I’m Working on a New Story, and It’s So Much Fun!

I haven’t written a new story in a while. Not since the first half of last year when I composed “Maiden America.” I’ve done a lot of editing over the subsequent months. Editing of “Maiden America” and “The Adulteress,” my Faerietales series and my upcoming Dirty Politics series…

But very little actual writing.

Well, last month – or maybe it was back in January? I don’t quite remember – inspiration struck. I had plans to work on new books, of course. I had (and still have) ideas for not one but two sequels to “Maiden America,” along with a young adult/sci-fi/historical fiction series about teenagers who go into the Bermuda Triangle for one reason or another and end up getting transported back in time to periods of history with ancestral significance to them.

Here’s the list of working titles and descriptions:

·         When Dignity Was a Crime – The story about Ariana, who ends up back in Baltimore in the 1830s… walking the same streets that her great, great, great, (great?) uncle Frederick Douglas would have walked as a slave.

·         When Dignity Was Worth The Fight – The story of Jonathan, who ends up back in Baltimore about the same time working for his distant relation, the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

·         When Terror Reigned  Supreme – This is Leah’s tale, and she and her younger sister Rachel find themselves back in Nazi Germany before World War II officially broke out.

·         When Fear Took Hold – Grace also becomes a victim of World War II, only on the Allied side. She ends up shuttled off to an internment camp thrown together for Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor.

·         When Mobs Ruled New York – I had to throw a little Italian goodness (or badness) into the mix, so this one will be about David, the great grandson of a Trenton police chief who just so happens to have a few shady mafia men in his family tree too.

Yet as usual, my writing plans didn’t work out the way I intended. So instead of delving into the research necessary to pull off any one of those, I started writing another fantasy fiction story.

And I have to say, I’m having so much fun! Not to say that I don’t love researching, because I do. (Though let me say that finding facts about American slave life outside of a plantation is inexcusably difficult.) But actually putting pen to paper – or fingers to keyboard – and steering characters down intriguing side roads toward uncertain adventures?

There’s nothing quite like it. It’s like Jafar’s little monologue from “Aladdin” after he becomes a genie: “The power! The absolute power!! The universe is mine to command… to control!!!”

Only I’m not evil, no matter what Sabrina might try to tell you.