What A Novel Idea Part One - Memoirs of Our Imaginations

Hey Friends!  (You guys are our friends, right?)

We have a confession to make to you all right here on the internet.  Are you ready?  We are total and completely undeniable nerds.  Whew, we said it.  We always have been.  More to that point, we love to lose ourselves in books and the worlds that they create for us.  We are going to assume that a lot of you feel the same way and that you too spend countless hours on the internet reading threads about your favorite books in-between actually reading and rereading all your favorite books.

But, dear reader, have you ever thought about writing a book for yourself?  Have you ever created an idea so meaningful and influential (at least to yourself) that you had to share it with the world?  Have you tried to write it down?

Here’s the deal.  It’s a lot of work to write a book.  Forget coming up with a noteworthy idea and writing and rewriting until it resembles something coherent.  There’s publishing to think about, editing, marketing, all the boring stuff (to some) that has to be done for the book to be successful.  And then, after all that work, people might not like it.  And so, we have another confession to make: We (both of us) have let these things prevent us from writing a book.  It has always been in the back of our minds, even before we met each other. 

We are going to guess that this is the case for at least some of you guys, too (we are doing a lot of assuming today, but hey, all of the most complicated engineering problems can be solved if you have enough assumptions).  And that’s completely fair.  There are a lot of questions to be asked when writing a book and sometimes the answers are scary.  We are both engineers and in the engineering spirit, we question everything.  We approach every situation with the same logical, stepwise manner, and we ask questions, a lot of questions.  How much time will it take to write the novel?  What are the steps to get it published?  What is the cost?  Is the idea marketable?  What are the risks?  What steps can be taken to mitigate the risk?  What is the chance for failure?  How large will the failure be?  Where will the failure be, with the equipment, with the customer, with the quality of the writing, with the marketing?  And the list goes on…  

Today we are announcing to the world that we are throwing all the risk analysis out the window.  We are going for something big.  Something bigger than www.zazzle.com/Catpicsallday* .  We are going to co-write a novel (because everything is more manageable when you have an awesome team).  There will be no risk analysis, no mitigation, and we may fail.  This could be the biggest failure of our lives.  But we are going to write the novel we’ve always wanted to give to the world (and wanted to read).  The customer might not like it, a publisher might not see any worth, an editor might tell us to scrap the idea and go in a different direction.  These are all things that can happen, but we are going for it anyway.  We will be having many fun and entertaining discussions with each other about the direction, the characters, and the plot points that move the novel forward. There will be plenty of erasing and starting over by our own accord.  One of the perks with being in a great team, we don’t get offended when the other says an idea sucks in so many words :D.  Instead, it can become the theme for comical blog-posts. Lucky for us, the engineering side of our brain helps out with that!  I mean, we’ve written like 6 blog posts so far, so we clearly know what we are doing.

So in addition to all the other random things we decide are blog-worthy, we are now going to provide insight into our book-writing process.  We’ll be sure to share with you all our inspirations, our writing techniques, resources we’ve found helpful, all our frustrations, personal successes, and hopefully some self-discovery along the way.  And then with some insight, hopefully some of you will choose to do the same and follow your creative dreams. 

A Possible hint at our theme for the novel. That and Quinn likes the night vision feature.

So, here we are in another moment of clarity.  Our lives are (once again) taking a new turn that hopefully won’t end with us bruised and battered along the road (although that is very possible considering we may develop over-confidence due to our kickboxing skillz).  We hope you enjoy our adventure through the process of discovery and our engineering mindset, mixed with our bizarre imaginations, of how to write a meaningful story.  If, nay, when, we get to the stage of being edited and preparing to submit to publishers, you all will be the first to get information about the actual story.  In the meantime, we’ll be dropping hints and pieces of the book for you all to sample (we do want this to be somewhat a surprise).  This is our new beginning, writing the Memoirs of Our Imaginations.

Until then,

Alice & Quinn