It’s 2am, and you can’t sleep. An idea is racing around your brain, bouncing off other ideas, growing and morphing in ways that you’re not entirely sure you’re comfortable with.

Quick. What’s the idea?

What’s the thing that pulls you out of sleep and rides you like a racehorse?

If it’s a fear, something about your family or your job or our current political nightmare, set that answer aside and go back to the beginning of this article to try again.

Got your idea? Good.

What’s the next step? If you’re a writer, the answer’s obvious: you write. Depending on your process, you might write a scene or a character sketch. Some people create an outline. Others just go stream of consciousness. I’m not super consistent with this step. What I do is different for each idea. Sometimes, I draw instead of write.

Now you have an awesome idea and something written down. There’s good news and bad news.

The good news is that you’ve started your next book, poem, play, or whatever.

The bad news is that, if you’re like me, that idea is going to continue to race around your brain. You’re going to be waking up and adding notes. You may end up sketching, or bringing it up in completely unrelated conversations. “What did I cook for dinner? Great question. How would you control a system of medical devices installed into a… Sorry. Let’s do pizza.”

As your idea grows and changes, you have to make decisions about format and structure and tone. You also have to prioritize. Odds are good that you have a drawer full of ideas like this. If you don’t figure out how to choose one, you’ll never actually complete any of them.

There’s all sorts of logic you can use to prioritize. Which one looks the easiest? Which one matters the most to you? If you already have readers, you should consider which ideas will connect with them. If you have a bunch of ideas in the same genre, it might make sense to start there.

Every once in a while, though, you have an idea that is so big and complex and challenging that it chases away all the others.

What do you do about it?

Well, here’s what I did.

About this time last year, as I was carrying Emil through the process of artwork and publishing, a new idea arrived, a vision of a person who designed cities for other planets. She even had a tagline: When you’ve built your life building cities, what’s left?

Suddenly, characters started showing up in my brain. This wasn’t just the designer’s story. It was also the story of a dis-inherited prince who’d lost his faith, a young space pilot trying to make his parents proud, a grizzled war-criminal struggling to be less evil, a love-struck palace guard, and many more than I can list. Cultures clashed. Assassins showed up.

Every night, a new spark burned through my consciousness. Wizards, ecological systems, alien languages, religions, technologies, magic, fear, hope… It was like my brain had exploded in a dozen different directions.

Except they weren’t different directions. They were all part of the same story.

That was a problem.

You see, in the world of publishing, even indie publishing, there are rules to follow. This story broke all of them. It required different voices, genres, tenses, and cultures. Heck. It didn’t even fit inside the structure of a traditional novel.

By every sane measure, I should have put it aside. I wanted to finish the next Nash Dragons book, and get started on the next Boy With The Sword book. I have half a dozen other partially-written projects aimed at the middle grade and YA markets. Ignoring them all to dive into what could only be described as an exercise in experimental fiction would be insane.

On the other hand, how could I ignore what was happening?

In the end, I had no choice but to embrace the insanity. I suppose that’s the definition of a passion project.

The result is my new book, Tales of Esperanza, and I couldn’t be more excited about it. Will it succeed commercially? Will it prove that all those rules of publishing can be thrown out? I have no idea. I sure hope so.

It will be arriving in stores on October 6th. I hope you check it out!

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