I recently began the submission process with my latest and greatest (ha!) work, and in an effort to keep producing while trying to not think about my story sitting in agents’ query In boxes, I’ve begun another piece. Well, sort of.

I started one about dragon shapeshifters, changed the plot/conflict on that, and then got busy with Thanksgiving. I promised myself I’d get back to it, but in the meantime, a story idea for a character from the above mentioned work popped into my wee head. I fiddled with that over the weekend, even going so far as to write out some character sketches and a synopsis. A nearly complete, 8 handwritten pages synopsis! Much more organized than I usually work, but I’m hoping to get this one written in a shorter time than my other books. Why? To see if I can. And I think I can.

Though I have yet to write much of the manuscript itself, I have a first scene. Maybe. Most of that was to get into my heroine’s head. She’s a former drug addict trying to go straight when she’s approached by the hero to help him save his younger sister from the same drug dealing bad guy the heroine had been with years before. Not necessarily an original plot, but as we all know, it’s all in the execution. The story could be set in any time period, any place. I’m pulling the hero from my latest and greatest (ha!), a futuristic/SF setting on another planet. It’s a world that I’d like to explore some more, so there you go.

I don’t know how much I’ll get written during the holiday season, but I have a couple of long plane rides coming up and my children are old enough not to require constant monitoring while we fly. I should put a pretty good dent in it. Or in the shapeshifter story if that one gels a bit more. Either way, as long as the ideas flow, the writing never really stops, does it? And thank goodness for that.