It has been a few days since I received the prompt and the wheels are turning. Between showers, work, wrangling the kids, and getting caught up with all the beautiful Writer In Motion posts, my own story idea hasn’t solidified yet.

A dilemma is happening where the original spark becomes clouded by other thoughts in my head, characters demanding attention, and my own children jumping up and down, waving their arms, and determined to tell me every three minutes that they need food, a drink, hugs, or brother took the favorite toy away and now it’s all tragedy and tears. So how do I make this work?

The dilemma

Here’s the struggle going on in my head. I have two characters forming around this idea of an injured male on a journey home. One is from an existing story, the other is a complete unknown.

I have a character who’s a starship captain an incredible story to tell. His journey is half-written somewhere in my files, and every so often he pokes his head up with “is it my turn yet?” This captain has a tragic childhood, so by the time he becomes an adult he’s a bit of a rogue. He spends half his life with a cigarette in his mouth, the other doing something stupid that probably should have gotten him killed. Until he receives a transmission from his sister (an elite soldier called a Tracker) several light-years away. In the video she’s emaciated, covered in blood, and begging him to get her the hell out of there.
The second character is an unknown, but I’m getting glimpses of him. The only thing I know for sure is this character comes from one of my dragon worlds. But other than that, he’s more of a vague shadow at this point.

And herein lies the obstacle.

I’m a little more well-known for dragons in my writing, even though I also write far futuristic science fiction tech. So the question begins to burn a hole in my head . . . are readers expecting dragons or should I lean toward the science fiction story? The reason I bring this up is because I see writers struggle with this all the time. Was it not Stephen King who said “Write for your ideal reader”?

If I feed my ideas into this simple line, there’s really only one answer.

I have a lot of critique partners, but one in particular stands out because she loves my work. Enough that she even read one of my drafts twice—once with the villain’s POV and once with it removed. My two current polished books are so vastly different, and yet they have several elements in common. An alpha hero, a love story, and an exotic world.

So then the next question opens up: is there any point anywhere in the multiverse where these two universes overlap? And there’s definitely a maybe in there.

To honor my ideal reader, Miss Megan Van Dyke (totally calling you out here), I will be writing the nexus point where Hàlön and Arånor universes collide.

Writing the backstory

The original tale for my starship captain can only be told through a novel framework. He’s got a tragic childhood, and his future is going to take him light-years from home to a derelict starship with a stolen moon inside its ring. But for this short story, I need to take the captain backwards to his rogue years before the loose screw finally settled back into place.

In my files I keep a questionnaire based on Lisa Cron’s Story Genius to help me dig into a character’s backstory. Because I already have an inkling of this man, this part of building the story idea was surprisingly easy. While not fully filled out, it helped get me back to the character’s deeper persona.

The final spark

The last piece I needed was a location, and an actual story to tell. This is where Pinterest comes in really handy. Part of yesterday’s project was pulling interesting images together to see if anything stuck. Each one helped round out the concept in my head, but I couldn’t look away from the rounded dragon bone with symbols carved on it.

Then I found this:

I don’t know who the original artist is (this was found on a generic wallpaper site), but look at the gorgeous detail. It looks like a dragon, but also a dagger, and feels like an incomplete piece of machinery. So what happens when it finds its way home?

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for—the piece that ties everything together.

I now know the character, the story arc, and how the image above is part of the nexus where dragons and spaceships collide. This week I’ll be writing my first draft of this short piece. It won’t be perfect, but the first draft only has one job: to exist. Once its job is finished, we’ll fire up the forge and shape it into something beautiful.

K.J. Harrowick is a freelance web developer and graphic designer with more than a decade on industry experience on a diverse range of projects. As a child, she fell in love with fantasy worlds like those found in the books of Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey, which continued well into adulthood with the worlds of Ivan Cat, Rand & Robin Miller, Terry Brooks, Orson Scott Card, and E. R. Mason. She began to world build and create fantasy languages in 2004, and in 2014 it became a full-blown passion to write and publish her own books. Currently she resides in the rainy Pacific Northwest where she works with a broad range of client projects, plots how to destroy her characters’ lives, and occasionally falls down rabbit holes.

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