Bringing up Old Stuff

I write everything down, and I never delete any of it.

Okay, that's not completely true.  But most ideas I have, I keep around, even if they've faded into that ambiguous slush of things I no longer want to write.  I never know when I'm going to need something I thought up weeks, months, or years ago.

And over the past few days, I've been digging up quite a bit.

As I talked about in my last entry, I'm moving on from Skyborne, but I'm still set on telling Shiloh and Alexi's story.  As I also talked about in my last entry, I've been telling stories with these two for a long time, so I have more plot notes about them than anyone else.  In search of this new plot, I started looking through older stuff, and found a few very useful things.

For instance, I found that the 'new' idea I had a few weeks ago was actually something I thought up back in 2009 and had forgotten about.  Go figure.  I've heard it's bad to rip yourself off, but hey, I don't think it counts as re-using an idea if I never actually wrote that book.  ^_^  I also found a ton of character notes, some of which are invalid for the new incarnations of the characters and some of which is still very, very valid and will make them more interesting when I start writing them.

It's weird to admit it to myself, but character matters so much in making a book worth reading, and Skyborne's lack of interesting history for the main characters left them as more blank slates than I realized when I was writing it.  I will fix that.

Also on my list of older stuff to reread?  An entire book, one I finished back in 2005, the last book I thought was worthy of being published.  Odds are good I'll go through it and cringe a lot.  But I realized last month that I can go back to it, turn it inside out, and rework it, make it the tale told by one of the villains.  I want to really delve into this person's head and see what it's like to serve a spirit who affects the world in warped attempts at change and blood-bound symbiotes.  And I want this would-be villain to be the one who breaks the world's one great pattern.

This year, I would like to write these two books.  Nine months is plenty of time for that, yeah?

oh gods what am I getting myself into