When notes are thrown away

Capitola, California on 12 September, 2012, not long after I had finished writing Splitting the Sky.

All I have to go on is a manuscript and a playlist. Huh....

Happy new year! I hope you enjoyed whatever made you most content, and little of what pained. My thoughts are with those in New Orleans, Las Vegas too, and of course so many other places on this planet mired in conflict. As well as all the rancor within hearts, and while I spent much of yesterday prepping for more paper-pieced hearts, the first post of a new year concerns writing.

Or what happens when one writes a novel, shelves it, decides it's meant for the hard drive only, tosses all physical proof of its background, leaving only a playlist, the manuscript, and a few meanderings in a personal blog right after it was written. Because that's what happened with Splitting the Sky, and I'm kind of flying blind-ish as I polish the story, wondering why I chose this character name or that plot point, other than the few clues songs attached to each chapter concede.

Why did I throw out the notes, you rightly ask. Well, you see, there were a lot of folders from those early days of my writing tenure. MANY FOLDERS, because I was churning out stories left and friggin' right. At one point I was inundated with novels, the vast majority of which will remain safely tucked right where they are on hard drives and in flash drives. Yet Splitting the Sky was written at the tail-end of that lightning-speed comet of literary inspiration, or what could be called the How I Learned to Write Fiction era of my life. From 2007-2012 I wrote over forty novels. I'm not joshing you. I seriously went on a fictional tear and while MOST of them stopped at the initial draft, I released a handful, then found myself wrapped up in The Hawk, and spent five years wrestling with that behemoth. I won, I think, but if nothing else by the time I wrote Splitting the Sky, I kinda knew how to write a decent book.

If you are in the early stages of becoming a writer, maybe it won't take that many novels for you to get it together. Or maybe if I had written less, concentrating on revising.... Now that kind of musing is irrelevant because it's been eighteen years since I wrote my first book, and that was simply my authorial path. I'm grateful for it as today I'm here with some good stories released, hoping to begin work on another, lol. I don't know WHEN I'll write something new, and that's okay (It really is okay, Future Me smirks, then winks.). It's okay because no matter what I'll NEVER THROW OUT STORY NOTES AGAIN. Never. Really. Learned that lesson, dangit, but again, no harm done as Splitting the Sky (STS) didn't seem to require me to peruse its background, other than listening to the playlist not for information, only as a reminder (maybe, hopefully) that writing a novel can be as easy as, well, writing it.

Copious character sketches, detailed plot lines; I did that with A Rose Blissful and all I came away with was twenty-five thousand words of blah blah blah, then I bailed. All that mulling over, all those musings.... Sometimes musings can strip the life out of the story. Sometimes pulling a book outta one's backside makes for a more invigorating tale. Sometimes I even know what I'm on about, as Past Me pokes her head up from the sewing machine, in my pre-English paper piecing days. I don't know which quilt she's got under the presser foot, but currently my machine languishes under its cover like those forgotten stories, most of which are now as anonymous for their beginnings as STS. If I wanted to resurrect any of them, I'd be as reliant on their playlists as I am with the current WIP. Yes, I have a written WIP, but the writing was a dozen years ago when Past Me didn't even conjure quilts.

She doesn't pay me any attention, but Future Me shoots me a glance. What, I ask.

She smirks again, then shrugs. 

Am I going to write something new soon, I inquire.

As usual, Future Me doesn't say jack. Quickly she nods, then huffs, walking away.

I smile, thinking back to when I started The Hawk. A short story, I told myself. When I saved ALL MY NOTES FOR EVERY LAST DANG IDEA. The past, I permit, has its golden moments. But the future, I smile inwardly, holds great promise.

Grasp that with both hands folks. Somehow, some way, the future is gonna sparkle. All we need to do is breathe.