Scenes

Original Post: June 25 2010

Revised May 8 2013

Sometimes I get these scenes in my head that don’t happen for awhile. I usually have to let theses scenes play out in my head, I’ve found it’s easier than trying to fight my mind back on track and takes less time. Some of these scenes take place so far in the future that they probably would not even be anywhere in the series. I used to try to write these scenes so they would be done when I got there, if it was within the book’s time frame. I’ve found I cannot do this. It’s like trying to write out a five hour span of your life six months in advance, you can’t. There are so many factors going on that what you think will happen, may never come to pass. For example, when I sat down to start the second book in my Kat series, the one after Blood Natured, I wrote the ending to the book before I even finished the first page. I thought it was a good thing, I knew where I wanted the story to go, I just had to figure out how to make that ending happen. That ending never happened. By the time I got about two thirds of the way through Halloween Blood, I knew I couldn’t use the ending I wrote. It just would not work the way I originally wanted. I had a couple scenes in Halloween that were like that. I stopped trying to advance write and just go with the natural flow, living minute to minute with my characters. I still get these advance scenes, and I do go over them in my head, watching them unfold, but I don’t write them, just store them away. If it’s something that can be part of a book, I put the idea on my board, but that’s it.