So far this year I’ve only had one short story turn into a novel … I have actually managed to force all the others to stay short! Yay!!!

The disobedient story has no title yet – the codename is ‘Pond Girl,’ which I know sounds ridiculous. Let’s hope I come up with a decent title by the time I’m done… It started as an urban fantasy assignment for a writing workshop I took a few months ago. I tried and tried, but simply could not come up with a single story idea I liked.

One day at work I told a few friends about the assignment and how my mind was a blank, then we started talking about something that was going on in one of the guy’s lives, then someone commented on how it was raining and there was a leak in the ceiling by his desk … and all of a sudden I had my story! It was clear from the beginning that it wasn’t really a short story, but yet another novel. Fortunately it’s been so enjoyable to write that I’ve just accepted that fact.

In chapter two one of the protagonists finds herself in a tunnel. I quickly realized that I didn’t have a good sense of what the tunnel looked like, so I started a Pinterest board of images hoping it would help.

Follow Jamie Ferguson’s board Underground images on Pinterest.

Finding those images was a ton of fun! I finally had to make myself stop looking for more and focus on the story. The pictures helped a ton – my description of the tunnels is much richer. Looking through them also gave me some ideas about where to take the story, which was a big help because I hadn’t worked out the rest of the novel (since it wasn’t supposed to be a novel).

I created a separate Pinterest author account so that I could keep my writing images separate from my personal images. I went back and forth about that, but finally decided that combining my writing-related boards with my boards for vintage sewing patterns (yes, I have more than one such board … as well as a collection of vintage patterns taking up half a closet) might be a little confusing. I’ve started a second board with images related to another scene in the novel since the first board helped so much (and was so fun to make). And while these two boards originated for this book, I will likely use them to help with description in multiple stories.

Extra special thanks to Donna, Rob, and Vignesh for the inspiration!!!