Diary of Being a Writer; Week 189

A tale of two stories vying for attention.

There I was happily plodding along with NaNoWriMo and the second Dawn novel getting the words done, moving forward with the story when boom! The way to write my Stepmother Murder story came to me. I have been mulling over the idea of a thriller about murdering a stepmother for a long time, and I finally worked out how to do it. I don’t remember how I managed to think of it. Then I thought I had better get the basic idea down, which I did. Then I thought I should just try writing a little bit of it. And it just flew onto the page. It works. It will take a lot of editing and working out how to slot all the tricky bits together, but seriously every time I sit down to write this, it just flows. I have been thinking about it for at least four years, so maybe it isn’t surprising that it is gushing out.
The problem is I am meant to be writing Dawn. I already feel that although less political than the first Dawn, it is a better novel. The things I wanted to shove into the first one are no longer vying for a place in my book. Now it is just a story about Dawn, not a story with my own accidental agenda in it. Things like wanting to pay tribute to friends that are no longer around, I stuck them in the first book, and I am not sure they always added anything. Now they are no longer there it is just the characters I need to tell…