Using Leap Year in a Story

I’m posting this a week early because next week, I’ll have a post for A Storm of Doubts, which launches on March 1. Nothing else on the calendar is quite like Leap Year and Leap Day. So using Leap Year in a story should be as unique as the concept itself.

Speculative Fiction

Such an unusual day seems ready-made for inspiring speculative fiction. In the thirteen-book, middle-grade series, The Notebook of Doom by Troy Cummings, Alexander Bopp’s Leap Day birthday proves pivotal to the plot as he and his elementary school friends battle monsters in their hometown. The first book starts with Alexander moving to Stermont right around his birthday. The importance of his birthday isn’t revealed until the last book. Mr.Cummings uses this plot point cleverly and brings a cohesion to his series that I don’t always find in middle-grade books. The Notebook of Doom is a lot of fun for second and third-grade readers.

The rarity of Leap Year and Leap Day should signal something rare for the characters and plots of speculative fiction. Perhaps a character discovers her special power on February 29th and is at her most powerful on that day. Or a particular magical phenomenon only occurs on February 29th or during the Leap Year, and various parties try to take control of it.

To give a story an Indian-Jones flavor, two groups, one good and one evil, are attempting to discover some powerful object that is only accessible on February 29th. Once they find it, they must use it during the Leap Year. After the year is finished, the object becomes dormant.

Mystery

I’ve encountered two stories in which leap day was a crucial clue. In one short story, of which I can’t recall the title, an old diary is proved to be a fraud because the person who supposedly kept it had an entry for February 29th, 1900. Leap Day occurs at the turn of the century every 400 years. 1600 and 2000 had Leap Days, but not 1700, 1800, and 1900,

In a radio episode of “The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” from the 1940’s, a Scottish nobleman waits for his inheritance, which will happen on his twenty-first birthday. Because he was born on Leap Day, he is 84 years old but has only had twenty actual birthdays. A key plot point, again, is the fact that 1900 did not have February 29th. The nobleman must wait until 1904 to celebrate his twenty-first birthday.

Another idea for a mystery is to write about greedy relatives contesting the will of a wealthy woman because she instructs her lawyers not to make its contents known until the next Leap Day. Why the condition? A relative plays detective to uncover the answer.

Or a small town had a notorious murder committed on February 29th. Legend has it that the ghost returns every four years. The town’s tiny police force is strained to the limit dealing with an invasion of ghost hunters. When one ghost hunter turns up dead, the cops have to figure out if there’s a connection between the old murder and the new one.

Other Genres

In a romance, a couple meets on Leap Day. Events and their own flaws tear them apart, but on the next February 29th, they have a chance to reunite. Another idea is for a couple who met on Leap Day to hold a special celebration every four years, and the story charts the development of their relationship on those days.

For a family drama, a tragedy on Leap Day still haunts the survivors years later. On another Leap Day, a character somehow brings peace to the family so they can move on with their lives. Perhaps the family had a misconception about the tragedy.

For more ideas on how to February can inspire your writing, check out this post.

How can you use Leap Year or Leap Day in a story?

February 22, 2024 0

Patchworking the Muddy Middle

My friend and fellow Mt. Zion Ridge Press author Bettie Boswell is back for another guest post, “Patchworking the Muddy Middle”, explaining how she overcame obstacles in the middle of her latest novel. To learn more about that novel and how to connect with Bettie, read her blurb and bio at the end of the post. Thanks for coming coming back, Bettie!

One method that recently worked well for me is to patch that muddled manuscript middle together like a quilt. This was a strategy I used when writing my newest book, Free to Love.

Warning:

You need to kind of know where you’re going before you start working on your patchwork blocks. When I reached the point where I struggled to keep things moving, I sometimes skipped ahead to an idea that I thought would eventually be a scene in my story.

I would jump into that scene and fill in the conversations, stitching them together with setting, tags, the five senses, conflict or tension, an arc, and any other good writing tactics needed to complete the scene. The work went faster because I had skipped the hurdle holding me back. With less effort, because I felt free to move on, I soon had a nice block of story for my quilt. I jumped around and created several blocks. Before long, I was even able to go back and take on the scene making the hurdle that held me back in the first place.

When I exhausted my creation of blocks, I then figured out the placement of each scene and what might be a good binding strip to attach each blocked scene to another. At this point I printed out what I had written in small print, with two pages on one piece of paper (a function on most printers.) I cut scenes out and put the blocks in an order that made sense for the story. Some of the blocks had changed my story but they still met the goals and themes I set at the beginning.

