Oh, Oh, OH!

Last night I had one of those
Incredible Inspiration Moments that we all long for and that come so seldom to any of us.
I was headed for bed, when
It Hit me. A perfect verse for a story idea I've been mulling around in my head since the SCBWI LA Conference. So of course I had to write it down. And then a second verse popped into my head. And another one. And another one! They just kept coming and I kept writing them down on a pad of paper. I went through pages and pages before I was done.
Then I had to put them into the computer so I could see them all together and put them in the right order. That took quite a while, because, of course, I was revising them as I typed them in, and each revision meant finding just the right rhyming word that fit the story perfectly and moved it forward.
When I was done, I heaved a sigh of relief and looked at the clock. It was after 4:00 AM! Good grief. And I still had a house full of overnight guests from the triple birthday party on Friday night. Oh, well. I went to bed and went right to sleep.
Woke up at seven this morning and dragged myself out of bed, had breakfast with everyone, and saw the overnighters head out for the next leg of their trip. Then I went back to my new 275 word story, read it over and then completely rewrote the entire thing into a whole new version. It's 360 words long now, and a much better story because now it has a main character (a boy named Jack) in it, which it was lacking before. This morning my niece Jennifer thought she was going to be the main character in it, but as I worked on the revision I found I needed a single syllable word name that rhymed with "pack," so she morphed into Jack. She'll be surprised when she sees this new version of it and discovers she's now a little boy.

I'm thrilled with it.

Don't know, of course, if my agent or either of my current editors will be even remotely interested in it, but only time will tell about that. They will most likely tell me, "There's too many other stories out there on that subject already." That seems to be the response I get with all of my stories these days.

But at least "I wrote today!"