Shiny New Ideas

I got the first six chapters revised yesterday, but that was the easy part because that's the section I submitted to the publisher, so I'd already done a lot of work on them. Now I'm in the part that hasn't been worked over all that much, so it will take a little more effort.

However, the first thing I need to do today is a big brain dump to clear my head because last night I was hit by a story idea. This wasn't one of those little "I'd like to do something like this" notions. It was fairly fully fledged, with characters, backstory, situation, conflict, goal, and even scenes and chunks of dialogue. It was like getting smacked upside the head with a doorstopper fantasy novel. By the time I went to sleep, I'd seen about half of it as a movie (with bits of narrative woven in). When I woke up, I had even more details and more scenes.

The cool thing is that this idea would fit with what my agent has suggested would be good for me to do, but fixes my issues of why I haven't felt like doing that would be something I'd be good at. It's a trope reversal story, which I think is a lot of fun.

But it's not ready to write. I may have a sense of the main characters, the situation, and the plot, but it needs more detail and specifics. I need to finish the book I'm working on and one more before I'm anywhere near ready to work on this. Since this is the shiny new thing, my brain wants to play with it. That's why the first order of business will be to write it all down, everything I know so far. That will preserve it and get it out of my head.

Oh, but I think it will be so much fun.

I'm not even sure where it came from. I was reading one of the Norton Award nominees when it hit me, but that book had nothing in common with the thing I came up with. There's a bit of imagery from something I saw earlier this week that may have triggered it. Maybe it's something that's been lurking in my subconscious for a while, and these things just brought it to the surface. I've had big ideas smack me upside the head before (like the Enchanted, Inc. series), but few of them have come as fully formed as this.

Now I guess I'm extra motivated to finish the projects I have planned. This one may move up in the queue from other things I was thinking about doing.