This week I’ve been thinking about passion. You know, that elusive something that lights a fire in your belly or brain and won’t let go.

I’m in a space in my writing schedule where it’s all about writing proposals. Proposals are work. I have to create ideas out of thin air…and sometimes in the back of my mind, I wonder whether I could really write the book I’m proposing or if I even want to.

That’s a scary spot to be.

For each proposal, I have to pick a setting, create characters, give them a career, passions, challenges, etc., and build a plot from those elements. To put all that effort in and then decide I don’t want to write that book seems like a huge waste of effort and time.

This week I revised a suspense proposal at the request of an editor. The further I got into the revision, the more I itched to write the book. A very good sign.

Then a editor asked me whether I was still interested in submitting a proposal that we had vaguely discussed a couple months ago. Being me, I said sure, I’ll have something to you by Monday or Tuesday. The only problem: I had one teeny tiny idea. One. And with writing Captive Dreams, I hadn’t made time to flesh out that idea let alone locate others. And with historicals, it’s all about the historical hook. At least for me. Otherwise, it’s just another book that anyone could write.

So I needed three historical hooks that would support three separate books that were loosely tied together.

Yesterday I drove onto the internet superhighway and found a fantastic umbrella site in the area I needed. Early this afternoon I found one thread that got me pretty excited and gave me one hook. Then, tonight I found at least two more. I am SOOOOOO excited about this series that now I really hope the editor likes it, too. I want the excuse to take a research trip to make the settings come to life and pick up more details. At the same time, I still have a bunch of work to do to flesh these ideas into synopses that contain enough information for her to make an informed judgment.

So it all comes back to passion. And once that passion is ignited, watch out! My fingers will fly all over this keyboard!