A Twist of Things to Come

No, not a bizarre sex joke. I mean, I know I sometimes make *nudge,nudge* jokes about which stud nugget I have locked up in my basement, but I don't have a basement. And really, a sex slave would just be another person I'd have to clean up after.

Perhaps I've said too much. ;)

Seriously, though. By "men in the basement" (or perhaps "persons in the basement") I mean my subconscious. They do the heavy lifting on stories when I'm not thinking about them. In fact, NOT thinking about a story obsessively is a necessary part of my process.

In both of the larger things I'm working on now, I had an issue. in one, it was about how to tell a particular part of the story without putting myself to sleep, much less any poor readers who might wander in by accident. In the other, I had the bones of the plot all mapped out, and thought I knew exactly what was going to happen, but for a few niggling details that wouldn't quite fall into place.

I banged my head against both of these situations, even wrote sections of both stories in a few different ways trying to connect the dots. Trying to force it.

Within a day or two of giving up in disgust, a few interesting things happened. First, I was pouring myself a glass of water. I do that several times a day, actually, so it's not a big deal, but I was thinking about the water, and the glass, and trying not to splash. From absolutely nowhere, I realized that I'd written a certain planet as a dwarf planet, kind of an overgrown asteroid, which meant that its gravity would be much less, solving an issue I had anticipated (and totally gotten stuck on) in the next bit. The basement folk had already laid out the solution in part I'd written earlier (and already published so, wow, it will *really* look like I knew what I was doing when it comes out) but the memo hadn't gotten all the way to my conscious mind.

The other thing was a face and a name that came to me just as I woke up day before yesterday. A germ of an idea that solves all my problems with the shape-shifter story, including titles for all three books in the series. Five FREAKING months I have agonized over it, after three months of trying a couple different re-writes, and Oh, a hundred thousand words circling the drain. The Basement Folk were just waiting on me to let go if it. Once I got it out of my worry machine long enough, the story elves polished it up and left it on my freaking pillow.

Oh, GOD, how I loves them!