I’m writing the first draft of one novel, revising another, and supposed to be thinking about those exclusively. Instead I’m…well, I’m nesting. I’ve had this idea for a time travel novel, weaving the concept of ‘time slips’ with ghosts and hauntings. I have the main viewpoint character, a ghost hunter named Molly, and Molly and her world have been quietly loitering in my mind for a couple of years now, waiting their turn to be written.
And then Flinders stumbled in last week. He’s a British soldier during the American Rebellion (as he calls it), loyal to the Crown but a little bit treasonous; a roguish quick-witted time-traveler who enjoys keeping a life (and a woman) in every century that appeals to him.
Like any woman who’s met her ideal literary man, I am, as I said, nesting. Instead of devoting 100% of my brain to my current books-in-progress, I’m flitting about like a giddy girl: gathering interesting bits of revolutionary war history, stories of time-slips, and imagining the smell of Flin’s coat (it smells of gunpowder). I’m pulling all these bits of things into my imagination and building myself a cozy chaotic nest of raw ideas and knowledge… and out of this, in time, will emerge a book.
Out of Eden 