The Book

Last night I had a dream about a magical lion, who was being held prisoner by an evil queen.  He turned himself into a man to be able to escape, and he happened to escape at the same time one of the queen's priestesses was also running away.  Now, in my dream there was no romantical connection between these two characters, but if I were to write a book about them, there definitely would be, because, well, I like romantical connections, G rated, of course.  So these two are running away from the queen's guards and hiding in a tree with a little boy - I don't know how the little boy showed up, but they were protecting him, and Brian had a pretty good idea about who he should be - and then I woke up, and it was a lot cooler in my dream than I've told it, and I thought, "That would be a great book!"

(On a side note, Brian has James Bond type dreams that he wakes up to thinking, "That would be a cool movie!"  He's told me about them, and they probably would be very cool movies.)

But after thinking about this great book, and thinking, "I'll write it as soon as I'm done with the one I'm writing now," I then thought, "Oh, shoot!  I only have one page of that book written."  Yep, one page.  But, you know, that's progress.  I just need to get going on it.

I've been doing really well with my other goals, mostly because I have a set and serious plan to accomplish them: reading my scriptures aloud to Becca when I put her down for her morning nap (which makes her conk out real fast), setting a very specific task each month for food storage and emergency preparedness, etc.  I think I need to come up with a time every day and say, "This is my time to write," otherwise it might be years before this book is finished.

One thing that's helping and inspiring me is a girl I went to church with during all my growing up years.  A couple of years ago she announced on her blog that she was going to write a book, and now it's finished and will be debuting in April.  Isn't that cool?  Every time I read one of her posts on Facebook I think, "Alicia's a mom, and she found the time to write her book, so I can do it, too."  By the way, Alicia's book is called Emerald City, and it's set in Seattle.  I can't wait to read it.  And I'll probably keep a copy on my bedside table to remind me that the goal is attainable.

So to refresh my memory about what I've written and planned so far, I'll give you guys a little bit of information about my book.  The heroine is named Maura and the hero is Bowen.  Brian came up with Bowen when we were on our way to Great Wolf Lodge.  He kept naming cities we were passing when I was trying to come up with names for the different cities and kingdoms for my book, and when he said, "Bowen," I thought, "That's perfect for the prince's name!"  The villain is named Kendrick, but in every thing I've written so far, he's referred to as Bad Guy, or B.G. 

Here's a little snippet of the Prologue.  Don't be too critical of it.  When I read through it just now, I found many things just in that paragraph alone that I want to change, but that's just the nature of a rough draft.  Anyway:

He quickly descended, holding the precious book carefully with one arm.  Sitting on the stone floor, he opened the cover and silently ruffled through the pages.  He knew there was a lot of work ahead of him to learn the language that the spells were written in.  He also knew through his studies that this work couldn’t begin while he was still in the cave.  The only person that was allowed to use magic in the cave was the mage that the books had belonged to long ago.  To everyone else it was strictly forbidden.  He(name?) knew he should take the book home with him to study and learn from, but the words on the first page caught his attention, and in his excitement he read them, sounding them out slowly, even though he did not know their meanings.  He whispered the words as he read, loving the feel of them on his lips.  A slight rush of air came swirling from the page and circled twice around him before heading toward the cave entrance.  Once this small wind left his skin, he assumed that it had dissipated into the air.  He never knew how strong those whispered words were, or how far they traveled.