I don’t write vampire stories but my imagination takes me to a Joss Whedon-like scene where the photographer sees a brightly colored glow around her. (She’s standing in a book store and he’s passing by on the street. He always has his camera with him and stops to take a photo of the book store.) He notices the glow around her and then realizes it’s her, the object of his affections. The glow around her is strong. The stronger the glow, the more powerful the vampire. She’s powerful but there’s another colored glow around her and he doesn’t know what it means. His assistant/sidekick wants to follow her and kill her right now but he decides to search for answers. LOL! Fun.

I once read a story about a lady about our age who realised the only thing she had really wanted to do when she was younger was to be an engineer. Here she was in her mid thirties, and she realised she was going to be 40 soon…regardless of whether or not she was an engineer.

So she decided to go for it and pursue her dream. The sad thing was that instead of rallying around her and supporting her, her friends and family (some of them at least) basically abandoned her and told her she’d never do it. What a terrible way to find out that about people you had included in your life for so long.

So she earned her Degree in Engineering before she turned 40…and found out who her true friends were…

After twenty years in healthcare, I’m finally pursing my writing and photography…and finding out who my friends are…

Awesome! Let me know how it goes. If you prefer mind mapping on your computer here’s a link to a blog post on Stepcase Lifehack that has a list of free mind mapping software programs – http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/11-free-mind-mapping-applications-web-services.html

I haven’t used them, I use Mindjet, but I’d make sure you like using this system before you spend money on a paid program.

I’d really like to hear how the mind mapping works out for you!

Take care!

You’re absolutely right! I think the daydreaming to paper process is the most fun. In fact,I’m writing a story now that started as an idea for a single scene that hit me on a cross country drive. Didn’t do anything with it for more than a year and now it’s the beginning of a story.

The biggest challenge and, once you ‘get it’, the best part.

The best part about getting it all down on paper, even when it doesn’t initially make sense (sometimes ‘especially’ when it doesn’t make sense) is that even if you don’t use it in this story, it’s still there for the next story. You wrote it for a reason, it resonated with you on some level, so you have ‘something’ there and now you have some underlying structure to it from the work you did on it this time. What sounds like one long stream of messy ideas may actually be parts of two or three stories…if you take the time to unscramble the knots and let them breathe on their own pages…

…but then I’m the crazy one…

Cheers,

Scott