betwixt

I don’t have much going on right now to report, gentle reader.

I’m between major projects. One-Match Fire is, I think, complete (though I am flirting with adding another story). I am poking at writing a query letter to begin sending it out, but I choke up because it is so important to get it right, and that will never happen.

I have an idea for a new novel blossoming in my head. It’s pretty much taking up all of my attention. Unlike One-Match Fire, which is not always happy but at least resolves warmly in the end, this novel would be grim and harrowing. It would be completely unlike anything I’ve ever written, and yet it is forcing itself into my mind, will I or nill I.

I’m not sure what to do about that. It’s too early to begin writing it (though I have worked out a couple of passages already), so I can let it gestate and continue to present itself to me. But I’m actually afraid of it. It’s not a nice story, and I don’t want to go where I would have to go (research) to be able to flesh out parts of the story.

So I thought I should go back to one of my Finnegans novels — the murderless cozy mysteries I want to write a series of, and for which I first began this humble blog. (This one deals with running a half marathon, too.) While fun, with intricate plots, they are not fraught with emotion and generational intrigue like One-Match Fire is. And they are a polar opposite to this new idea I have. So my thought is that if I devoted my efforts to one of those novels, I could either dissipate the urge to write that monster, or I could let it evolve sufficiently so that I could begin working on it properly once the Finnegans novel is in the can. (A large part of me wants the former to happen.)

I’ve said here before that it sometimes seems as though the stories exist “out there” and we writers are given glimpses of them so that we can put them down. If that’s truly the case, then I must have sinned grievously in a past life to be punished with this newest story idea.