotional baggage.
• A bunch of world-building/cosmology/secondary characters stolen from a trunked novel (Obsidian Shield, for those of you who have known me long enough).
• The opening scene.
• A very rough outline, and a couple of pivotal scenes from the rest of the story that I am really looking forward to writing — I am going to try to firm these up and identify a few more to serve as “carrots” to tempt me forward through the drafting process.
• Lots of excitement (and a tiny bit of fear)!

What is your favorite part of starting a new project? Any other suggestions for keeping the fun alive during the drafting process?

Tags: poison maid, writing