Book Ideas

Welcome back to the Carson-Hume blog where “two hearts share one brain cell.” I am today’s host: JT Hume. You’re reading my second or third writer-centric blog which is a blessing for me today. After twelve hours with the relations (fun but tiring), you get an updated rerun.

There are few easy chores when writing and publishing a book, and book ideas are tough for many writers. You can ask fifty writers for their inspirations and get twenty-five different answers. Some probably have a flowchart like we use in the IT business: stick drawings with boxes, diamonds, triangles, and so on. A lot of “if/then/else” decisions on paper, and all are oh-so-easy to overthink.

I’ve never been accused of being a thinker, so my method has two steps.

“Is it reasonable?”

You’ll probably never see a teenage zombie apocalypse story on my bookshelf because I feel the readers’ suspension of disbelief can stretch only so far. I can’t get past one or two episodes of book and television series because my eyes keep rolling. The mass of humanity may love their two-dimensional characters with one-dimensional explosions, but I want real meat on those bones. The upside of that “real meat” means fleshed-our characters with honest problems set on a background we can all understand. No sparkly vampires here, kids!

“Is it a good idea?”

This is the veto point, but what is a good idea? Hell if I know. There are a bunch of books on my bookshelf, and dozens of unpublished manuscripts and fleshed-out book ideas in Google Docs. If you apply the thumbscrews, I’d say the book must hit me in my feels. Yeah, I’m secure in my masculinity to admit that some manuscripts made me tear up like I’m peeling onions, but others left me feeling “meh” after 80,000 words. The latter are the ones stuck in limbo. Once I decide I have a good idea, though, I’m a greyhound chasing a rabbit. Get out of my way.

Bottom Line:

I don’t care about profitability or a thousand other details you might find in other writers’ brain spaces which simplifies things. I write and self-publish what I like, and if the world doesn’t buy the final product, I throw up my hands and move onto the next book. Either way, I have to believe in what I write and publish, or I feel I wasted your time, and nobody wants that. As long as I write what I like, I’m happy to sign the standard “rich and famous” contract in my next life.