Well. Here we are. It’s a new year. Wait, what year is it? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Often, I can’t even remember a world without illness, masks, hand sanitizer and flight delays. I do know that the last vacation I had before Covid happened was a wonderful anniversary trip to canoe the Great Lakes in Canada. We camped, paddled, and ate too much cheese. (Worth it!) On our way back home (tired, but sad to be leaving our kind northern neighbors) we stopped by a friend’s house in Indiana to recharge our personal batteries before returning to everyday life.
The big old farmhouse sits on five acres of land with a pond, woods, loads of poison ivy, and two time zones. That’s right! The house sits right on the line of two different time zones. They delineate this by calling one side “Early Time” and the other side “Late Time”.
Of course, this sparked my imagination. What kind of story could come out of this? As those who follow my writing know, life is full of story ideas. They are all around us, which is why I don’t bother with writing prompts. My head is buzzing with a thousand stories all jockeying for position at the top of the queue. Just the other day, a harmless news clip about a company who cryogenically freezes its “patients” with the hope that one day science can find a way to undo the source of their demise kindled a horror story about the dead breaking out of their steel tube coffins and overwhelming the sentry staff. I like it, but that one will have to sit on the back burner for a while.
The House that Joe Built has been gaining momentum, and over the last two months it crested the hill of my imagination and came thundering toward the station at an unstoppable pace. I thought about The Story in the shower, while I was driving, while I was trying to fall asleep at night. When I started writing The Story in my dreams, I knew it was time to take action or go crazy! I wouldn’t call them voices in my head because that makes people start to worry, but yes. They were screaming at me to be let out.
After another night of interrupted sleep, I decided it was time to “pour the itch out on paper” as my favorite writer once said. I opened a word document and spent an hour decanting. I wrote every detail I’ve been pondering, every character who had something to say, and even part of the plot into a word document, labeled it, and stuck it in my “story scraps” file on my computer. After a second to reconsider, I gave it its own file, because I know this is the next story I’m going to write.
I felt a little bit guilty setting my current work aside, but I promised it would only be for a couple of hours and we would get back together. Stories are like toddlers, all vying for my attention at once. If it weren’t for my habit of strictly prioritizing my goals, I’d have been off chasing this new baby around for months. I went to bed that night and didn’t think about The Story as I fell asleep. When I awoke, I felt refreshed for the first time in weeks.
Soon, The House that Joe Built will begin to take on real life. And I think that’s what stories are. They germinate or kindle in the window of our thoughts. If tended to, given fertilizer and nurture, they begin to gestate. Given enough time, they may be big enough to be birthed as a fully formed idea. Then comes the hard work of coaxing, guiding, correcting, and polishing it until it becomes an independent entity of its own. They are our babies. And we have a responsibility to give them the attention needed and offer them to the world.
Stay tuned for sneak peeks of The House that Joe Built, a supernatural horror novel about the spaces between time, and a child with autism who sees the world differently than the rest of us.