Death by Plot Bunny and a Snipit from my new WIP

Alrighty... Since I finished Where I Belong, I've been floundering and it's been going on for months now. The beginning of WIB went like this... I was sitting in my office working on my real job when I'm Moving On by Rascal Flatts came on Pandora and for some reason I really listened to the song. Not in the singing along kind of way, but the deep hearing/feeling the message of the song way.  

With that my brain started to spin the lyrics around... 

But I never dreamed home would end up where I don't belong... Stopped to fill up on my way out of town... Maybe forgiveness will find me somewhere down this road... I'm movin' on... 

What happened to this guy?  What happened to him down the road?  Did he ever find forgiveness?  From there, the character of Harper Ellison was born.

I'd never written anything longer than a short story in fiction... a couple one-act plays don't really count.  Technical manuals are different, I've written encyclopedias worth of that crap, but not fiction... not romance... Those things scared me... that was real writing... It wasn't just translating geek into human.  But I quickly had the opening of a gay romance, fully formed and perfect, in my head.  The words came organically.  It felt like a choose your own adventure.  I literally wrote all 100K (at it's most obese) in order beginning to end.  Some of it was hard and I got off track more than a few times but I never felt completely lost.

Once the self-imposed major re-writing was done, I had an idea for a shifter book which I got to about 10K words and then I couldn't feel it anymore, the spark was gone.  And then I saw a photo on Tumblr that created this amazing character I had to write about and after 15K words it was gone... Then came the BDSM book... Then came a second shifter book... And then... and then... and then... Every time I would just get to the meat of the story and get scared that it wasn't as good or as organic as WIB, which I thought half-way sucked most of the time.  At that point all the life would go out of it and the story would just flame out.

So the other day, another plot bunny gave it's life in the cause of my eternal frustration.  I was reading one of Sean Michael's Hammer series books (Push, I think) and I couldn't help but ask...  What would happen if it were the Dom who was broken?  What would a sub do to fix it?  And I was off to the races yet again.  Lucky for me, this time finally feels different... It's finding my answer to those questions that's driving me, not the characters or plot.

Here's a much loved paragraph from this new WIP with a working title of About Face.

Rob used all the control he had in him to not tremble when he heard the door to the dungeon close softly. Some of the anticipation was coming from his need to get out of his head after the conversation with his brother but more than that it came from his attraction to Siri. Jamie had described him as an old school leather guy, but that's not what Rob saw. Siri was the epitome of the modern leather top, coming of age long after the Stonewall riots and the advent of the gay rights movement such that his masculinity wasn't threatened by society's belief that gay men were all effeminate. For Siri, being a top wasn't a reaction to not wanting to be perceived as girly or gay, it was just who he was without pretense. Siri was what all of those old school tops wanted to be but couldn't because they could never get out from under a culture that reminded them at every turn that their sexuality made them less of a man. For Rob, Siri's absolute confidence in his masculinity and his sexuality was the hottest thing he'd ever encountered.  

So there it is... And to distract you from the abundance of authorly angst, just look at the pretty, pretty bear...

(Source:  I've lost the post-it with the source, let me know if you recognize it.)