Hang on! I'm actually posting about writing!

Yeah, like the title says, this post is actually going to be about writing. Sonja's dying of shock somewhere, but hey, I like to shake things up every once in a while. Okay, always. :)

I had a story idea. Now, that's not anything unusual, given I consider myself a writer and almost any writer will tell you that they often have ideas and if they're really lucky, they remember them and then can eventually spin them into a story later which they sell for lots of money and, lucky them, Fabio appears on the cover. So it hasn't worked exactly that way in my case, I do have a lot of story ideas. I keep a file for each, usually and add to it when i think of something that relates.

At any rate, I need to preface my post a little bit with how this idea came about. I was lucky enough to get an xbox 360 for my birthday this year. Along with it came a bunch of arcade games. I've been wandering through the arcade games, seeing what there is to see. Tonight, I was playing Bejeweled 2, which is a totally brainless game involving gem swapping to get rows of 3. Or something like that. So I was sitting there playing it, not really focusing, and I started daydreaming. And in to my mind popped a story idea about a girl who plays video games. (Now you'll never ask an author where they get their story ideas from ever again, right?)

And the longer I played, the more fully formed the idea became. I started expanding on the main character... and who her hero was going to be. I started pondering how much research it would take (because, let's be honest, no one's going to read a book about Bejeweled 2, and that's pretty much the only game I know anything about), and other facets that i will eventually need to bring this book to life.

Obviously, the moral of this story is that I need to turn my brain off and let it do it's thing. For the first time in a long time, I was actually inspired to write. Which is a bummer, given I'm in the middle of packing up a 2 bedroom apartment to fit into a 10 x 10 storage space and also, theoretically, working on my work in progress (forever after referred to as my WIP) which is entitled A Girl's Guide to the Afterlife, and is, to my egotistical way of thinking, a really great concept. I mean, who wouldn't want to read about Valkyries? I know I do! Besides, there's so much potential for Fabio to be a manly Viking on the cover.

So, my writing goals (which Sonja has been wanting me to post since the beginning of the year) are now thus:

1) Finish the damn book. A Girl's Guide to the Afterlife really needs to be finished. And I need to make the hero less lame.
2) Send massive amounts of paper to Sonja so that she can take 2 years to edit my book, much like the last one :)
3) Work on new book, an as yet untitled project about competative video gamers

and finally,

4) Play Bejeweled 2 a lot more in the hopes of sparking more writing brainstorms