The New Idea

Last Friday was a great day for many reasons.  Number one, it's bank holiday Monday coming up this weekend in Cyprus which means and extra day of weekend, which even when you work for yourself still feels good knowing that there is the chance of an extra hour in bed with no alarm call.  It was also the day when I finished the first edit of my next book.  It is no longer called Crazy Girl and now sits under a new file name in a version that is probably quite close to the finished product.  And finally, Friday was also the day when I came up with a new idea for the next story, and that is without doubt always an exciting time.

As part of ‘Operation Long Weekend’ the husband and I have found a love of YouTube documentaries.  It started off with a documentary about Ted Bundy, followed by the fattest woman in the world who was blamed for the murder of her nephew, and ended up in a much more promising place called Birth of the Earth.  As we are both science geeks we love a show about space, and this one was particularly interesting.  It explained how what started off as nothing but a cloud of gas and dust particles took the long journey to eventually become the planet we live on today.

This got me thinking that this process is quite like the idea for a book, and is much like my latest concept.  An idea always begins with a tiny snippet in the beginning, just like the dust and gas cloud.  Mine happens to be a countdown clock, or perhaps a board with numbers on that the whole world is watching.  As of yet, I have no idea why they are watching it.  I have no idea what they believe will happen when it gets to zero.  I have no idea even who is watching it.  But this idea has been floating around in the space of my brain for a while now, minding its own business.  It is still waiting for a supernova to strike and smash these dust like ideas into something of substance that can actually begin to become something more than a cloud.  Something that has substance. 

This is what happened in the first steps to create the earth, a huge injection of power, a shockwave that smashed into a cloud of gas and dust.  It compressed the gas and dust into a new star, the centre of a swirling mass of charged dust particles which over the course of the next four billion years underwent enough changes to become the planet we live on and the solar system we know as our own.  It took lightening to force the clumps together and chance collisions with other rocks.  When they became large enough gravity took over.  It held these clumps together until they were so large in size that the gravity was strong enough to drag these rocky lumps in on themselves to shift from an irregular comet shape into a spherical, early version of the earth.  But this is still just the beginning.

I am thinking about trying to bash this idea out in NaNoWriMo, but I have huge reservations.  It seems like a great idea at the moment.  One month, one book.  How can that not be a good idea?  But the process to form the earth took billions of years, and the destruction of other smaller early planets before our world became something that can sustain life.  Perhaps by trying to force a book out during NaNoWriMo, all I'll end up with is a rocky comet that doesn't grow large enough for it to ever become a planet, and fifty thousand words of an idea that never fulfil their true potential.