As I came home from work on Friday, looking forward to the New Years Day weekend, and all the clock turning festivities that entails, I suddenly got struck by an idea for a book. It gripped me. In a way that I haven’t been gripped by an idea in several years. The last time I got gripped by this idea was for Pandemonium, my yet unpublished first novel, and I have been rewriting and trying to get that published for three years now. Still haven’t quite gotten that finished.

Much like Pandemonium, this idea hit me like a thunderbolt, and by the end of Sunday, I had a two-page outline, single-spaced, that laid out an entire science fiction novel. I won’t describe it in complete detail, but it takes place in a world where people work jobs in the physical world during the day and then plug their brains into the cloud at night to live with a “virtual family” they buy upgrades to from a multinational corporation. The main character is about to retire with his virtual family permanently when he logs on one night to find they are all gone, the result of a hack of his online account.

The funny thing about this idea is that I’ve got a lot of pans in the fire right now, so I can’t really execute it until I hear back on a few other things, among them, ironically, being Pandemonium, which I am waiting to hear back on from a few independent publishers. That’s why I am wondering if an outline is all I can write at this moment. I might get some kind of start on it, but I can’t promise to finish it with all the other things I have going on.

Ever had that happen to you? You get struck by an idea and then you can’t think about anything else for a few days? What do you do if your schedule is so full, you can’t really act on it at the time? People talk about writer’s block, but what happens when the idea comes and you have no time to act on it? Which is a worse problem for you?