I love starting out on something new. The “in potentia” stage of developing a story always seems to fill me with this excitement. Like the first day of school, when all your pencils were new, all your paper was smooth and blank, and your notebooks hadn’t yet been chewed up or had the spiral rings squished in your backpack. Anything could happen.

And so far, it has. Most of my ideas start out with a single element, around which I craft the rest of the story. Back when I was writing romantic comedies, they’d often start out with a wacky event. A punchy opener along with a “cute meet” (cut me a break here, I was targeting a Certain Publisher, and I honed my ability to pique their interests. Unfortunately–or fortunately, as I’m coming to think in retrospect–I never could abandon the quirkiness that made me essentially not worth the risk for them). Sometimes, it’s a strong character, who, like Athena, springs fully formed from the head of her creator, complete with backstory, GMC, flaws, and character arc. Other times, I’ll get a sense of scene–a scene between the main characters that isn’t the beginning scene, but nevertheless contains all the qualities that grab me by the throat and make me burn to find out more about these people and why they’re in the situation they’re in, and what they’re going to do to get out of it.

This particular throat-ornament sprung from a writing challenge. It was a sex scene, and likely suggested as a joke, since the challenge was not in a community where ero-rom writers are exactly thick on the ground. Well, I took it up, thinking it’d be a hoot to see if I could do it, and the idea came to me at a weird moment. I wrote the scene, and it ended up being a 12,000-word novella. All sex, but enough story to be intriguing. And boy, was I intrigued!

After the challenge, I put it on the backburner, because I’d just gotten word from Liquid Silver that they wanted “Alien Communion,” and I completely had to squee about that. Well, while the squee still hasn’t completely worn off, it’s been mitigated by the “omgwtf is next” reality that says, “Okay, hotshot. Now you’ve sold one…what are you gonna do about two?”

My first thought was, “hey, I liked this challenge piece–maybe I can expand it a little and make a true short story out of it.”  The e-markets have a place for shorts, and I’d have an advantage if I could get something else in the pipeline right away.  Plus, I could actually turn my “Books” page into something that truly merited a plural.

So, I started working on this thing.  Or rather, I opened myself to the ideas.  And boy, did they come.  I found myself plotting a “ten years later” scenario for the characters and realized that this little world they lived in was an entire universe.  And things were happening there.  Lots of things.  So my project turned into “a trio of interconnected novellas.”  But in the middle of plotting out my novella featuring the first two characters, I’m coming to wonder if they aren’t going to miss the novella mark and turn into full-blown novels.

That’s something I love about the writing process.  The potential there.  The feeling that I’ve peeled back a strip of wallpaper and am staring into a whole ‘nother universe.  And the incredibly fiddly urge to peel back another strip.

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