Looking Ahead at 2016

It’s a brand new year, which means it’s time to draw up a plan for our writing.

Son of Music Novel’s first draft is resting quietly in the virtual bottom drawer. Once we’ve forgotten everything we wrote we’ll pick it up again and edit it with fresh eyes, then take it to our critique group.

To help us do that forgetting we’ve begun to spec out Son of Science Novel. We had approximately a day and a half of just sort of staring at each other, trying to remember who had survived the first book in the series and imagine what they might get up to next. Then – BOOM! – the ideas exploded and we’ve started filling up the pages in a new steno pad. Jen’s made her first timeline and her first list of potential character names. Kent’s list of topics to research is growing by the minute. It’s amazingly fun.

Not that it will be fun for our characters. Nope. They’ll hate us, which is how it should be.

Coming into the brainstorming we had some pictures and preliminary notes on two real-world locations that seemed like fruitful story settings. Early ideas seemed to rule them both out, though, much to our chagrin. But now we’ve found a way to work with one, and possibly both of them. Huzzah!

We’d like to think that the brainstorming and outlining won’t take as long as they did for Son of Music Novel. If they keep going at this pace, we should be golden.

Once we get this baby outlined nicely, we’ll switch back to Son of Music Novel and do those edits, and while we’re at it we’ll pull up Music Novel itself and find ways to tie the two narratives together more strongly.

Meanwhile, we’re waiting for good news from the agent who is currently looking at Science Novel. 2016 might just be the year this all takes off.