It’s good to be back with you, my lovely JS readers. ❤
As you may be aware, during the last year or so my family and I encountered some very difficult challenges we needed to overcome. We actually had to leave the country we were living in, but most of that trouble seems to be behind us now. Things have gradually settled down and I feel able to spend at least some of my time writing again. I’ve got my juices flowing, you might say.
The first of my unfinished stories that brought revitalized inspiration was “Two Moms.” I came up with a few new situations and ideas for the main characters (all four of whom I really like), and as soon as I began putting those thoughts into words, everything took off. I’ve now completed that story and have turned my attention to another one. I’ll tell you more about that in a while, perhaps, after I’ve made satisfactory progress.
The origin of “Two Moms” is kind of interesting.
I have a habit, you see, of writing up little snippets of new stories whenever they occur to me. This might be a few paragraphs of dialogue, a page of narrative, or simply a description of an idea, the basic concept. It doesn’t happen all that often, but over a number of years I’ve accumulated a large backlog of possible ideas for stories.
In fact, I currently have around 40 (!) potential story concepts waiting to be developed. Some of these are fairly long, more than a few pages, but the majority are quite short. Chances are I’ll never do anything at all with most of them since I just don’t have the time — and besides some are simply not good enough, not worth the effort. But there could be a nugget or two in there that someday finds its way to the surface and becomes a new entry for Juicy Secrets. Who knows?
Anyway, that’s what happened here, with “Two Moms.” I actually had two separate pieces I had begun long ago, one about a girl who moves with her mother to a new city and makes a new friend at school, a flirtatious young girl, plus a different piece about a girl whose mother is addicted to masturbation. It occurred to me at some point that I might merge those two stories and when I tried doing that, the rest became easy. It worked really well.
There’s one additional thing I’ll mention to show how my writing process works. After I’d made what felt like a good start, with the first five or six pages of that combined tale underway, I suddenly decided I also should show Nora, the mother of our narrator, Lia, and let readers see things from Nora’s perspective. This wasn’t my plan at the beginning and it led to a somewhat unorthodox style with sections of both first-person and third-person narrative back to back in the same story, but I’m quite pleased with the result.
I never would have attempted something as ambitious as that, however, if it hadn’t already been demonstrated how beautifully it can work by Cheryl Taggert in her masterpiece, I Was the Daughter of a Porn Star. I miss our partner very much, but even in her absence she continues to be a guide, a teacher, and an inspiration for me.