The thing about books is that they change you, well the good ones do. I was reminded of that this morning.

I was getting ready for work this morning and I noticed that there was a lovely creeping fog hanging around the house – I was immediately transported to Stephen King’s The Mist. I started to feel a little uneasy as I looked at that fog wondering what could be moving behind the curtain of grey moisture. It was completely childish, the dogs had been in and out without so much as a bark, surely if there had been some nightmarish prehistoric creature the dogs would’ve at least barked.

The uneasy feeling gnawed at the back of my mind and when I headed out the door, I found myself trying to move a little faster to get from the house to the car. (Yes because clearly a car would be a great defense against fog filled with pterodactyls and other nightmares.) In my haste, I walked face first into a spider web and a sense of fear and panic thicker the fog began to close around me.

I waited to see a giant spider, roughly the size of a medium size dog, moving towards me with pinchers dripping, waiting to paralyze me with venom, wrap me up in webbing for later. (Yes, let’s completely ignore the fact that a spider of that size would have a web much much bigger than the one I was brushing away from my face.)

To the casual observer, I imagine I appeared to only pause for a moment but in truth, every second while I contemplated my death by giant mutant spider was excruciatingly long.  When I was safely in my car and there were a few miles away between me and the spider web, I was finally able to chuckle a little and feel just a tiny bit sheepish about the whole experience.

An hour later I am appreciative of the man who crafted a story that fifteen or twenty years later can still make my heart skip a beat in fear.

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies,…The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance With Dragons

“You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.”

I believe that’s completely and utterly true. I get most of my ideas from one of two places – dreams or playing a game I like to call “what if.”

I have strange and vivid dreams, sometimes I remember them in exquisite detail, sometimes I only remember impressions or a few scattered images. The project I’m working on now is entirely dream based, I don’t remember all the details but there was one powerful image at the end that I carried with me into daylight. I wrote it down, I contemplated it, wrote more, watched as the fragment evolved into something more. I’m still optimistic that one day I’ll be able to share more about this particular project with you.

Of all of the dreams that I have, maybe one in a hundred is really worth holding on to, the rest just serve as amusements for friends, family, and coworkers. (Like the one where my Boss was leading our company through an outbreak of the zombie plague.) I confess that sometimes I’ve spent more time on one of the ones that’s not worth holding on to than I should.

The “what if” game always starts the same way, I look at something and I wonder “what if” – the first “what if” scenario I remember having that turned into a “story” was when I was in grade school. I loved climbing trees and while I was sitting in a tree I watched a squirrel chattering at me for getting too close to its nest and I thought “what if” that squirrel was really my friend, and it was talking to me. I filled many pages of a black marbled composition book with the story of me and “my secret pal.”

“What if’s” can strike at any minute, sometimes driving down the street, I’ll look at a house and imagine – what if it was haunted, what if the people who live there are building a rocket, what if… Usually these ideas are laughable – there is a house where I “what if’d” the people into building a rocket, but there wasn’t really anywhere for that to go in my head so even if they were building a rocket, I’ll leave that story for someone else.

Perhaps “other” people think “what if the neighbors are building a rocket” and they laugh it off and the thought never goes anywhere else. As Neil Gaiman says, perhaps that’s the difference – writers ride out that what if to the bitter end. I sure do!

So imagine my surprise when I was listening to iTune’s Meet the Author  podcast with Melissa de la Cruz and Ally Carter and Ally Carter started talking about storyboarding. My degree was in communication, I remembered the Advertising majors talking about storyboarding but since I have absolutely no artistic tendencies, I didn’t really see how that applied to storytelling. However, listening to Ally Carter – I was intrigued, storyboarding for writing, it all started to make perfect sense!

My stories always start with an image, sometimes it comes to me when I’m dreaming, sometimes it’s when I’m wide awake  - all of a sudden I’m seeing something completely different than what’s there.  Other images start popping up,  so the thing that makes my mind horrible for outlining makes it perfect for storyboarding. When I’m trying to write an outline, I’ll hit a blank spot in the story, something I haven’t flushed out yet or I’ll hit spots that are crystal clear in my head but I don’t know where they fit in yet and there’s no room for that in an outline. Storyboarding is perfect for that!

