Category: Brainstorming & Inspiration

Big ideas and how to get them.

Worth the Wait

We love to travel. We love to see what life is like in other parts of the world, and visit amazing sights. We had an epic trip to Eastern Europe planned for March of 2020, which didn’t happen for obvious reasons. At first we postponed it a year, thinking “Eh, the pandemic will surely be over by then.” Ahem. So then we postponed it again.

One of the stops on our itinerary was Romania, which is right next door to Ukraine, so things were looking iffy again for a while, but by fall 2022 we were comfortable enough — and vaccinated and boosted — to go. And we are so glad we did.

We met some amazing people, ate some delicious new foods, drank some intriguing new beverages, and managed to squeeze in some research at the same time.

First stop: Romania. Our Bucharest hotel was next door to the Romanian parliament, aka “The Heaviest Building in the World.” Who knew they kept track of such things? We took a side trip to Transylvania to explore some castles and the breathtaking Carpathian Mountains. Kent drank a Dracula beer in the village below Castle Bran. It was red, but contained no actual blood. Bummer. We also visited Snagov Monastery which is both the burial place of Vlad the Impaler and an ostrich sanctuary. One stop shopping for all your touristic needs!

Disappointingly, the Bank of Transylvania is not a blood bank.

We’ll continue our travelog next week. See you then!

Cave Art

The Writing Cave’s stylish updates are so close to complete. We need to track down a few specialized supplies for our final, final, finishing touches. But it’s almost done!

Feast your eyes on the bounty of inspo that surrounds us!

We used a combination of vinyl and felt to create the designs, incorporating imagery derived from our various story worlds. Kent did the illustrations, and Jen’s sister used her magic cutting machine to turn them into decals, and Jen painstakingly applied them to the walls. (Jen is also the art director and project manager.)

All About Give and Take

A member of our critique group has sent pages out, and we’re very excited to read their material. It’s great to have something to analyze besides our own words once in a while.

The obvious way you benefit from being part of a critique group is that you have extra sets of eyes on your pages. Getting feedback about your work is crucial. But, you can also learn a lot from being the one providing the feedback, if you put forth the effort to do a quality job of it.

Good critique isn’t proofreading. It gives the author a map of where their words took you at each stage of the journey, where you felt different emotions, when you had felt like the logic didn’t add up, which moments were your favorites. Why you love (or love to hate) the characters. And by articulating these thoughts about another’s manuscript, you’re sharpening tools for use in your own writing.

Do you have a critique group? Use the comments to tell us what you like best about belonging to it.

A Tale of Two Roadtrips

Back in April we took a little roadtrip. And as we usually do, we spent the time on the road brainstorming. We came up with a doozy of a character moment for someone’s backstory. It’s really quite a shocking thing. So shocking that at first we weren’t sure we wanted to commit to it. Once it was shakily noted down, we set it aside. (The writing was shaky because we were in a moving car, not because the idea itself was that outré.) We walked around the city a bit, attended a phenomenal concert, and the next morning we found a place with fantastic crepes. In short, we pretended we weren’t writers.

We picked the idea up again on the drive home and found that, yep, that terrible thing is indeed what happened in this person’s past. By not talking about it for a while we were each able to get used to it on our own, and all on its own it became the obvious answer.

More recently we took a day trip, and we barely talked about our work at all. Part of that was because the weather was wretched and Kent needed to really concentrate on not driving us into a ditch. But mostly it was just time for us to have some adventures unrelated to the current project. Sometimes a writer needs to soak up new experiences to give the ol’ creativity engine something to work with. (And maybe there was a touch of still being a bit stunned from the last big idea.)

A good writing partner is someone who is ready for novel adventures when you are. And also someone who shares a taste in funky lamps for the auxiliary writing cave.

Search, Then Search Again

A novel set in the vague “present” allows the author to, for the most part, write what they know. You might need to dig into the details of a profession your character has, or a location they’re going to live in or visit, but you don’t need to research everyday life. Pretty much everyone knows what modern cars and airplanes are like. You can drop in a reference to Netflix or Uber or Joe Biden without needing to explain streaming entertainment, ride sharing, or the state of politics.

Still Untitled Ghost Novel #1 is set in the past, which has required us to do more research than usual. We want to be as accurate as possible, but we’re trying not to get too hung up on minutiae. No one wants to read a book that sounds like it was written by the most anal people on IMDB who take it personally when the train seats in a movie are the wrong shade of brown. Plus, it’s a ghost story. We’re allowed to take liberties.

Some of the research we’ve done for the Ghost Series will come as no surprise: mausoleums, funerary flowers, tarot. Some of it will give you a hint to the time period we’re working in for the first book: telegrams, livery stables, the British Raj. And some of it will hopefully have you scratching your head: world record for underwater breath holding, the history of welding masks, Gloria Vanderbilt.

Put all of that in a pot and stir. Sprinkle in some teen heartthrob magazines, circuit breakers, and the tunnel through the redwood tree, and voila! You’ve got yourself one heck of an untitled ghost novel!

