Myth, the Universe, and Everything

Highlights roughly in order:

• Spent quality time with my parents


• Helped set marks for a sail boat race


• Took a cruise of the Thimble Islands


• Helped pick monster zucchini on one of the Thimbles


• Ate blueberry coffee cake and Dad's Blueberry Pie (TM) with real Michigan blueberries


• Went sailing on a gusty day without capsizing


• Went to a restaurant with the same name as my father.


• Judged the SpaceWesterns.com senryu contest entries--winners are now available online! (Some of my favorites did not make the cut.)


• Celebrated a wedding anniversary


• Visited with old friends


• Had dinner and watched movies with new(ish) friends


• Stayed out 'til almost 1 a.m. with said friends, which is remarkable for its infrequency


• Went to see the superhero exhibit at the Met in New York


• Debated the virtues of Stark Tech vs. Wayne Tech.


• Had hot chocolate with dragonladyflame


• Wrote several "e-mails" and "interludes" from the perspective of my vampire alter-ego for the Dogs in the Vineyard game I mentioned awhile ago


• Started learning about grant writing


• Ordered and received skzbrust's new Vlad Taltos novel (which my husband promptly devoured), nalini_singh's most recent Psy-Changeling novel (because waiting for it to become available through the library was driving me nuts), and blue_succubus's Storm Born, the first in her new series.


• Typed portions of a new short story I wrote mostly on scrap paper.


• Neglected to turn anything in to Arielle for my first "hold me accountable for fiction" deadline.


• Got paid for freelance work.


• Went to the dentist.


• Spent all day at the beach with a large group of fifth to eighth graders and had an absolute ball.


• Went to B&N to replace Storm Born, as my copy arrived with water damage from the copious amount of rain we've been having.


• Went back to the beach to have a grill out with my Dogs in the Vineyard group.


• Discovered that spending time from 10 a.m. through, effectively, 7 p.m. at the beach leads to sunburn on the face.


• Had my poor vampire almost die. Again. She made it. Also again.


• Found the aloe in the med kit still packed from Greece and Turkey.

I think there's actually more (not that this isn't enough), but I'm a bit exhausted right now (probably due to the sun as much as the time), so I'm going to turn in. Tomorrow is another day with family (I hope!), Friday is a D&D game after work, and Saturday and Sunday I'll be at Mythcon in New Britain, CT (just up the road). If you're also going to be there, send a holler!

I'll try to be back on a somewhat regular blogging schedule next week.

I wrote this yesterday on fantastic_realm, but since it has to do with what I'm realizing about the new YA novel (which I'm going to start tagging under Blackstone), I thought I'd x-post here. ;)

--

It's been quiet around here, and since I've just had a writing related issue come up, I thought I'd see if we could stir up some conversation.

What I thought was going to be one novel seems to have turned itself into something like three novels instead. This is not because I have the writing anywhere close to done (hardly begun is more like it), but because I realized that all of the different ideas I want to work with are just too big to fit into one story.

I'd started the whole concept wanting to work with giants in Connecticut (since we used to have them, apparently--just look at Hobbomock, our own Sleeping Giant, a lovely hiking area near Haddam). Then I wanted to work with other Quinnipiac legends, particularly the woman sachem who is said to have drowned herself in Long Island Sound to protect the Thimble Islands from invaders. And I still love those stories and think they have a place in the world I'm developing--but they also seem to need their own books. The alternate Connecticut I'm working on needs its own book just to get started--and I think it could be that the secondary characters who are less important in the first book may be the ones to be involved with those other legendary figures. As it is now, the Blackstone family of Branford is coming to the fore, along with their (soon to be developed) relationship with the famous Blackstone the Great. And those ghosts don't seem to want to share the page with the legends that went on before.

Have you ever had that experience? Has your original great idea ended up becoming a third book in a series, rather than the book that starts it all? (Or, have you ever realized that you will need more books to tell the stories you want to tell when you haven't even sold the first?)