I promptly went out and bought a magnetized dry erase board and a myriad of multicolor post it notes. (That would be that Type A personality coming through.)  I had my whole story mapped out in about 20 minutes,  I was  able to identify quickly where things were really flushed out, where I need work, and where I have this little fragment that needs to find its place.  Instead of feeling confused and frustrated the way I do when I outline, I felt energized and ready to write.

Thank goodness for iTune Meet the Author podcast AND Ally Carter!

Honestly my beef was never in showing my work to someone else and getting criticism, it was in sharing my ideas with someone that might not have my best interests at heart. (Did I mention that I’m perhaps a touch cynical?) Then came my friend Lisa…

Lisa and I met through a mutual friend right before she was moving out of State, but we shared the bond of books and thanks to Facebook, we kept in touch quite a good bit. I was struggling with my writing, scribbling away in my journal, but not getting any really good momentum. Lisa had joined a writing group where she was living and I confess I was a little jealous. She was so positive about the experience and it was the first time I got the sense that I might be missing out on something.

It was probably a full year later before Lisa and I started working together. I was getting ready to enter a writing contest and I really needed someone to read and review my entry, so I asked her if she would look it over for me.

The long and short of it is that I didn’t enter the contest (I needed a full manuscript behind it, which I didn’t have) but I still won – Lisa and I worked really well together and I finally *got* why people would want to be involved in a writing group.

The relationship with Lisa challenges me to answer the “why” questions and encourages me to be ready to answer “what happens next.” She points out those place where I have used a wrong word, but a real word. (My favorite trick, like using “loose” when I mean “lose.”) I’ve made more progress working with Lisa for two weeks than I have on my own for the past two years.

Of course, I’ve also realized I have alot of work left to do!

No really, it is – sometimes an image or scene from my dream leaves such an strong impression, I write it down. Sometimes I write daydreams here. I have family trees for stories. Sometimes I write letters that can’t be sent.

So what’s with all the weird colored stuff? Well those are tabs to help me keep track of things for when I need/want them later. I only wish I could tell you I was joking.

There’s a handwritten table of contents in the front of my journal to remind me what each color is for:

• Red – figments, fragments, and fodder
• Orange – letters never sent
• Yellow – abandoned?
• Green – book #1 ideas, scraps, and scenes
• Blue – book#2 ideas, scraps, and scenes

I think it’s all pretty explanatory, except for Yellow, it’s a short story that I started and then got down to the end and didn’t like it anymore. It just seemed to kind of feel iffy about it. (I wrote it after a dream where that I was married to Christian Bale, only he wasn’t big deal actor Christian Bale, he was a handsome charming man who was in love me – maybe I abandoned that one out of utter embarrassment!)

Anything with a red tab could ultimately become something that needs it’s own color tab. Some of the red tab pages aren’t even real written pages – they are questions, scribbles, observations. Some of the red tabs probably deserve to be yellow tabs!

So I guess this is where the magic happens, on a good day the magic grows stronger and more powerful and on a bad day – it’s just downright embarrassing later. For better or worse, I still scribble on.

See friends, here’s the problem – I keep starting these things and talking about all the wrong things and losing steam and everything falls to the wayside.  Here’s the problem – I love to cook, but I’m not enough of a foodie to run a recipe site, I love going to the movies, but movie reviewer I am not – do you see where this is going?

My dream, my goal is to be a published Author so I never wrote about writing because I am not a published author, I’m a scribbler, a writer, a dreamer of wild dreams. I did write about books I read but I would get so irritated with myself because how can I say anything negative about anyone who has been published? I felt like whenever I talked about books it came across as kissing up or sour grapes, so I scrapped it – I scrapped it all.

My plan is simple – I am going to talk about writing. I hope that one day this will be my journey to achieving my goal and living my dream.  I might talk about other things – I go to Comic Con every year, I watch a crazy amount of movies/tv shows, and I have wonderful adventures, but this is my journey. I hope you’ll keep reading!