Odd Excerpts

I was cleaning out some notebooks today and I came across something odd I had written. Three pages of a mostly blank notebook contained notes from a college business class (margin of safety/breakeven point), sketches of a two story house with a wrap-around veranda (for The Sims?), repetitions of a poem I was memorizing ("Wynken, Blynken, and Nod"), the opening paragraph of a letter to a pen-pal in Florida, a list of the people in my life that had died in the last month and half (6, including my childhood pet), a recipe for Tex-Mex Chicken Starter (great on lettuce or in a tortilla or both), and the oddest scrawl of all: "change me into Zeus' daughter."

What in the world does that mean!?

You know what, skip the novel I have outlined. I'll just write a scenario where all of those random notes are not random. It'll probably take me all 100 pages to come up with the theory. I'll use the enigmatic scrawl for a title and the book will probably involve an alien race, a government conspiracy, a time vortex, a character with Tourettes Syndrome, and a Greek goddess.

Snoopy and Bilbo Baggins on Writing

I remember a cartoon from my childhood called The Snoopy Musical. I used to watch it all of the time (it was on the same tape as Mary Poppins and a cartoon about bears cleaning a park). In this cartoon Snoopy sits on his dog house with a typewriter and starts: "It was a dark and stormy morning... No, a dark and stormy night, Night? Night. A suddenly a" something something... The song is called "The Great Writer."

I'm not complaining, but I am a little envious. After all, Snoopy could at least think up a great first line. The best I can come up with is "Once upon a time..." before I get stuck. Bilbo Baggins would say that it is none the worse for having been used before and that the important thing is to have an ending, "Books ought to have good endings." I, like Frodo, must reply that the ending "will do well, if it ever comes to that."

I can relate to Frodo, I can't see the end of my journey either. I outlined the plot of my novel this evening and when I got to the end I introduced a character. A main character. I didn't mean to, it just happened. I don't know if you know anything about writing novels, but apparently, you're not supposed to do that. Now I have to write in a sub-plot that introduces the character much earlier in the story.

(By the way, I stole my plot from another story, but let's just keep that between you and me.)