I wrote a blog post some time ago about capturing ideas for writing. Actually, I may have written several posts about that between here and my other blog, An Arrow Through The Air.

Two situations have come up in the last few days where I was able to do this. Actually, I guess it was three.

On my novel in progress, China Tour, I’m in the middle part of the novel now, between the two main plot points. This is the part where a novel often sags, as the protagonist overcomes a series of conflicts, preferably rising in danger/difficulty, before moving into the end game. And it’s the part of this novel I had mostly not thought out. So I’m writing each scene as it comes to mind.

But while driving home from work yesterday an idea for a conflict came to me. It seemed to be a good one, but I didn’t use memory techniques to lock it in. By the time I got in the house not only had I lost the idea but I forget I’d even had an idea. After supper and going through snail mail, I went to The Dungeon and started writing earlier than usual on a week night. I typed a few words, continuing a scene from where I left off Wednesday evening, when the idea came back. I grabbed a piece of paper to write it on, then decided to just put it at the end of the Word document, set off from the rest of the text.

While writing for the next couple of hours, two or three other ideas came to me. They went at the end of the ms. as well. So by the time I knocked off for the evening, around 10:00 p.m., having added over 2,000 words to the novel, I also had good ideas documented for middle-of-the-novel scenes. It was a good evening of writing.

So upstairs I went, intending to do some pleasure reading, but before I left the computer I saw one of the volumes of The Annals of America, the one for the Civil War years. I took it upstairs with me, and instead of reading for pleasure I went through the Table of Contents to find items to include in a future volume of Documenting America. While that book was a stand-alone volume, I have always hoped to make a series of volumes based on the style of the original book. I listed about twelve documents to include, and spot-read in two of them to make sure they are suitable. They are. The book will need about thirty documents all together, or perhaps a few less if I use some documents for two chapters. It’s not much, but it’s a start—and it’s on paper.

The other idea capture event happened on Tuesday. I was at a professional lunch, a PowerPoint presentation made by an Arkansas state official. It was all words, and sitting in the back of the room I couldn’t really see them. Plus, it’s stuff I already know, for the most part. So rather than concentrating on that I took a napkin (I hadn’t brought a note pad with me), and began thinking through books that might eventually go in my future series, The Alfred Cottage Mysteries.

Now, this is really long-range planning, as I don’t expect to be writing any book in this series. But I’ve thought of the series much over the years, had a couple of books in mind, but not the full series. So as the regulator droned on about short-term activity authorizations, I wrote on the napkin. Here’s what I came up with.

• Alfred Cottage and The Coroner’s Inquest
• Alfred Cottage and The Lost Love
• Alfred Cottage and The Lost inheritance
• Alfred Cottage and The Lost Years
• Alfred Cottage and The Wife Murderer
• Alfred Cottage and The Fornicators
• Alfred Cottage and Stolen Identity
• Alfred Cottage and The Cherokee Princess
• Alfred Cottage and The Abolitionist
• Alfred Cottage and The Cobbler’s Will
• Alfred Cottage and The Soldier’s Son
• Alfred Cottage and The Rum Runners

Each of these, except the next-to-last, comes from something in my or my wife’s ancestry. Some will have large pieces of the real family history as a basis, some just a small part. All of them will be fiction, however, with many embellishments and conflict added along the way.

As I’ve told people, when I dream I tend to dream big. Here’s a big dream: 12 books that are years away from being started, yet are already finding their way out of the gray cells and on to paper.

Stay tuned.