Letting Your Stories Choose You

As many of you know, I have been searching for a new house for the family for the past few weeks.  I've seen so many, the rooms and features have become blurred in my mind.  And then, this week, we found it.  The most perfect place for so many reasons, it was a glorious bloom in a sea of fertilizer.  Seriously.  What people think constitutes "a great family home built for entertaining" is truly scary.  Anyway.

We had two other places we were considering and those close to me kept telling me I had to make a choice.  But, over the drama of having to move in the first place, I made a decision:  I was going to treat this dilemma exactly the way I treated my writing.  In other words, I let the house choose us.

Everyone but my Mum and hubs thought I was crazy.  I heard it all.  If I didn't act fast, I'd lose it.  Someone else would get it if I didn't make a decision.  But I bided my time.  I nearly drove certain people nuts, but I swear, I knew what I was doing.  Sure enough, day by day, reasons to let the others go and choose the one we finally did, kept revealing themselves.  And I realized it was just like writing.

As I have admitted here before, I get ideas for books and stories in the shower.  And I like it fine that way.  I love that the ideas start as seeds and those kernels burst into paragraphs, chapters, story arcs, and finally, a finished project.  But I never sit down and say to myself, Today I will write about....witches.  Or ghosts, or things that you wish would have gone bump in the night.  Every story I write chooses me.

You know the old adage, write what you know?  I do that.  Not even consciously either.  When I wrote Spellbound, I was exposed to a person who was a practicing Wiccan.  Not directly, peripherally, but that was all it took.  Ghostly came about from a conversation with someone about how her grandmother came to her when she passed.  Musina wiggled in my head and said, Why are the ghosts always old grandparents?  What would be wrong with a hottie ghost?  Turns out...nothing.

Would it surprise you to know that when I was the general manager of a failing car rental facility, I wrote a story about aliens landing at LAX?  Or that now as a Risk Manager for a cab company, my freshest horror tome features a graveyard shift cabbie?  Or that my latest big project is set in the same state where I have family and once went to high school there? (shout out to Louisville, KY, ya'll!)

Your stories are out there, waiting, for just the right time to jump in your head.  I promise.  It happens to me time after time.  So what are you doing right now?  Your story has been looking for you.  Let it choose you.

My Muse Has Returned!

My kids were gone all week for Spring Break and you can't believe how much my hubs and I were looking forward to the time alone.  With each other.  And away from them.  We were going to eat what we wanted, watch what we wanted, and maybe even get frisky without locking down the master bedroom like Fort Knox.  But, here's the funny thing.....we hated it.  We hated the no-kidness of the whole week.  The house was lifeless, with no color or happy vibe.  I prowled back and forth from their rooms, peeking in just in case I forgot to send them to their grandparents and Nanny's homes and they might still be there, casually lounging on their beds, playing a pink or black DS, depending.  Hubs walked around the house bitching about how quiet it was, much in the same way he bitches about how noisy the kids are.  But he missed it.

Another nasty by-product of the deafening silence in the house is that Musina took a powder.  Nowhere to be seen.  Va-moosed.  I thought I would be thrilled to write in the lovely peace and quiet.  I couldn't have been, in my son's words, "wronger,"  Not a single word came out of my head or my fingers this whole week.    I had no original thoughts, no fabulous story lines ripping around in my empty spaces, nothing bubbling or percolating at all.

But it was temporary, Thank the Muses, and changed the second my kids were on my radar.

Swear to God, I stepped into the shower this morning, which is my "idea-zone" and the good ones began pelting me harder than the shower stream.  I had to jump out of the shower and pound notes about the gems furiously into my iphone before they left my head for good.  I needn't have worried.  The stream of killer topics and projects have been constant and non-stop since I woke up and realized this was the day the babies came home.

So, I learned something important, besides how much I love those kids.....Musina loves them too. And apparently, we can't write unless they are around.   Even as I write this, one kid is practicing his Cabbage-Patch dance in front of me, and the other is flitting about in her pajamas like a lost moth.  Both of them are in my orbit.  And because of this, I'm writing.  So fast my fingers can barely keep up.  And they ideas keep on rolling in.  Topics include haunted makeup, supernatural trees, harried and weather-beaten cabbies, strippers, scary banjos, creepy ambulance drivers and, believe it or not, a kind of shit-monster.  Yup.  You read it right.  An idea, by the way, my son completely LOVES.  Big surprise.

So, there is really no lesson to be learned from this post, no big "A-ha" moment.  No heartfelt advice I am doling out in the hopes of helping aspiring writers.  I'm just so chuffed my kids are home, I wanted to shout about it.  A writer's equivalent of shouting out?  Blogging, baby!

Oh, and from a person whose child calls them "freaky, but in a good way", enjoy your Friday the 13th!  I sure am.