Friday, January 20, 2012

100 Words About: Story Ghosts

I’ve been looking through some of my old files. I’m a pack rat. I have tons of story fragments and things, although most of them are in dead tree at this point. (Really must scan those now that I have a scanner.) I have some on my hard drives, though, going back 6 or 7 years. A few are older, doc files so old that Windows doesn’t know how to open them anymore. (Must task The Husband with finding a solution to that…)

Looking through the old files is like being haunted by the ghosts of unborn stories. Most of these are fragments, where I wrote down just enough to get the story idea to be quiet before going back to work on Scent and Shadow. A few are just notes. But some are pretty good, if I do say so myself. The character voices jump out at me, echoing in the chaos that is the back of my brain, asking why I never finished them.

Because I don’t know what happens next, I usually reply.

Um, hello, they snap back. You’re the author. That’s your job.

Stories are all about me, me, me. They don’t like to share, and they hate being upstaged. But they are stubborn ghosts. Hell, I have one character that’s been waiting for a story for fifteen years at this point.

Someday…

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