What I'm working on

Now that Shine Bright is completed (or at least as much as an initial manuscript can be), I get to start outlining a new story. I love this part, when the ideas are still so shiny and new and I know that this time the writing will be effortless and beautiful and the story will unfold gloriously upon the page…Anne Patchett says it best in her essay “On Writing”:

“This book I haven not yet written one word of is a thing of undescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its colour, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book, and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight, is the single perfect joy in my life…

When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It’s not that I want to kill it, but it’s the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page. Just to make sure the job is done I stick it into place with a pin. Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV. Everything that was beautiful about this living thing – all the colour, the light and movement – is gone. What I’m left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. Dead. That’s my book.”

I haven’t gotten to that part yet, though. I get to enjoy the unformed ideas a little longer as I describe my beautiful butterfly as best I can in my outline.

Despite my personal reading preference for lower angst stories, this next book is going to be a second chance romance. Theodore and Sarah are high school sweethearts who are ripped apart by their conservative parents and fate intervenes to keep them separated for nearly a decade. Eight years later, newly released from the Marines, Theodore is finally able to track Sarah down. Instead of his shy first love, however, she’s now Sienna Rose, Hollywood’s hot new starlet. Can Theodore and Sarah overcome old hurts and mistrust in order to find the healing they need in each other? I guess we’ll see!

I tend to avoid second chance romances because of the amount of heart-wrenching angst you have to get through before the protagonists finally get together—but that also means I can appreciate the value of the hard-won HEA. Let’s hope I can accomplish that here! I already know I’m going to have to intertwine past and present scenes to show what they’ve been through individually before they reunite.

I’m definitely setting myself a little bit of a tricky narrative task but I can’t wait for you all to meet Theodore and Sarah!