Getting Carried Away With Future Ideas
My concerted effort to finish my second novel, A Place Where We Belong, this year is going really well. I’m about 34% through my draft with a much healthier word count than my original which I’m only two chapters away from overtaking and with only 500 less words than I would have wanted at this point (compared to the 3000 I was missing last time). Things feel a lot more solid and a lot more grounded. Some of the issues I had last time seem to have resolved themselves and progress feels solid.
But while I’m slowly and carefully working my way through this draft, I found myself getting carried away with ideas for the future novels in this series.
Now, that’s nothing new. I’ve always found that writers tend to have loads of ideas flying around constantly. It’s why lots keep a little notebook on them at all times to write down ideas so they don’t forget it. What I don’t think is so common is the desire to spend time coming up with the titles and potential logos for those future ideas before you’ve even put pen to paper.
I am years away from even getting to some of these concepts and yet I had to procrastinate from my current novel to create treatments for novels whose titles and ideas may change drastically when the time comes to writing them. I’ve regularly procrastinated when tackling challenging things; partially because the time away often helps ideas blossom and energy to complete a task to grow; but it’s also an escape born of fear that I’ll never finish my current project and constantly need something ahead to move to if things fail.
There was a moment in this slightly crazed round of procrastination in which I was trying to think up entire cover designs for some of these books. I barely even have the outline for the characters in Dante’s Foundation (what is due to be Novel 3) and yet some part of my brain decided it’d be great to start throwing ideas at the screen to see what sticks. Thankfully, I stopped myself from going that far, though I do think I’ve pretty much finished the cover for A Place Where We Belong and I’m excited to reveal that when the time is right.
Still, despite getting carried away with ideas for the future, I’m actually quite happy with these future novel titles as they really capture the essence of the seedlings that are germinating in my brain and waiting to burst forth when I get to them.
I suppose the lesson of this tangent is that sometimes you need to procrastinate and to explore different creative outlets to keep your jug of ideas flowing; and that getting carried away can be useful in the right contexts, you just need to know when to reign things back in. For me, this was a fun diversion with some nice results and now I can keep plugging away at A Place Where We Belong knowing these ideas for future novels have a springboard to help me in the future.
So, if you want to know what my next five novels are likely to be called, here’s the sneak peak!
