Do You Believe In Signs?

January 2, 2008

I'm not superstitious. I'm really not, although I do believe in good luck and bad. But I don't believe in fortune cookies or astrology (although I thought a recent Capricorn definition fit me quite well) or any of that stuff.

Still...

I do think we live in a huge mystery, more things in heaven and earth, etc.

I'm in between projects at the moment. I probably should focus on CHINA FIRE, but, well, I don't feel much burning desire to. Or much desire to work on any particular project. But that could be because I've taken the last week or so off. I did start a short story and I tried my hand at an SF novel just to see if it would take off (it didn't), but no, I was just fooling around.

But I have had a NOTION for a kids' book. I wrote one last year and it's still being marketed and I enjoyed the change, which is maybe what I need. But this NOTION, that's all it was, a sort of, "it would be cool to write a book for kids like..."

There was no plot, no characters, just a NOTION, a type of book, a type of story.

While I was talking Frodo this morning--we received, I kid you not, 12+ inches of snow on New Year's Day, literally a foot of snow--the sky was a clear blue, it was cold, about 18 degrees, and I'm trudging along streets that have "tracks" but haven't actually been plowed, and I start thinking about this NOTION I have, and the NOTION turns into a CONCEPT, and the CONCEPT turns into a PLOT and I get a TITLE and a CHARACTER and I look up and I see...

See that photo up there? That's pretty much what I saw. The sun was moving toward the south behind the treeline and I could see a red glow and shooting up out of the red glow was, like, a PILLAR OF FIRE for God sakes, which was pretty cool and I thought, "Huh."

It was gorgeous and no, it probably wasn't some creator putting on a light show just to motivate me in a particular direction. Oddly enough, I don't see myself at the center of the universe (the center of MY universe, perhaps, but not the center of THE universe). Still, I came back from the walk, stuck my head in my son's bedroom door and said, "What do you think of this for a title?"

He liked it.

Now I need to go see if there's any real life to this idea.

Cheers,

Mark Terry