I didn’t realize that you were part of that proud sorority.

Oh yes! 50 hours a week and 15 or 18 credit hours. Can’t remember. Anyway, lots of time for homework and writing.

Also, it was an odd thing to learn that there are twenty-four hours in a day. Not intellectually, as in, the dark part of that twenty-four is for settling in and sleeping. But in practice, as in, those are available hours in which to get stuff done!!!

You are one of the most creative people I know!

Your “little vignettes that I’ll never publish” sound like the “irresponsible writing” that Dermot Bolger advocated.

I wish I could take credit for “gun-on-the-sideboard,” but I think it’s a variation on “Chekhov’s gun” that I must have run across somewhere in my reading, and which caught my imagination, although I don’t entirely agree with Chekhov. So, if I were an editor and I saw a good one lying around unused in a current story, I wouldn’t tell the writer to get rid of it. I’d ask about developing it in a related book. But I’m a pantser, and most editors are probably congenital planners. Chekhov might have been a planner, too, for all I know.

You seem to use your guns the way others report engaging in lucid dreaming: a sort of hybrid pantser-planner. In my case, I just left the guns on the sideboard, the windowsill, and the top of the toilet tank, and now I’ve got this behemoth war story to show for it. Not exactly job security, but it keeps me off the street.

guns-on-the-sideboard

That’s an excellent term.

Were there gun-on-the-sideboard moments in your modern-setting novels that subsequently sent you down to the sea in the Dunham ship?

tl;dr ALL THE FREAKING TIME. They’re details most editors would ask me to take out because they don’t seem to serve a purpose.

Long version:

I have tons of those, but usually I know what they are and I leave them, even though most editors would have me take them out. When I get ready to do X thing, I’ve already laid the groundwork. Usually it’s because while I was writing the current book, I was doing alternate scenes on the side, deleting other scenes, writing little vignettes (sketches) that I’ll never publish, writing scenes for other books that tie in, so I usually know where I’m going.

Disclaimer: I have broken canon a tiny bit or two, but only careful readings would tell you where

For instance, when I wrote the masquerade scene in STAY, where Vanessa’s mother brings the press to ambush her, there’s a part there where Etienne is sitting with Nia (the architect) in the corner. I had already written the opening scene with Etienne and Tess (yes, they existed that far back), but I had something else in mind. But I left it open just in case.

When Sabrina poked me, I hauled out all the off-the-screen things I’d written on Etienne and Tess. There were portions in PROVISO, STAY, and most of it in a very old, old manuscript I’d started retrofitting a while back. So I got to thinking about all that, and decided to go a different direction.

Now, I had to work around the masquerade scene in STAY when I wrote this book, but other than timing, it flowed together so seamlessly. And because it’s from entirely different points of view, it’ll give you a different look at Whittaker House, Vanessa, Sebastian, and the pack.

You know what’s really funny though, is there’s a running joke throughout this new book about going to Russia in the winter.

The thing that tripped this particular trigger was the conversation that Dillon had with Fr O’Tuathail in Chapter 30 of “Irish Firebrands.” There were also several earlier hints that I didn’t recognize as guns-on-the-sideboard when I wrote them, although I do recall wondering, “Why is this in here?”

Were there gun-on-the-sideboard moments in your modern-setting novels that subsequently sent you down to the sea in the Dunham ship?

I only have one piece of advice: Stay out of Russia in the winter.