I hate work assignments that involve tons of complications and political tangles and workplace drama. The writing assignment for our class is the exact opposite of all those things, and exactly the kind of assignment I like.

“You owe me 25,000 words this March, and 50,000 words this May. Good luck.”

In the real world, nobody checks to make sure you’ve been keeping up with your word counts and writing a little bit every day. If nothing else over the past several months, I’ve learned graduate school is no joke.

We started class on Tuesday, January 19th, and were asked to turn in a 5-10 page synopsis of our stories last Thursday. Next week our professor will let us know if there are any major issues with our plans or plots, but after that, she’s turning us loose to go write. I’m super excited, and a little scared.

People often ask me where the ideas for my personal blog come from. The answer of course is, they come from everywhere! Every day I take mental notes of the things I see, many of which end up as blog entries. Likewise, the idea for a novel can come from just about anywhere as well.

In December, my family and I took a cruise to Hawaii. When we got on the cruise, each of us got our own cruise card. Someone scanned our cards each time we got off the ship, and each time we came back on board. A digital picture of your face appears on the scanner, but it’s 1″ x 1″ (at best), and when I saw that I thought, “I’ll bet it wouldn’t be that hard to use someone else’s card, as long as you remotely resembled them.”

After a day or two of writing, that little seed of an idea turned into an eight page synopsis for my novel.

Tomorrow I’m going to write a little bit about “plotting” (figuring out the plot of your novel before hand) vs. “pantsing” (writing by the seat of your pants!). Also, in case you missed it, I added an email subscription box on the right hand menu. If you would like to be notified by email each time I post a new entry, sign up there. You can remove yourself from the list at any time by clicking the link at the bottom of the email. Anyone who is on the list when the novel is done will receive a free electronic copy via email!