Probably one of the questions I get asked most often is, “How have you written 3 books in 3 years with another one in the works?” My books tend to be close to four hundred pages, so the question is a valid one.
The one answer I can give is, “Focus”. When I am seriously focused on the world and characters I am creating, I become intensely involved and the story tends to flow from one scene to another like a movie playing in my mind.
Focus is an interesting thing. A magnifying glass is a tool for focusing. It does this in two very different ways. On the one hand it can bring things that are tiny into sharp relief. The tiniest leaf or insect becomes detailed and wondrous when looked at through a magnifying glass. It opens our eyes to new ideas and unseen facts.
The other thing a magnifying glass can do is to gather scattered rays of sunlight you may not even be able to feel on your skin and focus it into a focus so sharp and clear that it can start a fire through the intense power and heat that is generate when all of those apparently passive sun rays are concentrated and focused on a single point.
Many of the technologies of solar power are based on this very thing.
Depending on the size and shape of the glass, physicists posit that the temperatures produced by this focus (especially when there are multiple glasses refocusing the light) can reach over 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, close to the temperature of the surface of the sun.
I think of these two functions of a magnifying glass like this:
- The ability of the magnifying glass to get up close is a lot like the research I do to make my world-building and characters believable. It brings possibilities into sharp relief and allows me to extrapolate things I hadn’t considered before from the information I have been researching.
- The ability of the magnifying glass to concentrate sunlight to a usable source of heat and power reminds me that as I focus on the task in front of me, that I can have the power and energy to persevere and put in the necessary work to write a book that is entertaining, enjoyable to read, and hopefully inspiring to my readers.