Hi all.
I was researching online the other day, wiffling about as I often do - twelve windows open, you know, and for some reason I'm reading about the nocturnal call of the Mongolian Scented Bat. Not what I set out to do, but so it goes. Anyway, I came across a reference to a battle in ancient Japan in 1185 AD, which ended with many warriors of the beaten side throwing themselves into the sea. All very dramatic, eh?
Crabs from that coast have the pattern of a human face on their shells. Go on, look it up. They're the Heikegani Crabs and they're a bit creepy.
If you're a Fantasy author, you can't read something like that without a hundred lights going off in your mind, like filaments burning out in a power surge. The crabs are said to protect the souls of those dead warriors, until they can right the ancient wrong. I had a torrent of ideas about evil rising again, or maybe a force of good trying to return and dispose of the darkness that triumphed that day. Five minutes later I had a secondary culture which knows more of this than the main one, and a band of renegade warriors whose existence has never been proved. Then came the MC, a misfit warrior from one of the military temples, and the one concubine he can afford, who's the brains of the outfit and who harbours a secret she's never dared tell him. That secret relates to the renegades and the ancient battle, and it will change everything.
(Because women do change everything, don't they?)
All that in less than half an hour. Which is great, I love it when my brain pops and fizzes like that, there's no feeling like it. Except I've been working on a new WIP for a few weeks now, blocking out and researching - which is actually what I was doing when I stumbled on a reference to the battle and these weird crabs. I started to write chapter one just last week. And now I can't stop thinking about the black and freezing water of the bay, the secrets it hides, and the forces which radiate out from it to change the world.
Usually I'd tell myself to be disciplined, to see one project through before I start the next. But there's that fizz in my brain... I'm a weak man, sometimes. Long story short, I just started the new (new) WIP, with a man treading on fallen blossoms as he walks through a garden. Time will tell if my instincts are guiding me right, won't it?
Cheerio.
