Alternate Title: A funny thing happened on the way to my next two novels.
When the creative juices are flowing it’s a wonderful thing. I wrote my novel “The Setting Earth” and had no problem writing a few short stories and posting on my blog while doing it. It took me about 6 weeks to write and I hated it when I had to go to bed, because I had more to write. I woke up in the morning after 6 hours sleep, dieing to write more.
Now it’s finished and I started on the sequel I had planned in the trilogy and found I had a major problem, I could write the great imagery I planned, I had the characters nailed down but something was missing.
I went back through and read my novel and found the problem. I had written a great romance novel. It was set in the background of an interplanetary cold war and took place on the dwarf planet Ceres, but it was about the main characters wanting to be with each other but their cultures made them offend each other as they tried to seduce each other. Classic Romance novel stuff with great imagery as a backdrop.
Having the war break out while they are on their honeymoon seems mean. The second novel in the trilogy would be “Gone with the Wind II” or “Romeo and Juliet II” it just doesn’t work.
So I turned my attention to my other novel, “The Pizza Diaries”. I wrote a few short stories with the same main character Brian a Pizza Delivery Guy who runs into Aliens, Devil Worshipers, Beings from other dimensions, Poltergeists, and a time traveling babe, I figured I could turn it into a horror/comedy novel (I’ve got the ending all set up to tie everything together). I began writing the stories to tie them together and realized my A plot is a fantasy and I’ve never wrote or really read fantasy.
So now I’ve got writers block, I’ve visited some web sites that give the advise to write up some imagery to get the process going. I’ve got no problem in that area, I can describe the Cloud Cities on Venus or the platform at Mercury’s Lagrange point that can power the 22nd century’s space ships in vivid detail, I’m just having a problem staying in genre. My sci-fi turns to romance, my horror turns to comedy, my comedy turns to fantasy, and my porn turns to either horror or epic space opera.
Does anyone have any advise how to kick start the process and get the juices flowing again?
