Series, anyone?
When my beloved gave me permission to give fiction writing a go, the first thing I knocked out was a novella about a couple, Josh and Dana, with qualities I admire. To flesh them out, I did an in-depth character profile on each. The more I inhabited them, the more I liked them.
One of my touchstones on any new story is a venue I find interesting and/or want to know more about. When I came up with my next location, Hazard, Kentucky, and a rough direction for a plot, I invited Josh and Dana back to be the protagonists. I had given them humor, flexibility, professional effectiveness and fearlessness. Once again, they did a good job of navigating through a threatening situation, resolving the problem and survived (no small feat).
Despite working in other stories with other protagonists (five novellas and a book without J&D), I have now a series of twelve (12) Josh and Dana stories wherein they deal with challenges in Maine, Kentucky, Oregon, London, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Florida and the Hudson River Valley. The challenge/opportunity now is what to do with the series. The stories could be combined into a compendium or packaged for a TV mini-series. Being ever the optimist, I have already begun converting the novellas to script form. This is an interesting challenge in its own as there must be a minimum of interior dialog and description and a maximum of conversational information transmission.
Sigh. A mother’s work is never done….
