Here's today's oddball writing-related conversation:
Me: "Hey, is it weird that I want to be a published author with a fanbase so I can look on TV Tropes and see if my readers listed the same tropes I think the books should have?"

My husband: "No comment."

I'm going to take that as a "yes", but surely other writers have thought the same thing. I'd almost see it as a badge of honor or proof that I made it in the world if people care enough to take the time to poke fun at it. Then again, I write humor. Maybe I see this differently than people who write serious, epic novels. I mean, scenes earlier this week involved pies, sandcastles, and characters trying to one-up each other about which one is the better juggler. Overly serious this is not.

What prompted that tropes observation in the first place was flipping through the site and realizing that the protagonist from my current novel falls exactly into "Beware the Nice Ones". This set me to wondering if readers would see it the same way. In this case, probably. (Sweet, patient, pacifistic painter drives the antagonist to insanity- ripping away his magic and ending up with it himself- out of revenge and pain after said baddie kills someone he cares about. If the protagonist has been a less moral person, he would have killed the villain, which would have probably been a kinder act. Yeah, he's that trope to a T.)

Anyway, I just wonder about stuff like this. Ya know, on the off chance that my series would ever get published and I get fans. The thought of that is almost laughable, but I'm going to keep writing anyway.

Speaking of a series... I do in fact have one! Sort of. I'm still working my way through the first book, but I've been steadily adding notes to the file for the later ones. After I uncovered plot this week that wouldn't fit into the three I had planned, I realized I have enough story lined up to take me to four books. Four books that even have titles. Get that! That's frankly amazing because I can never think of ideas for titles until the last minute or else mooch them off of friends. In this case, though, I kind of cheated; the titles are the magical titles of the main characters.

Book 1: Colorweaver
Book 2: Spellbinder
Book 3: Bladeshielder
Book 4: Shadowshaper

Although one or some of those titles may change depending on if I think of better ways of describing their magics. Technically the first three are a trilogy while the 4th follows different characters years later, but there's some overlap, so it's all the same series.

This means that I'm going to be shifting "Unexpected Inspiration" to the name of the series as a whole rather than use it for a single book because all of the characters are either artists or performers in an artisan-centric culture. I have to laugh because "Unexpected Inspiration" was supposed to have been a simple, silly 30k word short story to give me a break from my other in-progress novel. Instead it's currently sitting at about 115k words and is the first in a multi-book series. A good friend summed this up well by saying "I think you've gotten to the point where you are completely incapable of writing anything that isn't complicated." Guilty.

I'm working like crazy to try to get Book 1 done by the end of the month so I can take some time off and work on my unrelated '12 NaNo novel for Camp NaNoWriMo in July. I'd rather rebel during a camp month rather than actual NaNo, so that will free up November to start Book 2. I'm optimistic! :)

~Meri