Friday, March 28, 2014

90 Day Writing Challenge - Week Two

Okay, so, I'm a week in, and I've already missed one day. On a brighter note, I have written two blog posts, a few really cool scenes, and a bunch of plot notes. I now have basic ideas for what I'm doing for five books in this series. And come up with names for four of them. I'll call that productive, and not beat myself up too much for the day that I was in too much pain to write. (TMI time: PMS + headache = OMG I think I'm dying.)

As for this week's question. Where I got the idea for this mess is kind of funny, really. Three years ago, I started in an online role-playing game. A week after I created my character, her "best friend's" world exploded, and she blithely informed me that she did NOT think of him as an older brother, as *I* had originally envisioned their relationship, but rather that she was in love with him. So, I got a lovely little baptism by fire as she threw me into a major bit of plot, including a relationship I had no intention of playing when I first started. Luckily, the guy that played her new boyfriend was pretty awesome, as were most of the others in the game, and I had a lot of fun playing with that. I played her for JUST under a year (her first day of play was March 1, 2011 and she died on Feb 26, 2012). But, their story was just so epic and fun that I got it into my head that it would make a great book. So, that's what I started out doing. Eternity's Price is basically a novelization of the plot of that game, with some changes, both planned and from various characters coming up with ideas for how to make it better.

And things snowballed from there. While writing the scene where Eli fights his Sire, my muse decided that Ana was a pretty awesome character in her own right, and I should write a prequel around her and Nicolaus. Chat logs from the game had me decide to pair another of my game characters up with one of the guys from the game (they had one scene together, and it wasn't even really him in the game. But it gave me a major springboard for a relationship between them). Interestingly enough, the MMC of Eternity's Promise was supposed to die at the end of Eternity's Price, he got a reprieve thanks to Dani. So, that was three. And then Katy Perry happened. I talked about it on Monday, where the idea for Book 4 - which I'm currently calling Magic's Curse - came from her song Dark Horse. Well, in fact, it wasn't just Magic's Curse that came about from that song. By the end of the weekend, I knew what had brought the mages to Sangue Collina, which gave me some kind of actual plot for Eternity's Promise.

My muse wasn't quite done, though. Her idea for how to end Magic's Curse made it necessary to have a fifth book. And it didn't take long to realize that the cliffhanger in that one gave me the perfect way to FINALLY tell Rory's story. She's a character in Eternity's Price that I've been wanting to write a book about since she showed up. She's a vampire who had been a mage before she was turned. Now, mages lose most of their powers if they become vampires. But, Magic's Curse ends with a huge magical power surge. It seemed the perfect time to bring Rory to the front by making the power surge give her all of her old powers back. That one is tentatively being called Magic's Return because of Rory getting her magic back.

So, to make a short story long, as my dad likes to say... My ideas came from a role-playing game and song lyrics. And from having a really annoying muse who nags me until I agree to things.

And that's all for today folks. Come back on Wednesday for my weekly ramble. I have a few ideas for that one, so not quite sure what I'll be talking about.


1 comment:

  1. oOo nice! Sometimes I feel like collaboration brings forth the best ideas because of al the different energies and plots and characters everyone brings~

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