Recycling....

I've been procrastinating for several months. Our chapter is putting together our second anthology and I wanted to get a story in, but life intervened and there is that procrastinating component. So, the deadline is the end of the March and there I was, with not a single word written.

In theory, puking up five to ten thousand words is possible in a month. I mean NaNo participants write whole books in a month. But that's not me. I need to time to get to know my characters.

In that dark time, just before dawn, when I typically worry at all the things I need to do during the day (and wish I wasn't), I realized I have two, perfectly good proposals that I put together for my agent some years ago (when I still had an agent). While the proposals were written to be novels, I learned when writing The Key, that you can migrate characters into new stories, if you do it early enough in the process.

So, I opened up both proposals and have started looking at them in terms of shorter stories. One will have to be changed a lot and both will have to be moved from New Orleans to Houston (the anthology is called A Death in Texas).

I might have been discouraged about giving up on the novels I'd planned to write, but I'm not. For one thing, migrating characters into short stories doesn't mean they can't be moved back into a novel.

And I'm not sure I'll ever write either novel.

When I created the proposals, they were fresh and alive in my head. While I had to come up with synopsis for both possible novels, I keep a lot of my plot in my head, because I'm an "into the mist," seat-of-the-pants writer. I'm not sure I can go back and write those books, so many years (not to mention about four books) later.

So, whether I rediscover my novels in this process or not, I'm glad these characters will get to live in a story, even if it wasn't the one I originally planned. (If you've read any Jasper Fforde, you'd realize how cruel that is!)
So, recycling doesn't have to be limited to aluminum cans and plastic bottles. Your words, your characters, your ideas can all be recycled, re-emerging onto the page better and brighter--and just in time to save the day.
Perilously yours,

Pauline

“Why would a beautiful woman choose to be a soldier?” he asked.

“Some pukes in a movie said it best," Sara said. "I joined to travel, meet new people…and kill them.”