2011: Inspiration to Publication

I just want to let everyone know of a few things that will be coming up this month, the first month of a glorious new decade (yes, that's right...I'm firmly planted in the camp that believes that 2010 was the last year of the previous decade).

I am going to devote much of the blog this year to following the writing process from Inspiration to Publication.  That being said, all posts for the months of January and February will deal with Inspiration.  All interviews and guest blogs will also deal with the aforementioned topic.

And since I write this blog after all, I wanted to speak briefly about a story that I have forthcoming from Untreed Reads early this year.  The story has a working title of "13" (that will be changed by publication time), and deals with a very lonely young man whose life is defined by a rigorous routine that remains unbroken until he meets a young woman at a diner one night while order his next day's "breakfast".

I am often influenced by music, and I find that this medium affects me on a profound level.  I can be deeply affected by both the poetry of the lyrics and the sound of the music itself.  On one particular trip to Florida, I was driving from Tallahassee to New Port Richey, and on the radio came a song I hadn't heard in ages:  "Owner of a Lonely Heart" by YES.  This song came out in 1983 when I was 7 years old, so I do have a memory of it playing on the radio frequently, although at that tender age, I never really understood the meaning of the song.

Fast forward 27 years to November 2010.  This time, when I heard the song I listened intently to the lyrics...and found something both profound and terribly paradoxical in the lyrics.  It seems to me that the song on the surface is about someone who has been hurt by love, and chooses loneliness.  However,  it also seems that the singer is admonishing this person to break out of that mindset and take a chance.

Well, once I came to this understanding, I wanted to write about the lynch-pin in this song...what caused this person to want to be the "owner of a lonely heart", rather than chance being the "owner of a broken heart"?  And that small seed is what gave birth to my forthcoming story.  Obviously, during my revisions, the story line changed a bit, and I added the radio in the diner as a character in the story.  But suffice it to say that the story would have never come to be if it hadn't been for that Florida drive and YES on the radio.