Those punch-the-air moments....

Does anybody else get them? Those moments when you're slogging on writing your WIP, making your characters do awful things and have even more awful things happen to them ...

... when suddenly your conscious brain disconnects from your fingers, you type furiously for a few minutes, them sit back and read what you've written for the first time ...

... and punch the air, yelling YES At the top of your voice. At which point your spouse/family/colleagues fall off their chair in surprise, or run into the room wondering what's happened. Are you ill? Do you need help? You shake your head, smiling ...

... because you've written what may be the best few lines of prose ever committed to a computer. Your subconscious has kicked in and boy, has it delivered on its promise.

Or else your subconscious has made good on a bargain it made with you way back - maybe in the previous novel (it's a series). You had a deal. You agreed to let it keep a throwaway and apparently meaningless line. You argued with your editor that it had to stay there. And in return your subconscious promised you that the payoff would be good.

And it is. That throwaway line makes sense now and adds a whole new dimension to your character or plot.

And you kiss your subconscious and promise faithfully never to ignore it again.

Lightbulbs and Photography

As I wrote on facebook recently, the really, utterly, amazing thing about seat-of-your-pants writing (as in having no idea where you are going until you get there), is that every now and again your character says or does something that explains their entire backstory.

There I was, minding my own business, writing a conversation between a major character and a character who started off with a relatively small part to play, but is becoming more important (because he's a bad boy, but so damned cute and I secretly fancy him). And suddenly ... wham! ... lightbulb moment. There's a look that passes between two people and I know his entire history in that moment. And it explains everything and gives me a way forward for this particular plot-strand.

Sometimes my subconscious is so awesome that I want to kiss it! It sets me up, makes me write things that make no sense at the time and it won't let me delete them. And it's not until ten, twenty, fifty thousands words later that things fall into place and I understand the why of it.

And photography - that's the local paper, which sent a photographer out to my house yesterday. My local paper is doing an article on me, so heaven knows what will come out of that. No hiding away now, is there?