A little over a year ago, I asked my best friend which of my long-dormant ideas I should work on. I wanted her input because at that point in time it seemed quite likely that she’d be the only person who’d ever read whatever I wrote, so it had to be something she was interested in. I had been seemingly incapable of writing more than a few lines at a time for a very long eight years or so, but for some reason I felt hopeful I might be able to accomplish something if I would only try again.
For all these ideas, I had at least a few notes, some lines of dialogue, truncated character descriptions. For some very old ideas, I also had notebooks full of handwritten scenes, but even these were nowhere near complete stories. For reasons that escape me now, neither of us were in favor of my working on the most likely candidate, a contemporary romance for which I had written about 30K already. I don’t actually think I even offered her my paranormal idea simply because the scope is so big and it seemed especially daunting at the time. We both liked the cross-dressing “princess” story, which had been at various times medieval, then futuristic, and finally set in an alternate 1930s, and that one will definitely be written one day, but the one she asked for was the bossy slave/shy master. I had about 15 pages of notes and scraps, but nothing was set in stone except Henry and Martin’s names.