Writing about writing

[naomikritzer]

I have a post on where I get ideas up at the group blog kept by my writers' group, if anyone's interested. (Specifically, it's where I got the various ideas that went into Fires of the Faithful and Turning the Storm.. I can explain very specifically where I got the idea for any particular story I've written.)

Edited at springbok's suggestion to note that the entry at the group blog contains spoilers for Fires & Turning.

Comments

[winterswitchery.livejournal.com]

I'm curious about where your ideas for Freedom's Gate and subsequent novels came from. I'm finally reading the last one and it struck me that most times, I have no idea where the stories have come from.

And.. are you working on anything neeeeew? ^^;;

[naomikritzer]

When I was a teenager, my family went on a long road trip from Wisconsin to Glacier National Park, visiting various interesting sights in between, including the Badlands of South Dakota.

The Badlands are seriously freaky looking (and also very beautiful, in a spooky way), and I was really fascinated. Since I am a fantasy writer and not a geologist, I immediately started coming up with magical explanations for that landscape, and came up with a scenario in which a nasty invading power subdued the locals by binding up their water into a magical necklace. The heroine of the original story was a girl named Loris Brightsun. The original version included a lost princess, and Loris was always one of the good guys, never a collaborator.

I was very good at finishing things as a teenager, so I got sick of the story and set it aside.

I started thinking about it as an adult and decided I wanted to revisit it. Except, I'd discovered that I rather liked stories about people who start out on one side, and change their mind. (They're very interesting to write about, for one thing.) Also, I'd decided at some point that I wanted the "bound water" to actually be dammed up somehow.

I am working on something new, I just haven't talked about it much because it's not under contract yet. I'm about 100 pages into an urban fantasy novel set in Minneapolis, involving a woman whose great-uncle in Leipzig, Germany leaves her the Ark of the Covenant. He came into possession of it when his Jewish neighbors showed up at his door and said "Here. Keep this for us until we come back." (They never came back.) The magic in the book is religious-based magic. It's been fun to work on so far; I think it's going to be a good book.

I also wrote a couple of short stories which are verrrrrrrrry slooooooooowly making the rounds. Writing is a bad career choice for the impatient. I am profoundly impatient. Waiting drives me bonkers.

[springbok1.livejournal.com]

You might want to mention that the blog entry in question contains spoilers.