Emotional Outbursts

So this "writing prompts" thing is cool - even if I never see any of it again, it's helpful. This morning, I used the word wrapped and wrote a couple of things from it. I could do more. Weird, how finding a word that seems so obvious, so specific, can open my eyes to feelings and emotions I'd not really considered. I keep these in a computer folder called "emotional outbursts" and that is where some of my book starts come from. I've written a scene that became a piece of a novel (twice). The novel didn't necessarily hinge on that scene, and neither time was that scene the beginning, but both times I was able to so clearly see the characters, their motivations, their fears and their anxieties that those characters came alive to me right then. I just had to do that little job of writing a novel around that scene.

If you're interested, one of those was the scene in Bright Blue Miracle where Leigh and Germ are in his kitchen, the scene leading up to his saying "she makes me feel like you do." That was the first thing I wrote for that book, and I still love that scene (at least in my head. It does me no good to go back and read it now, I'd only find things I wish I could change, you know?).

The other is from the forthcoming Ridiculous Romantic Obsessions. It's an almost-kiss scene that takes place at a wedding reception (and in a pink dress), and it appears in the book very close to how I originally wrote it. At least, I think it does. I should see edits very soon, and I'll see how much has changed...