SQUAWK! SQUAWK!

Yep, that's a chicken instead of my normal avatar, because tonight I chickened out of my originally intended post.

Recently we were talking about how we do our posts (or, in my case, forget to do our posts), maybe changing the order/frequency of postings, starting some regular features, that kind of thing. And someone mentioned individuals doing short, serialized stories - like we do with the parodies, but not written together and not necessarily parodies.

I got to thinking that this sounded really cool. I have all these plot bunnies* in my head, some of them moderately developed story outlines. But let's be honest--as slowly as I write, and considering that I still have at least 4.75 more Werewolves in Love books to do, plus a steampunk WIP and a Regency I am DETERMINED will get written, it's very unlikely that I'd ever get around to working these bunnies/outlines into real books. But it could be fun to do them as serial freebies. They wouldn't have to be very long and I wouldn't be as concerned with niggling little crap like plot and conflict and motivation and all that stuff that just gets in the way of storytelling.

Now, it so happens that I've already got the first scene of one of those plot bunnies written, and I have a general idea of what happens next. So I thought I'd post the first scene and then write another one before my next turn on the blog comes around (on July 18, to be precise.) It would feel like working without a net - writing the story as I go, not being able to go back and change anything once it posted - and I figured it would be good for my creative juices, get me back in the groove.

Then today, while contemplating future scenes/chapters, I realized I didn't have the backstory nailed down in my head - and this story will absolutely depend on backstory because it's very weird and nothing like I've ever written before. It might be fun, or it might be stupid. People might say "Hey! This is clever!" or they might say "WTF is this crap? You mean to tell me she's been published? Seriously?"

So....cluck! Cluckcluckcluck! I chickened out. I need to spend a couple weeks nailing down my backstory, maybe writing one more scene. THEN I'll be ready to start walking out onto the wire.

And in the meantime, maybe one of my fellow Naughties will start their own story. Stay tuned...

*A plot bunny is an idea for a story that suddenly occurs to you, usually while you're trying to finish another story. It tempts you to drop everything and go running after this shiny new idea. I've got lots of bunnies and half-formed ideas. I even have this big, interconnected family already invented and just waiting for me to write stories about them. Will I? Hell if I know.