If you followed my old blog at Cranium Outpost, you might remember a post I did about having to make some hard choices about my latest novel, The Unexplored Territory.

The hard choices have been made, 10,000 words were removed, and the writing has begun again.  But it came to a stop over the weekend as my brain tussled with something, and this morning, I figured out what it was.

My last novel was a fairly simple thing.  It has three key themes: survival, coming of age, and making a choice.  But the story line and the character scope is small, and it was fairly easy to stay on track, even when I didn’t know enough about writing to worry about themes.

My latest story has a  theme. A big one.  A grandiose one.  One might even call it epic.  It’s been sitting there all along in my brain, but in all the planning for the book, I never stopped to write down what it was, and I never stopped to figure out how the characters played into the theme.  I knew I wanted to work in this underlying current, this allegory, if you will, but it wasn’t until I started writing it down this morning, that the plot freed up in my head, and what was stuck became unstuck.  Even with an outline, the book wasn’t fully developed in my head until I wrote down the theme.  I still have more work to do on the theme document, and I need to do a little background research to make sure I’ve got a few metaphors clean, but things are definitely back on track.

My goal is to do a short blog entry every day about how many words I’ve written.  Today, the word count in the book was a big fat 0.  I probably won’t get to write for the next 3 or 4 days as I have a book for work I have to read (that is really pissing me off right now – 350 pages on Microsoft SharePoint.  Yippee), but the story is calling to me again, and I can’t ignore it for too long, or the muse may leave me forever for a more attentive writer.