Foresight, Or Gung-Ho'edness?

Back in the day, when I lots of energy (ha!), I would do a lot of writing in my down time. Back in the day, when I was going through the hellish journey called "querying" and when that finished, the dark, dank drop through the seemingly endless tunnel called "waiting for publication", I would do quite a bit of writing to keep myself occupied.

Through an extraordinary combination of luck, perseverance, gung-ho as all get out and moderate tunnel vision, I was able to produce enough completed product to get me through any kind of dry spell that might pop up along the way.

Sure enough, as it has been well chronicled on this blog, I've been functioning on a dry spell, on & off, for the better part of two years (2 years!). The good thing about this dry spell, which is not the time spent staggering from project  to project to project in a vain attempt at finding something that sticks, is that there's no pressure on me to get something done, at least for the rest of 2015 and probably the 1st and 2nd quarter of 2016.

We took advantage of those completed projects by publishing the first one in line entitled A Taste Of Pain, in May (as an e-book) and in late June (in print).

However, while I was applying what I thought was a final round of edits to the aforementioned novella, a random thought decided to stick to the wall of my brain, thus making its presence known. What was that random thought? The book that was sitting in the on deck circle, which had gone through only two rounds of editing, had as its lead character a young lady named Nikia. Nikia, in some aspects, was a good copy of the lead character in A Taste Of Pain, who was called at the time, Ashante: Vivacious, quick to anger, quicker to forgive a transgression when it initially originated from her, strong and independent.

So what ultimately turned out to be a not-so-quite random thought that actually stuck was to turn the aforementioned book into part the 1st of a three book trilogy featuring the character Nikia. On a semi-pro level, I'm not very keen on writing a long series, simply due to the fact that it takes me quite a while to complete one story, and even with the rare bullet point memo that has the necessary points on it, I still have that tendency of getting hopelessly lost with my own writing.

So while the first book introduces the character of Nikia, the 2nd will be a continuation on a theme. I think doing this trilogy as a theme, as opposed to having the character age (like they do in a lot very fine series), will be a lot easier for me. On a personal level, trying to keep track of those kind of salient points as a reader did drive me a little nuts from time to time, especially when I was reading a very long series (i.e. minimum 500 pages) that stretched out over a number of years.

I haven't really nailed down a particular theme 100%, although based on the content of both the 1st and 2nd book, I'm leaning towards a combination of sympathy, resiliency and doing the right thing. In the 1st book, those three points are introduced with a good degree of success, while in the 2nd, I think I did a very good job of fleshing out those three points. And just like the first, I believe I did a very fine job of carrying two major plot lines to a satisfying conclusion.

The 3rd book, which I've been working on in fits and starts, is a major gutting/rewriting of this good book. In keeping within the same vein as the first two, the lead character is a paranormal/hybrid, and although it is a fantasy, I believe it has just enough realism to make it seem like an everyday occurrence. Plus, what's make this a little easier to take on, is that I'm using the original story as my working outline.

In conclusion, I think I just answered my own question in this post: not so much foresight as being extremely gung-ho/proactive with my writing, because let's face, we all have serious flaws that we try to assimilate the best we can into our day-to-day lives, but sometimes, they do rear their ugly head from time to time. Mine just happens to be a serious case of procrastination that's borderline brain freeze.

(c) 2015 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved.