Day 30 – Writing Rabbit Holes

Have you ever been working on a story or book and known exactly what it is you need/want to happen in the scene you’re writing, written a sentence that sparked some random thought that then spirals off into a digression about the background of a minor character that suddenly decides he/she wants more page time?

And wow, how about that run-on sentence?

Seriously, though, I was working on my current novel FIXATION (shapeshifting jaguars, Olmec deities and  other goodies) and all I had to do was get my heroine through a garage to her little cottage in the backyard of an old SF house.  Simple, right?

Well, theoretically, yes.  But my mind started off on a tangent involving the contents of the garage, the heroine’s landlord, dumpster diving and art.  Yeah, I know… WTF?  I have 200 pages (the standard length of a Ravenous Romance novel) to play with and lots of action and sex to get in this book.  And yet my brain insists that I need this extra bit of information about a character who, before I had my heroine enter the garage, was never going to actually get any “screen time.”

Now, however?  He’s looking to feature fairly heavily in the plot, all because I started wondering what this guy would have in his garage.

My mind works in mysterious ways.