What I've been doing...

So what have I been doing in the last few days, other than fretting about the situation I posted about last, smoking WAY too much and playing Bookworm Adventures until my eyes fall out?

Well, I've been thinking a lot about She Moved Through The Fair, the next book in my Caitlin Ross series. In it, Caitlin tracks a destructive magical amulet through the week-long Gordarosa Harvest Festival and eventually finds it closer to home than she suspected.

SMTtF started as a mundane murder mystery. In fact, it was the first Caitling Ross story I thought of (with the help of my darling and creative husband) some five or six years ago. Consequently, it's changed a lot since then. For one thing, Caitlin was a simple musician, without any of the more arcane elements to her persona that we come to hear of in The Unquiet Grave. For another, for all you people who are interested in the writer's process, it was written in the third person. And Timber had red hair.

But the biggest stumbling block I'm having now is that it was mundane. A Ha! you say, That's where the magic amulet comes in. And you'd be right. I invented the amulet when I was about halfway through TUQG so that there would be a reason for this book to be a Caitlin Ross story and not just a random Cozy.

But I'm having trouble remembering just how the amulet fits in to the murders. That's what I get for not writing things down I suppose. I know I had a Great Idea and pretty much the whole book planned out at one point. But did I take notes? Of course not. I thought I would remember. Of course years have gone by since the Great Idea and I DON'T remember. And I feel like I can't get started writing until I do.

Editorial meeting, help! This is where I need a team of writers to back me up with little notecards all filled with ideas that I can pin up on a bulletin board, just so I can keep track of what's going on. Because I have at least six Caitlin Ross books in my mind at this point--enough to keep me going for several years if they ever become more than vague notions (or should I ever sell a book to a real publisher or win the lottery so I can keep publishing them by myself).

Oh, and in case you've been wondering, the narrator of "Gifts of a Generous Heart" in Dragons of the Mind WAS indeed Caitlin Ross.

I've also been thinking about writing a letter to my mother, but that's another story that would entail the use of much tobacco and perhaps some whiskey.