I published The Darkest Winter three years ago and I’m not entirely sure where that time went. I quickly came up with two sequel ideas to make it a trilogy but the basic ideas never went anywhere. Book 2 felt like it was going to be difficult to make original and interesting. It would cover a lot of the same scenarios as TDW. The third, while pretty separate from Book 2, would take the series in a different, larger picture idea set years later. None of it felt interesting to me every time I tried expanding the concepts. Then Covid-19 lockdown happened and writing about miserable things fell completely by the wayside.

That led to a new concept about how to stop terrorism based on religious zealotry. A major real-world thing, obviously. I like my concept but cannot break the story. I have the very beginning but making the story plausible is a major mountain to climb. All sorts of action sequences are possible but so much can go wrong that I haven’t been able to make the basics of the story work well enough to make it more than a short story or what I’m really afraid of, simply a more elaborate outline that ends up going nowhere because nothing is fleshed out.

I’ve written a few short stories, most of them I like a lot. I could do some editing to make each one stronger, but my favorite is ultimately Harry Potter fan fiction. I can’t do anything with that. But it was a valuable exercise. It’s about 40 pages long and I took some concepts that aren’t talked about much in the books to explore. I like my original characters, there are a ton of deep cut Potter references, but again, it isn’t mine. I really like fantasy but I don’t know if it fits me well enough to keep going with. I did have a lot of fun writing this, but I’m using concepts that were made by someone else, which was inspired by tons of other work. Can I bring something new to the table? I keep coming back to that idea in everything I write. If I do anything with this story, I’d have to strip it bare to my concepts and make a totally different world. Would it be worth reading and investing in? I keep running into that idea and it’s holding me back. Like if I can’t make a new genre, I shouldn’t bother. That’s a ridiculous thing to think of as all art is built on the art that comes before it.

But I now have a new idea that I like a lot. It’s about ghosts and humans, something that veers into the Beatlejuice headspace. While the concepts aren’t new, I think the angle is. I’ve written the start of it, but I’m going to rewrite it because the perspective doesn’t work. I’m also doing research to get ideas going. I want this to be weird and funny, an approach I want to ape from author Simon Rich. Right now I have no clue of what the end is and the rest is just a jumble of ideas that don’t point me to a story arc yet. The difference between this and my other ideas is that this feels like I can find a path to follow and see where it goes.