Your characters know themselves better than you do.

Okay, so usually I know what I'm going to write when I sit down to write it, but more often than not, the story takes over and starts to tell itself. It forms connections within itself that I never would have thought of on my own and can take me to some of the most unexpected places. If that sounds kind of weird, it is...but it's also something I've heard other writers talk about.

Hmm.

So, along that same line, my characters can sometimes surprise me. Sometimes I don't know things about them until they tell me, but usually I have a decent idea of who they are and what I expect from them. Today, however, the story, my fingers, and one of my characters decided it was time for a shake up. And I don't mean the delicious lemon kind you get at fairs. (Yum.)

Lord Endymion kissed Raven. O_O

I didn't even know Endymion liked women. And I never saw him as a potential love interest for Raven. My intentions for them were wholly platonic. Not to mention that I didn't go into the scene with any sort of kissing planned. Now I have no idea what's going on.

All I know for sure is that when I left them, Raven was kissing him back, so I guess I'd better get back in there and figure out where they're about to take me.

When your muse decides to smack you the forehead, you should probably listen.

I found myself in a writing lull. Immediately my brain questioned the possibility of such a thing even existing. A writing lull? What is that? It didn’t know what to do. I started writing in January of 2007. I haven’t stopped since.

Now, never mind the fact that this story actually began in my head when I was 13 or 14, or that its very first words were handwritten and then typed out on a Tandy – one of the first home-based computers. The Tandy didn’t even have a hard drive for storage. The only thing it came with was a clunky monitor and a DOS-based operating system. Everything else had to be stored on diskettes. Back then the story was about witches and was called The Witches of Twilight Woods. I still have a diskette with the Tandy version on it.

Throughout my teen years, I revisited the story often — using the Tandy, typewriters, and then slowly evolving forms of the computers we use today. But I was too young and not serious enough to really finish it. Apparently, my muse finally decided it was time to change that in 2007. And it hasn’t released its hold on me since.

And so, I found myself in this “writing lull.” It’s this strange void where I find myself in a holding pattern awaiting critiques on the two manuscripts I have written so far. So what did my brain decide to do? Well much like a computer, it could not compute “writing lull” and process it into meaning. So...I started on my third manuscript and swiftly wrote out the first eighteen pages. Eighteen pages. In one day. And that’s not even a solid day, just a few hours really.

I consider fifteen pages in a solid day a good day. Of course, bear in mind that this eighteen pages does include the cover page and the page for the table of contents, but still, it also includes all the time it took to format the document properly and come on, even only counting sixteen pages is an accomplishment.

I have a few years with my muse, yet, I know. But I have to admit that I’m kind of scared of the day when I finish this trilogy. Especially when the muse has already made me write down the beginning of a potential number four and even given it a title. O_O