Swirling Ideas

I managed to figure out the plot of the book I'm working on yesterday. Now I have to figure out how this affects the opening scenes I've already written. It's going to require moving some things around and adding some new things, but I'm not entirely sure if some of the scenes will be able to stay at all. It's going to be "drill into details" day. I need to start seeing the movie of this book in my head.

One problem is that another story has decided to pop up and do a little development right now. My head is generally a swirling mass of story ideas, story fragments, characters, and other things that could be stories. When one has built up enough to be written, it comes to the surface. Or sometimes I can focus on one enough to make it come to the surface so I can work on it. But every so often, one of the bits and pieces swirling around in there will randomly pop up and let me know some new detail about it.

In this case, it's one that's been backburnered for a few years. It's what I'm planning to write to follow up on my YA steampunk planned trilogy. I have two more books in that series to write before I can get to this one. I have one main character really well developed in my head. The other has been a cipher, but he suddenly came to life for me, and he's not at all what I expected him to be. It'll be a whole new character type for me to write. And then I realized that this book might actually involve a caper story -- one of those "assemble a team of experts to carry out a seemingly impossible job" things. That made the whole plot fall into place. It will require a lot of research to build the world I want for this book, so it still has to be backburnered. Unfortunately, until I can force that story back into the idea soup, it's currently a little more vivid and exciting than what I need to be working on.

I suppose this means I need to write faster so I can get to everything I want to write. I need to finish the third book in the Fairy Tale series. I suspect there will be more, but there will be a brief break while I work on the second steampunk book. Then there's an entirely different adult series I want to start that bridges the steampunk and contemporary fantasy, but that one will require lots of research and some travel, so it probably won't happen until next year. I guess I'll see how things go with the steampunk launch before I'll know how quickly I need to write the third book -- will the publisher want more books or will I independently publish the last two books?

And in the meantime, I need to get this house ready to sell, sell it, find a new house, and move. This is going to be a fun year.