The Cup Runneth Over (Day 4)

I tend to get a lot of ideas for books. Okay, more like for series of books. I've never managed to write a stand alone book before, and I doubt I'll ever figure out how to do it. The truth is that my ideas tend to be too big for a single book. And I don't mean a little too big. I mean these grand plans that if I tried to shove in to a single book would end up so long that it could be called an epic fantasy. Except it wouldn't be a fantasy.

Anyway, lets just say that my brain doesn't allow me to think in single book terms, and I've learned to deal with it.

The point of this blog, though, isn't about how big of a book I write, but rather how many ideas I have.

See, I bought a notebook last year that I dubbed my 'Shiny New Idea Book' and I started writing all of the ideas I have for novels in it. There are some that are really old, but most are brand new ideas that I've thought of since last November. Today, I counted them.

Fifty. I have fifty ideas for, not just books, but series. And two of those have been from the last few days since nano started! I don't even want to tell you how many came from just before nano as I was planning.

I swear, I come up with more other ideas about books to write while I'm doing nano than any other time of the year. I spend months editing and don't come up with a single thing, but start planning or writing, and suddenly my brain is tossing out story ideas like I have all the time in the world to sit down and write them. Like my brain wants me to just keep writing first drafts all the time and never move on from it.

Of course, I'm not going to do that. First of all, first drafts don't get published. Especially not mine. They're pretty bad. Pandora had almost three quarters of it rewritten in it's first pass of editing, and I know there are parts that I'll want to fix again, because they're still not sitting quite right with me. And I don't even want to talk about all of the typos and spelling mistakes that I manage to get in my first drafts (I'm sure you've seen some of them, I don't tend to edit my blog posts, sorry).

This nano I've also had to put up with the fact that my brain is now tossing out ideas for books that I've written in the past and want to come back to at some point, but have been shelved for now. (Literally...I got a book shelf). I figured out that one of the first novels I've ever written was all wrong. The main character was too young, she should have been married, and her husband should have been the one getting blackmailed, not her father.

Because I have so much time to go and fix it now.

I'm not complaining, I promise. I know so many writers that honestly don't know what to write. They don't have any ideas. The thing is, at this point in my life, I'm not sure that I”ll ever have enough time to write all of the ideas I have.

Maybe I should look at adopting them out.

Do you have lots of ideas piling up waiting for your attention? How many books have you shelved that you want to get back to?

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Daily Word Count: 15,309

Total Word Count: 50,143