The Crappy Used Diary and Other Stories of the Future

One of the persistent themes of this blog is, Where do story ideas come from? The answer in its most pedestrian form is, they come from the same place ideas for what to fix for dinner come from. They are a collision of memories and events of the day that when mangled and tangled together form something new and shiny. Or, they come from dreams.

I’ve written before about that half-asleep, half-awake territory I think we all wander. We set our minds free, mostly, though there might be a loose agenda involved.

This morning, sometime shy of five a.m., I came out of that dreamland with a book title in my head. It is not the title of the book I’m currently writing, rather the next book I will write or the one after that. Maybe not one at all, but one I will certainly add to the list of possibilities.

The book title is The Crappy Used Diary. I don’t know a lot about the book, other than the situation. A teen or preteen girl receives an antique diary from her father for her birthday. The first few pages have been filled in, one day at a time, by someone a century ago. It is a lovely diary with fine paper that beckons the fingertips. To her, though, it is a crappy used diary.

This book wants badly to be written. Maybe, to be written badly. I’ll try to avoid the latter.

I will finish Blood of Anjels (the title I have settled on), first. I may spend a little time buffing up Keeping Private Idaho for Kindle release, and I may go back to another book called Dog Run that stopped me dead about halfway through a few months back.

Or, I may dip into the idea well and work on other books I plan to write, and which I have spent anywhere from minutes to years thinking about. I don’t always start with a title. Even when I do, the title might change when I get further into the book. Here are some teaser titles from the idea well:

Tell
The Autobiography of gGod
Ruined
Placebo
The Invisible Friend
Interstice
Cooper’s Laundry
Dead Air

Of those, the most likely to eventually become novels are Cooper’s Laundry and Dead Air. It’s not too late for requests.