rock my world

Posted by admin | November 23, 2018

On a hot August day a few years ago, my wife and I picked up a cute little blue heeler that we had named Zailey Rochelle Olson. She was nervous to be away from her mother and siblings for the first time. Also, there were two humans she didn’t know carrying her about and taking her away from the only thing she had known as home. It was a long drive home from northwest Kansas back to Junction City.

After that came the tedious process of potty training with more than a few messes to clean up along the way. We did some organized training at a nearby Pet Smart. There was this being that demanded a lot more attention than our previous dog or even the kitty that we currently had. My world was rocked.

That same year, I got an interesting idea for a short story. A witch living in the old west was captured and put with two other witches. Their powers were blocked so that they could be burned at the stake. The story was about their struggle to get free of the block. It was a metaphor for intolerance. I called it “Flaming Curse” and it came out that December in Dark Matter.

In 2016, the next year, I was thinking about what to do for my next novel as I was nearly finished with Tech Fear. At that point, Whispers Within was being worked on slowly, but steadily, but I was trying to do two projects at the same time in my quest to increase my productivity. I remember driving home and thinking about all the short stories I had worked on. I thought on “Flaming Curse” and how it would make a good television series. I started thinking about what that series would look like. The next day, I went to work on an outline with some slight changes to the story. It took a few hours, but I had over forty chapters set. The next few days, I reworked the outline, mainly because I forgot to close one of the plot lines. By the end of that period, I had fifty chapters. I’ve since made enough changes to the outline that I’ve had to extend it to fifty-one chapters.

This story continues to build momentum. After finishing the outline, I had a vague notion of doing a sequel. Some of the changes to the first book put a kibosh on the idea I had. Now that I am nearly finished with the novel, I realized that the ending I have in mind will lend itself to a different story with more witches, more bad guys, and more action, even though there is a lot of action in the first novel.

The world of “Flaming Curse”/Flaming Curse has consumed so much of my time that Whispers Within has been put on the back burner. That and I wanted to work on Twisted. So, my writing world has been rocked much like Zailey rocked my world.