Wonder Week

Call it confirmation, guidance, a "God thing," or as my favorite singer/songwriter, David Wilcox, likes to say, Timing with a Capital T, this week made my head spin with it.

Seems like sometimes . . . no, often . . . making one good decision can lead to other good things. (Yeah, I've been trying to teach my kids that for years, and one of these days maybe they'll believe me!) My decision to cut the domineering subplot earlier this week has been followed by several rather amazing "coincidences" that have affected my writing in one way or another.

Let's start with Tuesday night. I was browsing Amazon and started reading about the number one book in women's fiction (by their rating system). My eyes got pretty big as I read about a plot that was identical in several critical ways to the next manuscript I planned to work on. Not the cut plot from my current one, but another I've been toying with for some time. I've had a few trial chapters from this story stuck in a file on my computer for a little more than a year because I decided the idea I had for my WIP was more timely, and the most original idea I had come up with so far. Now, I thought the other idea was quite original, if I do say so myself, and perhaps since it's number one on Amazon, it really was.

I felt a gamut of emotions--frustration, relief, and affirmation are a few. Frustration because I knew I couldn't effortlessly move right into that story when I finally finish my current one. But frustration quickly turned to relief. What if I had not come across this book before I poured my heart and soul into mine for a year? It would definitely have been labeled a copy cat book, even if my story was different in many ways, because the basic plot was too close. Finally, affirmation, because if I had a "what if?" idea as close to a bestselling author as I did, I must be on the right track. Apparently, I'm pursuing story ideas that are publishable and commercially viable.

The very next day, I browsed to one of my favorite author's blogs. Imagine my surprise when her blog title referenced the very same book. She blogged about how her upcoming release is similar in many ways to this book as well. (IMHO, her plot sounds very different, but it has the same universal themes. I can't wait to read her book.) Needless to say, I was having a Twilight Zone experience for sure. I exchanged some personal correspondence with her, and she encouraged me to squirrel that story away and somewhere down the line, give it some big tweaks, and try again.

Thursday night comes along, and my heart has pretty much taken all of this kind of shock it can stand for one week, but yes, God does have a sense of humor. As I blogged about earlier this week, I've been pondering a new working title for my WIP. Early in the day Thursday, I was tossing some ideas around in my head that seemed right, but I needed some confirmation. Yeah, I'm a spineless wimp. I can't make decisions on my own. So, there's something David Wilcox (the Capital T guy) says in concerts sometimes, and I couldn't quite remember how it went. I googled it, looked at song lyrics on his site, but couldn't locate it. I knew, however, that it gave the universal theme of my WIP in a nutshell. So, I was playing around with titles derived from it in some way. I ran them by my husband and kids at the dinner table, and there were the usual obnoxious jokes and so on, but also good reactions.

An hour or so later, I got an emailed digest from a group of Wilcox fans. One lady had posted a poignant story about her work week. She then posted the very quote I had been trying to remember. As if that wasn't enough, she signed off with a Valentine's wish using one of the exact phrases I was tossing around.

Yeah.

Before I went to bed, I changed the title on my WIP to my new one and put the quote at the top as an epi . . . uh, what is that word!? (Not epitaph--that's for tombstones.) Oh, yeah--EPIGRAPH! While the new working title is not the exact phrase she used, it was one of the alternates that means the same thing. This morning, I got a response from my first reader, telling me she preferred the one I used over the other, and I hadn't even told her which I had chosen.

In the meantime, I've done more writing this week than I've been able to do in weeks. I'm writing the last chapter of my story (although, I do have maybe two transition chapters that go in between the last one and where I left off earlier in the week). The place I thought was "the end" back when I was doing NaNoWriMo is pretty much the middle of the story now. Talk about opening up the story when I followed my heart by cutting that subplot.

My goal was to get a good first draft complete and ready for serious revisions before I start my Voice II class with Barbara Samuel in March. I think I can. I think I can.

What about you? Coincidence? Guidance? A God thing? Timing with a Capital T? How has it affected your writing?