A writing partner is someone who doesn’t let you fall too far down the research rabbit hole.

Working Title

Here at SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises we value secrecy, which is why we use placeholder titles for our novels and series on this blog. Rest assured that the Science Novels and the Music Novels have actual real titles. Pretty kickass titles, if we’re being honest, and when they’re published, you’ll get a chance to witness their majesty for yourself.

Alas, the Ghost Novels do not, as yet, have any sort of titles at all. They don’t even have cute little nicknames. When we talk about them between ourselves it’s just “The First Book” or “Ghost Book 4” or whatever. We don’t even have a name for the series.

Some of this is because we’re still so early in the writing process. Sometimes you have to meet the baby before you can name it. Also, it turns out that naming ghost stories is kind of tricky. It’s very easy to wind up with a title that sounds like a Nancy Drew book: The Haunted Placename, The Secret of the Thingy, The Ghosts of Blankety Blank. It would be a lot easier if no one else had ever written a ghost story before. Another factor is that we like for the titles in a series to sound like they go together. We’ve done that most elegantly with the Science Novels, which you’ll one day be blown away by. Trust. Meanwhile, we do have a few ideas for possible Ghost Book titles, but not any so far that lend themselves to a coordinated set of four.

“Writing Partner” is a great title for someone who is your partner in all things writing. Including coming up with titles.

Another Road Trip, Another Brainstorming Session

We just got home from a great concert, and regular readers of this blog know what that means: we used the time in the car to talk about our work-in-progress. This time out we were deepening the world-building.

Without giving too much away, it’s pretty dark. A lot dark, really. Let’s just say we delved into the practices of the cult in our story (one of the cults…) and when we got home and Kent was typing up the notes, he had some qualms about using his work email for the task. He hit send a while ago, and so far appears to still be employed!

We also wrote the central myth that the cultists’ worship is based on. There’s more to it than just “yikes! that is demented and gross!” It is demented, and a little gross. That’s just not the whole recipe.

A writing partner is someone who offers scintillating — and sometimes moderately disturbing — converstion to help make the miles disappear.

What Will the New Story World Be?

We’ve begun the process of figuring out what we’ll write after we finish the Ghost Series. Technically we haven’t even started writing that series yet, so it probably sounds like we’re getting ahead of ourselves, but it’s good to have projects we can juggle so we don’t get burned out.

So far we’re still looking at our possibilities from a miles-high vantage point, a choice between two basic options. Will it be an extension of one of our previous story worlds, or something totally new?

We can see ways to add on to all three of the existing trilogies. In some scenarios this would mean continuation of the original narrative, while in others it would mean exploring uncharted sections within an established world.

We also have a few thoughts about how we could tackle a type of story we’ve never written before. That’s how the Ghost Series came to be — doing a ghost story was something we wanted to check off the list. There are myriad kinds of stories we haven’t done yet, but the tricky part is finding a way to tell that type of tale in a Rune Skelley type of world.

A good writing partner is someone who’ll invent whole new worlds with you, and then follow you to their ends.

As Predicted

Way back in January we made a writing plan for 2021. Let’s see how closely we followed it.

In true oxymoronic fashion, we wanted to start by finishing something. Editing the Science Novels was handily done, so — Check!

Next was plotting the Ghost Series, which gets another check.

And here’s where things fall apart a little. We were a smidge optimistic when we made our plan, and thought we’d have enough time left in the year to start the actual writing. Hilariously, we left open the possibility that we’d need to decide what to do after we finished the first Ghost Novel. Ha ha! Building four plot rainbows took longer than anticipated, and the actual composition hasn’t begun yet. But slow progress is still progress, and we’re very excited about what’s in store.

One other item on our To Do list that still needs to be addressed: deciding what will come after the Ghost Books. Extremely preliminary discussions on that topic have begun. A good writing partner is someone you enjoy having discussions with, no matter how preliminary they might be.

Like It’s Been There All Along

Things are getting down to the very end in our plotting and scheming sessions for the Ghost Series. Only the climax of the final book really remains up in the air, but there are still surprises waiting for us as we see where our characters go. For instance, during a recent dog-walking-and-novel-plotting excursion, two of our characters decided to wouldn’t you like to know right in the middle of the finale.

By the end of the walk, it felt like that was the way we’d always intended it.

That’s a strong indication that what you’re onto is good, when it immediately acquires a sense of familiarity, when it retcons itself into your whole conception of the narrative. That feeling means that this new idea fills gaps without pushing all your other pieces out of place. You might not have even recognized consciously that the gaps existed, but the structure suddenly holds its shape better.

There’s still a long way to go before we get around to actually writing these scenes. We need to do our outlines, and create stubs, not to mention that what we’re talking about is the very end of Book 4 of a tetralogy. A lot could change by then, even with a process as methodical as ours.

A writing partner is someone to share the discovery of what’s been there the whole time.