Brand-spanking New Story Idea!

So within the past week I was bombarded with a new story idea.  It just hit me one day, and I was completely obsessed with it for two days straight.  It’s been only a few days since I first thought of the idea, but I still can’t stop thinking about it.  There are quite a few funny things about this (cue the nifty bullet points).

1.      Story ideas are incredibly rare for me.  So many writers are constantly bombarded by story ideas—usually with so many they get distracted and don’t know which one to write (or so I hear).  Not with me.  Story ideas that I’m genuinely excited about hardly ever come around.  The last one that did was the idea for my MG dystopian story, and that was about 8 or 9 months ago.  Yeah…it’s been that long since an idea pounced on me with its sharp, clingy claws (how's that for a metaphor?).

2.      This story idea is for an adult novel.  WHOA!!!  Seriously, at this point I thought for sure I was a children’s book writer (particularly within the science fiction/fantasy genres), and would be forever.  So now...maybe not.  This poses a couple problems for me, however.  Such as writing with an adult voice.  I’ve been trying to master a children’s voice (particularly a boy’s) for so long, it’d probably be quite tough for me to transition to an adult’s.  That, plus the book will have to be adult-length, and as I’ve said, I’m an extremely sparse writer.  So another whopping difficulty/challenge (not that I’m one to back down from a challenge; just sayin’).

3.      This story is a superhero story.  I’ve never written a superhero story before in my life!  I take it that makes this an Adult Fantasy novel, but I’m not even sure.  Something I will have to research, but it’s kind of wild that I’ve never done this type of story before.  But that’s also a part of the reason why I like it—it’s unique—to me, that is.  I’m sure there are a couple other superhero stories out there (OK, there are millions).

4.      The story idea was entirely built around a theme.  This is another first-time affair for me.  Usually I have to write the whole story, or at least most of it, before I even begin to understand what the theme/the whole point of it is.  But I literally built this story around the theme, so the theme is a massive reason why I’m really excited about this story idea right now.

 
So, yeah, a lot of firsts there.  It’s still way too early to know if I will go through with this story, but each time I think about it, I get goosebumps.  Of course, that’s happened to me before with other story ideas that wound up not panning out.  (One time I had an idea for an adult contemporary novel—even more out of my typical zone—but it wound up not panning out.)  Sometimes you just gotta cycle through a few ideas until you weed out the gold ones from the fake-gold ones.  Good thing is, I have a lot of time to figure that out about this one.  I’m still hard at work on my dystopian story, which has a long way to go before it’s done, and I’m still not entirely sure what I’ll do, if anything, with my MG epic fantasy story.  Either way, I’ll be sure to keep you posted about whether this new idea vanishes, leaving a green stain behind, or if it turns out to be the real thing.
 
How about you?  Do you cycle through story ideas a lot?  Are you constantly bombarded by ideas or does only the rare one entice you?