Shiny!

I’m 50+ pages into the first draft of Marama, Emperor’s Emissary, the second book of my imaged duology — and now I’m off on a tangent.

A shiny new idea struck me a month or two ago and as hard as I tried to keep it on the back burner — it pushed to the forefront. So I gave in and started exploratory reading and note taking.

For whatever reason a classic boy’s adventure story came to mind and I thought: what if the protagonist was a girl instead of a boy? Not an exact reworking of the classic tale, but using the main plot points and character roles for a YA fantasy/adventure featuring a young adult female.

I reread the original classic novel and did a Google search that provided some helpful plot summaries and character analyses. I’m scribbling my thoughts about the key plot points and the contributions of the main characters to the plot. I went back through some of my older story ideas to see if any of them might be adapted to the new story concept (without much success).

As the classic boy’s tale is a quest for valuables, an adult classic that is also a quest for priceless items came to mind. I’ve only seen the hokey Hollywood version of this book and I’m now reading it for the first time. I’m hoping it will inspire a setting for my novel as well as additional challenges for my protagonist. Interestingly —  neither of these adventure classics written in the 19th century have any female characters of significance. Hmmm.

I will go back to Mara’s story. This tangent could end up as a NaNoWriMo 2020 project. We’ll see.

But I am such a Gemini! So easily distracted by shiny new ideas.