Came across Marie Brennan’s AMA today and was struck by the bit about incubating story ideas. I write down ideas in Liszt all the time, but I never review that list…making it somewhat worthless. In a similar vein, something else I read recently (can’t remember where) talked about regularly reviewing cultivating your idea list.

To that end, I’m planning to start reviewing my list once or twice a week. I’ll also be pulling the most promising ideas out into their own documents where I can flesh them out further.

In concert with all this: writing a novel where I pretty much just made it all up as I went was fun, and it got me this far, but I’m very much itching to be more thoughtful about the ideas in my fiction going forward — more thorough exploration of the ideas in the book and their ramifications, more interesting combinations of ideas, etc. (And of course do this while also trying to serve up a riveting plot and lovable characters.)