After I figured out the order that each block would fall in my quilted story, it was time to put the patchwork together. I did that by binding each block into the story by using transitions, adjusting wording to make things fit, figuring out where to leave the reader hanging between chapters and scenes, and sometimes throwing a scene back into the rag bin for another quilted story.

This type of organization worked for me. It might not work for anyone else but you never know until you try. I am not as good at quilting as my grandmother but her beautiful bed coverings provided inspiration for this type of writing. If nothing else works, snuggle under or relax on top of your favorite quilt and brainstorm what might happen next in your story. Happy writing!

What a great idea! I’ve been stymied at the beginning of my next novel, so I followed your advice and jumped ahead to a scene that I wanted to write. It’s been refreshing to finally get words on paper again.

For more posts on writing the middle, click here.

*****

As Ginny writes her musical, inspiration comes from journals about Missy and her maid, bound together by slavery and blood, journeying toward freedom and love. Early and her mistress have always been together. When Missy’s family forces Early into an arranged marriage with George, also held in slavery, their relationship will be forever changed. Will Early and George find a love that can survive the trials of a forced marriage and perilous journey?

*****

Bettie Boswell has always loved to read and write. That interest helped her create musicals for both church and school and eventually she decided to write and illustrate stories to share with the world. Her writing interests extend from children’s to adult and from fiction to non-fiction. Free to Love is a prequel to her first novel, On Cue. Connect with Bettie on Facebook, Twitter, or her website.

July 14, 2022 2

Valentine’s Day Isn’t Just for Romance

My family will find it funny for me to do a post on Valentine’s Day as a story starter because I don’t read or write romance. But Valentine’s Day isn’t just for romance. I discovered that while writing my YA mystery, A Shadow on the Snow.

The story is set in rural Ohio from the end of January to the end of March. In the middle, I planned a suspenseful chase through a snowstorm. My main character Rae has been doubting the strength of her new relationship with her newly found father. I realized Valentine’s Day was the perfect day for her to come to grips with these doubts because the day honors all kinds of love. And I could set my snowstorm chase then because in Ohio, we get all kinds of wild, wintery weather in February.

Below are some other ideas for exploring more than romantic love on Valentine’s Day.

Stepparents

A Valentine’s Day story could center on a child coming to some kind of friendly relationship with a stepparent. The child could actually be a child, or a teen, or a middle-aged adult who isn’t sure what to make of a widowed parent’s new spouse.

Grandparents

Explore the relationship between a grandparent and grandchild. Or to give the story a better twist, a great-grandparent and great-grandchild. It could be a simple story of the two characters enjoying each other’s company. Or maybe a deeper one in which the grandparent realizes the grandchild has a serious problem and needs to communicate that to the parents.

Siblings and Cousins

Valentine’s Day is a wonderful day for warring siblings or cousins to bury the hatchet. Or for the reconciliation of any family members.

For more ideas for using Valentine’s Day was writing inspiration, click here.

Now it’s your turn. Since Valentine’s Day isn’t just for romance, what kind of different Valentine’s Day story would you write? Or what non-romantic story have you’ve read set on Valentine’s Day?

February 3, 2022 0

Fall Weather as Writing Inspiration

Fall is the best time of year in Buckeye State. Cool nights, warms days, and little precipitation allows people to enjoy the fun and wonders of fall. So it was fairly easy for me to use fall weather as writing inspiration.

Harvest

Farmers in my county are in full harvest mode. Combines of all sizes are collecting the corn and soybean crops. If I wanted to write about that kind of harvest, I’d have to do research and interview farmers from my church. But one harvest I am familiar with is black walnuts.

Black walnut trees are plentiful on our property as well as all over the county. The trees drop their nuts, usually, the last week of September or the first week of October. Getting the meat out of a black walnut is a laborious process–the green husk must be removed and the black gunk (I tried to find a precise term for this stuff and couldn’t) between the husk and nut stains everything, but the hardest part, literally, is cracking the nut itself.

Black walnuts are much, much tougher than English walnuts. It took us years before we found an effective tool to break the shells without straining our muscles or dodging shell shrapnel as a less helpful nut cracker turned some nuts into mini bombs.

The whole process is ripe (pun intended) for a humorous story about a family tackling a black walnut harvest. Or it could be a family drama in which the harvest ties generations together.

Indian summer

We’re experiencing one right now in my county. Wikipedia states that Indian summer is a warm, dry period in October or November after a frost. The Old Farmer’s Almanac has a much more detailed definition. Either way, this kind of weather allows us to experience one last shot of summer before winter settles in.

