Saturday 8th August 2020

My brain seems to rebelling against the idea of having no active project.

I spent the day playing Pokemon Go and the Xbox.  I did the Magikarp community day, but mainly for the stardust.  Then I came home and played on various games on the Xbox, although I seem to be settling into The Witcher 3.  And, maybe in a subconscious act of stopping myself from writing, I managed to throw drink all over my keyboard.

A lot of the times after I finish a big project, my brain is fried, but this clearly isn’t the case this time.  My creative mind does not need the rest.  But, I’m wary starting anything that I might have to stop to focus on other things in a few weeks.

And so I’m really restless.

But sometimes some good can come from that.

One of the current writing beliefs I have right now is the idea of great novels have great concepts.  I don’t believe this is a universal truth, or one that I’m likely to continue to hold onto as I progress my career, but I like the idea that a novel can be summarised to a hook; a concept.

I like cross-genre.  I like it when fantasy has spaceships or SF has magic.  The problem is that when it comes to write them or read them, it’s not easy to explain the concept.   It’s like Lord of the Rings except with spaceships and vampires.

Black as Knight is regency Batman.  The concept is really clean.  I want future books (at least for the time being) to also have clean concepts.

I had a new idea the other day.  It’s basically a play on the chosen one trope.  It’s a pretty strong idea, with a clear concept but like them all it needs developing.

I realised that this might go perfectly with a piece of worldbuilding I’ve got in my ideas notebooks.

This is how stories tend to come about.  It’s when one idea clashes into another and sticks.

It still needs a bit of work, which means that I put it back into the ideas draw, digging it out when the next big idea strikes that might work with it. That could be years down the line.  I have plenty of ideas for novels.  However, not all of them have as strong a concept.

For now, I’m just going to focus on not having an active project and enjoy a couple of days off.

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