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I don’t know what it is about autumn, but as soon as the temperatures begin to cool down (and cool here is around eighty-five degrees) I get very creative. Maybe it’s the upcoming NaNo, or maybe it’s the body’s natural response to the coming winter where everyone stays indoors for long periods of time. Either way, I’ve been dreaming strange dreams lately and turning them into stories in the daytime. This week’s sticky is from one such dream about Mackinac Island. If you’ve never heard of Mackinac Island, go rent the movie Somewhere In Time – it takes place there and the island hasn’t really changed at all. There are no cars, everyone gets around by bike or horse, and all the houses are old Victorian style. It’s a very charming island, but in my dream they quarantined the island from the mainland because of a plague (swine flu, maybe?), and 100 years or so later it was still quarantined. Turns out, being stuck on a small island like that for a century can turn a group of people crazy, and what started off as a nice horse-filled romp around the island became a dangerous escape from people who purportedly believed in Reason above all else.
Of course, the girl in this sticky IS reasonable, and she doesn’t choose death, but she gets herself in a load of trouble anyways. I’m still not sure what happens to her in the end – it may be a tragedy – but I’m pretty sure her own version of reason wins out over her crazy father’s version.
And if you are ever in the upper Lower Peninsula of Michigan, you really should visit Mackinac Island. Their fudge is the best in the world.
So, remember last weekend when I said I had found my next NaNo Novel idea? I found two more this week. One is an idea I’ve been cultivating since my first NaNo back in 2005. The main character is a pretty quiet guy, so I ended up writing Lane’s Girl instead, just because I couldn’t get Mio to say enough (Lane, however, never stops talking and we finished NaNo that year in 19 days). This week while watching the History Channel I found a setting that would work perfectly for Mio’s story. I still don’t trust him to talk enough to do a NaNo though, so that will be something I write outside of November (plus, I have to do a lot of research for that novel, since it will be historical fiction and I’m not yet an expert on Roman Britain).
So that left me with last week’s book idea about the world-hopper, or the third idea I had this week: Apollo and Daphne. If you’ve never read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, you are missing out on a plethora of ancient mythology. These have been some of my favorite stories since I was a child and first read the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Unfortunately, a lot of people are turned off by the style of writing in Metamorphoses (just ask my husband what he thinks of it!) so I thought I would re-tell the story in the context of today’s world. It sounds like bad fanfiction on the surface - take the Greek gods and throw them into high school – but I think the story of Apollo and Daphne can really speak to young readers. It’s about first love, about losing your first love, about never even getting your first love although you try and try. And in my version it will take place in Olympia, WA instead of Olympia, Greece.
As you can probably tell, it didn’t take me long to change my mind and decide to write my NaNo Novel about Apollo and Daphne instead of the world-hopper. And you are sure to see more stickies about it in the near future, since I have already filled one page of my writing notebook with stickies I brought home from work.
The other weekend when I was writing the Writing Prompt Challenge I had this really strange dream about travelling to other worlds (well, only one other world), which isn’t all that odd considering how big a fan I am of Stephen King’s Dark Tower Series. But it wasn’t in the vein of the Dark Tower at all, nor did it have Rebecca and Lane in it (who are characters inspired by the DT). Instead it had some high school girl and a guy I knew many years ago named Pete. I pretty much ignored the dream at the time, because I was too involved with Phooka Tales and then Fie Eoin to bother. But this week I started thinking about the dream again, because it would not be forgotten, and I realized that I had just found my next NaNo Novel! Strange books lend themselves well to NaNo, and the end of the dream was certainly strange. But I cannot remember anything in the middle of the dream. Just the beginning and the end. So I started storylining, and jotted down the notes on stickies. You’ll probably see more of these stickies as we get closer to November, but right now I only have three names (Anna, Atur/Peter, and Kester/Christopher) and a vague idea of what is going to happen (bad guys, world hopping, amulets). I’m not even sure yet if Atur is the bad guy, Kester is the bad guy, or neither of them are a bad guy.
And if Anna’s world poisons Atur and Kester’s world, how do they eat our food? Atur told her that’s why they travelled to her world, for food and medicine they couldn’t get in their own, but that seems kind of suspicious to me….
Today’s sticky is not actually from a story that I have written, but is a note I jotted down because I thought it was interesting. I subscribe to American Scientist’s Science In The News Weekly, and every week they send me an email full of interesting stories published during the week. This past week they sent me an email with a link to a story about the Taino – a native people of Hispaniola – who build houses on stilts over lagoons. While I don’t want to write about the Taino, it did give me an interesting idea to set a future novel in a stilted village above a lagoon. Maybe nothing will come of this sticky, but now I have it just in case.