That makes me think of using this weather phenomenon as a setting for a main character who gets one last chance to achieve something. I’m not the first writer to think of it. I found on Wikipedia that William Dean Howell’s wrote a novel in 1886 entitled Indian Summer about a man who falls in love in middle age.

Indian summer seems like the perfect backdrop for a reconciliation between friends, or relatives, or husband and wife. I could also use it for a character who gave up some passion that he loves, maybe painting, for a more traditional job and gets another chance to follow his dream. Any story about a loss and then an unexpected hope of recovery will work.

Blue Moon of Halloween

I hope those of you who celebrate Halloween got to experience the blue moon. It was a perfectly clear night at our house, and the full moonlight was magical. My husband and I took a walk into the woods under its silver glow. I’ve written before about how to use a full moon night as writing inspiration. What intrigues me was the fact that there hasn’t been a blue moon on Halloween since 1944.

What if in the waining days of World War II, the Nazis unleash some horrible evil force or entity that was only accessible on Halloween under a blue moon? A young soldier, who witnessed this act, has dedicated his life to fighitng it. Now that 2020 was arrived with another blue moon on Halloween, he has a chance to destroy the evil. But he’s in his nineties. He must assemble a team to help him. A group of Neo-Nazis could be defending the evil. I could even work in how the pandemic is hampering the good guys’ efforts.

What’s fall like where you live? How could you use fall weather as writing inspiration?

November 5, 2020 1

Cemeteries as Writing Inspiration

No, it’s not as morbid as it sounds. Since this month’s themes is mysteries, I wanted to feature a setting that works for that genre as well as many others. Don’t think cemeteries can work as writing inspiration for more than mystery and horror? Read on!

Walking a Cemetery

I’ve walked through cemeteries usually with two purposes in mind: to get a sense of the history of an area and to look for unusual names for characters. A large cemetery is also a quiet place to walk and plot not worry about traffic.

On my visits, I’ve noticed a very sad trend. If I spot a tombstone that stands out from the surrounding ones, regardless of how old the grave is, it usually honors someone who died young. That gets me to thinking. Who was this person? Why did he or she died so young, What happened to their family?

Those thoughts can run through the mind of my main character (MC). Perhaps a teenage boy has the job of mowing a cemetery. He notices an unusual tombstone and begins digging into the past to discover what he can about the person buried there.

If I write a parallel story about the person who died–maybe he’s a teen who lived around 1900–I would have a time-slip novel with complimentary storylines in two different time periods.

Family Connections

Twice, I’ve taken my kids to lay flowers on the graves of relatives from my mom’s side in Shinnston, West Virginia, during Memorial Day weekend. I’ve written about how important that experience is to me and for me to share with my kids. That can be the inspiration for my MC to connect to his family or to dive into family history.

We often run into relatives when we stop. Last time, it was my mom’s first cousin and her husband. A chance encounter like that can forge new family bonds for my MC. Or maybe bury the hatchet on a long-running family feud. Or the spouse of my MC learns more than he ever wanted to know about his wife’s more distant relations.

Any genre will do.

Any of the inspirations from above can be tweaked to apply to a romance or mystery. The teen researching the interesting headstone enlists the shy, smart girl in his class to help him. They discover the young person who died was the victim of an unsolved murder. And someone lets them know he wants it to remain unsolved.

I have a special fondness for mysteries featuring cold cases or buried family secrets or both. The skeleton in the closet may be a skeleton in a coffin. I like the idea of a cemetery being a symbol for long-buried secrets. Then the detective, whether amateur or professional, can finally bring about justice after so many years.

One thing I learned about cemeteries in my area is that if I want to know who is buried where, it’s not as simple as visiting “Find A Grave”. Churches used to maintain many of the smaller cemeteries and kept the records for them. During a cemetery walk, led by a librarian from our local library, she said the Baptist church that had started the cemetery we were visiting burned at some point, losing their records for the locations of the graves. She mentioned that three mausoleums were built into the hillside along the edge of the cemetery, but she couldn’t find out who was buried there.

The hillside was now thickly overgrown. On a later visit, I found all of them. I didn’t get to close because two of the mausoleums were open. I didn’t know if anyone was still buried in them. But those mausoleums sent my imaginations spinning.

What if the key to a mystery was finding the grave of a particular person? What if the records had been burned in a church fire? How would the detective find it?

Or what if on Halloween night, some teens dare each other to enter a mausoleum that one of them knows is open? What if they find a very recently killed body?

Writers, how would you use cemeteries as writing inspiration? Readers, can you think of a story that used a cemetery as something other than a setting in a horror story?

October 1, 2020 2

Tag: Writing in Time