One Day Later, and Post Titles Still Suck

I've got today off from work, and it'll be my last mental health break before the holidays eat me alive. It also means extra time for even more revision and editing work, which so far has been coming along pretty well. In extra good news, I've committed to "the perfect Rochester's" backstory, and Lysander is now Lorik. I'll be discussing in more depth in the book's gallery page once it's set up, but for the time being, I'm writing stuff down in my notebook. 

In the meantime, I'm looking into the future and already amassing a crap ton of notes for Compline. You know, it's funny how numerous closer readings of a story yield all kinds of interesting and promising stuff. And for better or for worse, I've decided to take a different angle in re-imagining "The Pied Piper of Hamelin". 

See, it started off with a bit of a macabre jolt of inspiration, but it's now evolved into something else entirely after I went back and reread the fairy tale and its variants for the bajillionth time. It was a small detail in one of the variants the fairy tale -- just like there was a very short variation in one of the myths involving the god of sleep -- that ultimately turned me down a completely different path from my original notes, and I actually like the possibilities even more. They're more promising and work very well with what I have in mind for my retelling. 

So! As with The Perfect Rochester, the main conflict of Compline is smaller and more personal and a lot more doable from my end. Seriously, I should stop defaulting to looking at the big, BIG picture when planning a book since that only dumps me down a rabbit hole of way too many possible side plots, which end up turning into a morass of whatever-ness that doesn't make any sense. 

And so this song ended up taking over my inspiration pile. I happened to listen to this while working, and it jarred loose a bunch of ideas that were already tapped into by those fairy tale variants (or a very specific detail in some of them). It definitely shows how much more private the angle of the story will be. 

Now I'm totally jazzed and really looking forward to writing it.