Hello Amazing Preppers!

I'm Storm Machine , and I'm the Coach Coordinator this year. I'm very excited to be back into the Prepper habit, because I've missed it while I've been sorting everything else out. I have two books coming out imminently, one that came out years ago but is now indie published and the other is an anthology containing 9 stories from my writing group, which I also get to see in two weeks! I learned to format a book this summer on ingram. What fun. If only I could do my own artwork.

But back to Prep. WHAT IF?
Every good story starts with a 'what if'. What if a young boy discovers he's a wizard? What if a girl discovers a world hidden inside her wardrobe? What if there was a cemetery where pets came back to life if they were buried there? What if dinosaurs were real again?

In this exercise, imagine your story and your main character(s). Who is(are) the character(s)? Why do we care about them? What happens to them, and why is it a problem? (If it's not a problem, it's just life, not a story. )

Spend at least 15 minutes imagining all the possibilities in your story. Make a list of every possible 'what if' you can think of. Nothing is off limits here - let your brain go.

For me, what if could be anything. It can range from what form would a heretic be in the future to what if we changed the view from the garden of eden to the spirit in the garden to what happens when we add aliens to firefly (space western where the crew just tried to get by)?

For you, it might look different. This jumping off point might start from a character, a genre, or something funny your bestie said. You might get ideas from other writers and stories written, and as long as you write your story and you're not actually using someone else's universe or copyrighted words (i.e. prose from their book) - you can do almost anything. Which actually leads us to the Fear of the Blank Page.

The best thing for the blank page is to keep it from remaining blank. Maybe you draw a flower or a road or a fence on the page. Let your mind brainstorm or free associate for a while. What gets your attention? What makes you think - ooh, this is something I would love to explore for a few months or more?

There are a lot of tools at the bottom of the calendar because sometimes ideas are hard to come by. I know @tuozzo and I both have snippet files where we keep ideas for later, and then comb through them for that burning idea that needs to be created first or next or whichever number we're up to now.

Do you have questions? Ideas? (I know nobody wants to plagiarize because that's unforgiveable, but remember fanfiction goes on AO3 (or some other sites), and Fifty Shades of Grey was originally fanfiction for Twilight. I last read the names Bella and Edward in Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi - the crazy godzilla characters were supposed to mate but they had no real idea. Edward wasn't even really aware of any of it because he was pretty dumb. They were named by people from our world but they had to skip through the alternate world tunnel to get to the one where the godzillas live.

So this is your chance to learn your process of how to find ideas, figure out what you need to jump start this new novel, and generally get in the swing of OctoPrep! Feel free to ask for help, for random words, or whatever you think of. Welcome to October, everyone!!