Hey all I thought that I would share with you a little of the behind-the-scenes craziness with this theme challenge craziness, because it might be fun.

So...like I've said, I started with this storyline that I had been creating in my head since middle school. Phoenix (who has gone through about a dozen names over the years before I finally settled) was originally an incredibly dull, way-too-kind, helping-the-world-even-though-I'm-homeless mary-sue piece of work, and I love to look at how her character has matured and become fuller as I have matured.

My original plan with the Challenge was to take the list of themes and, in the order they were already on the list, write up snapshot scenes. I didn't plan to re-order them to present the story as a novel-in-progress. But when I sat down to just briefly describe to myself which scenes were going to go with what themes, I discovered that I only had scenes for about 30 themes. D: It was kinda a facepalm moment! So, to help jog my creativity, I started shifting things around, to see what would happen if I used the themes as an outlining tool, to get my plot hammered out. And lo and behold, while I still didn't have nearly half the themes pinned down, it did get the creative juices flowing. One thing that I realized, probably the most important bit, was that, while I knew Phoenix inside and out, I hadn't spent time focusing on a single other character. And Morgan, who will star opposite our lovely red-haired streetrat, was practically an unknown! So I started thinking about him. Themes involving his storyline started filling up.

I wrote the first few scenes--ones that I had already written last year. All I really needed to do was minor rewriting and editing. And then...I got to theme 5, "Last Hope," and the plotline just completely ran away with me, and I, being the writer I am, let it carry me along. And I am so fantastically happy with result! The story has a lot more depth and, I hope, realism now than it did in its early stages last year. But the fun/slightly scary thing is that, my plotline is now changing subtly practically every time I submit a theme. I'm no longer entirely certain what's going to happen.

So you know what that means? You get to be my passengers on a ride none of us was expecting Hope you enjoy it!