Wild Childe

Happy Monday Everyone!

Congratulations to Sherrie Hansen! Remember to send your info to Margay at Margay1122@gmail.com to claim your copy of Nora's Soul!

Yes, today may be Monday but it's a wonderful day for me as I have recently confirmed that I have graduated, which means I'm done with school, for now. All that's left to do is concentrate on my writing. After having recently judged a writing contest, I decided that my goal would be to enter a contest by the end of the year or at about this time next year. That means I need to get to work. The question is, where do I start?

During my last semester of college, I needed to write roughly 20 pages for one class and 20 for another. We could complete the assignment a little at a time or in one big chuck. Because I wanted to get all my writing done at one time, I decided to do all my writing in one big chunk. For class number 1, I wasn't sure at first what I would write, but then I thought this group would make good test subjects for something I had written previously (with pen and paper). So, I began to type the story into a WORD document. Well, what started out as a simple, short British mystery/crime story, morphed itself something else entirely.

I still had a British mystery/crime story, but with very big twists. For one, the story takes place on a planet on the other side of the known universe. While this planet can sustain life and the early colonists brought and planted seeds from earth, the make-up of the planet alters things quite a bit. Citrus trees (lemon, lime, orange, grapefruit, etc.) were planted and the trees appeared to grow normally, but when the fruit started to grow, the colonists noticed that each of different citrus trees began to grow the same fruit. It didn't just happen to the citrus fruits it happened to all of the fruits and vegetables the colonists brought with them. Like fruits blended with each other to produce one fruit, like vegetables blended to produce one vegetable. What was unusual about these fruits and vegetables is that they exhibited the characteristics of each of the fruits they came from. Yes, a strange phenomenon, but one they had to accept because no matter how far away they were planted, the same thing would occur, again and again. They would later discover that the ground of the planet connected like things together to establish some sort of harmony and balance and even though they started off with multiple plants, they ended up with one connected root system.

Yes, this complicated mess began to take over my thoughts, but it didn't stop there. For class number 2, I went to my idea pool and decided to use an idea that I came up with years earlier but sat in a "box" to be used on a rainy day. The idea was so different that I thought it would offer a nice balance between the two stories. That was, of course, until I began writing. Before long, this second story tied itself to the one for class number 1 (which was still untitled at this point) in more ways than one. At first, they were tied only because of the planet. As I rewrote and revised the pages of the story for class 2, however, the main character of story 1 and the main character for story 2 revealed that they were related. Talk about a frustrating and confusing mess!

Because this world seems to be growing bigger and bigger, more and more stuff needed to be identified and explained, so much so that my head began to need a break from it to recharge. Okay, so I pulled out story number 3, one I had started long before the semester began. However, as I began to reread it, it appears that even that one had ties, however unintentional, to this fictional planet.

It was mid-semester and this planet needed a name, so I called it Centurion 54. Now, the planet is real to me and so are the lives of the characters I have written about and those I have yet to write about.

Yay! I have a planet with an undetermined amount of history. I should be happy right? Don't get me wrong, I am very grateful for this whole world I'm discovering, but I'm finding it a bit troublesome too.

No matter what kind of storyline I come up with, when I go to write it and map it out, somewhere along the way it always ties itself to this world. Is this just destined to happen until I finish telling the stories, or will every story I now write come from the people of Centurion 54?

My greatest fear is that this planet will somehow find a way to absorb another story that I wrote over two years (and haven't finished because the computer it was on died and I only had it on hard copy). I love the character from this particular story and want to keep him separate from my planet world, but I'm not sure if that will be possible since there are several years of history unaccounted for on this planet.

How can I prevent this world I have given birth to from tying itself to every new story I write? Any hints or should I just not worry about it and see what happens?

Carrie