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Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Thinking in the Rain

Okay, I lied. This isn't about thinking in the rain, it's about thinking in the shower, but that didn't have quite the catchiness I was looking for. So I tricked you into reading this blog post. Ha.

My best story ideas seem to always come to me in the shower. Does anybody else experience this? I'm not sure if it's the solitude, the white noise of the water, the relaxation produced by hot water and steam,  the perfect lack of distraction, or a combination of all three, but I have always turned into a pensive, thoughtful, and uber-creative person in the shower. If I have a particularly difficult plot problem to work through, often a good long shower will produce a plethora of probable solutions. (Alliteration is fun, don't you think?) The only problem with coming up with ideas in the shower is that I don't have a waterproof notepad. My mom always used to yell at me for taking long showers when I was young, but that was where I did my best daydreaming, and asking me to get out of the shower was like asking me to leave another world. Although now that I pay the water bill, I can also now commiserate with her. I really don't think The Gateway Chronicles would be here if it weren't for my shower, though, and I think every creative person needs their place of solitude where the muses can visit.

Did I really just write a blog post on showering? Yep. Yep, I did. Okay, I need to redeem this somehow... How about a sneak peek?

I introduce a new character/creature in The Scroll, and I think y'all are really going to enjoy him! He's a wyvern dragon, and here's a selection from the scene in The Scroll where Darcy and the others meet him for the first time. Enjoy!


Darcy crept forward as well as she was able on her crutches. The wyvern made a sort of humming trill and lifted his snout to sniff at her. “Where did he come from? Why is he here?”
“Well, I’m not sure if it would be more accurate to say he belongs to Tellius or Tellius belongs to him,” Veli said, a hint of laughter in his tone. “But he and Tellius are-were-virtually inseparable.”
At Tellius’s name, the little dragon perked his head to the side.
“He’s Tellius’s?” Darcy held onto her crutches while she knelt to one knee and reached out to him. He lowered his snout almost to the ground, like a dog wanting to be petted, but shy of the touch.
“In a manner of speaking. He came to Tellius one day on patrol. Tellius said later that he’d been shadowing him for days.”
Darcy laid a gentle hand on the wyvern’s side. His scales were smooth, not slimy at all, and very warm to the touch. “Does he breathe fire?” she asked, looking up at Veli.
“Aye, that he does,” Veli said. “Hence the bond between him and his lordship.”
“Fire,” Darcy said. She stroked his scales, feeling as though she was connecting with an aspect of Tellius himself. “He could sense Tellius’s fire magic.”
“Especially now that his lordship has passed his test,” Wyn said. “He’s a full master magician now.”
Darcy flushed as a swell of pride swept through her.