01/13/2004: "The Fool"
Music: Grateful DawgMood: Hungry
I wrote 2,000 words yesterday on “Dark Ages” and 1,500 words the day before, so I guess I’m off to the races, unless my editor decides he doesn’t like the premise – humans, vampires and other supernatural beings set at odds in Medieval Britain.
There are a lot of ways to write books. I’m semi-partial to making 40- or 50-part “step outline,” which are used sometimes in screenwriting. But I’m not taking that route this time. I have a fairly good idea where the story goes – and a detailed book proposal – but I’m just going to let it develop organically beyond that, one chapter at a time. Sometimes when I follow a detail plan, there’s a tendency to force things to work the way I imagined they would in the beginning, before I had the fuller sense of the plot and characters that comes after a certain amount of writing.
The first card in a deck of Tarot cards is The Fool, representing, according to Annie Lionnet’s book, “new beginnings, untapped potential, and a fresh start.”
Sounds promising. I’ll be The Fool.
Of course, if you’ve ever seen The Fool card, you know he is pictured as a happy-go-lucky lad and blissfully unaware of either the cliff he is about to step off, or the dog about to bite his leg.
Yes, The Fool: That sounds about right.
