Sometime in May, I had the brilliant idea to write about the writing in real time. However, I suck at blogging. Still, I had a voice recorder full of excitement and so I thought I’d share the thrill of catching the idea with you.

All of this was written on Memorial Day 2017.

---

So I try to write everyday, but after the craziness of March through May where I edited and published three novellas I was mentally exhausted and without a project.

This made the second half of May very strange for me. I haven’t felt like myself because I haven’t been sticking to my habit. I’m not as happy when I’m not writing (there been times in the past when my partner, literally told me to go away and write because I was being mean).

I still have been working on Witch, Ghost, Dog, Clone (which is a huge fantasy project that is also my graduate school thesis project), notes for the rest of the Heart of the Mountain series, and tinkering with old stuff. But I haven’t had a real project, because I’ve been writing like God-damned demon I needed a break.

So I took a break. Watched some Jessica Jones and Supernatural. Read some Deadpool.

But yesterday, for whatever reason, the writing came.

Rather than struggling to put words on page (or you know, text on screen) I found myself fluidly being drawn into a story. I knew the characters instinctively, I saw where the plot was going, I even had an opening line.

It’s an idea I thought up working at Starbucks. There’s long hallway that leads to a parking garage where they kept the garbage. One of my jobs was to walk to trash for this hallway and as a writing exercise I’d describe the hallway in my head in different voice and tones. How does it look from a horror novel from the monster’s POV? What about in a  romance novel?  What about in a comedic mash-up of the two where dude is so much in love that he’s listening to his music and dancing along, and never notices the giant bug demon hanging on the ceiling.

Somehow I got hung up on the idea of monsters and I put my Starbucks experience in the Buffy verse. My little place on Grove St. was actually nestled on top of a Hell-Mouth and and the reason nothing was ever done in the morning was because evening shift was killing demons keeping those bastards underground.

I had this fun image of David Wong, Kevin Smith, and Nora Roberts mashup where the romantic lead is this oblivious dude on night shift who falls for his boss who works the morning shift. Boss thinks Dude is an asshole because the work is never finished, so Dude starts working his ass off in the last half hour of the day to get everything done and impress Boss.

I teased this idea while writing Heart of the Mountain, and Witch, Ghost, Dog, Clone, and turning in the final edits for Seaweed and Silk and The Scarf. As I took out the trash, I’d daydream about someone getting locked out of the cafe and then devoured in the hallway. Or a soldier dropping down to the Hell-Mouth and hunting demons Dean and Sam Winchester style.

Then at some point, I had to submit a story idea to an romance anthology from the same people that brought you Crazy Little Spring Called Love. I knew it was science-fiction and I knew it had to happen on a beach. My brainstorming and searching through old stories brought me nothing. Neither did asking my sister (a hopeless romantic) for advice.

But I didn’t have time to write, because it was a Starbucks day, so I went to work. Of course, night shift had made a royal mess of things. Disorganized pastry case. Oddly curated sandwich selection. No cold brew made. And of course, they put in the wrong garbage bags. Instead of triple bagging the one for the coffee grounds (wet coffee grounds is the smell of trash. Nothing else smells as much like trash as wet coffee grounds), they’d put in a bag so tight it had stretched to fit over the edges.

Being witty as fuck at 5:30 a.m., I mentally demanded, “why? Did the bin see it’s youth floating away and decide to chaseit ‘s former glory with tight-ass garbage bags?  Did the trash make questionable sexual decisions and the bin squeezed into a female condom for protection?”

What I actually said was, “hum. Must have been busy. I’ll change this now.”

And my boss remarked on how pleasant I was and cussed out night-shift for me.

Instantly, I had the character for Dude’s love interest. Someone who could be mentally shredding everyone else to pieces while remaining pleasant to work with. It suddenly occurred to me, my story wasn’t happening in a Hell-Mouth, but on an planet so big that it was mostly beach. The brainless monsters Dude was hunting weren’t demons, but aliens, the insentient beginning of life. And when Boss found out, he would handle his rage by making Dude breakfast and smiling.

I even had a title for it.

Breathless.

 

And about 3000 words into it now. I’ve got a word count limit of 10k. I’m aiming to finish this puppy by Wednesday when I go back to Starbucks again.

Happy Memorial Day, folks. Wish me luck.