The Wonders of the Dollar Store

It's amazing where you can find inspiration. I went into a local dollar store just to see about picking up some posterboard for mapping out SoZ in purty colors. I decided to wander around a bit and see if I could find anything else that might help me visualize my story better. I didn't find much for SoZ, but I did find something so intriguing that I'll have to set aside time to write a different story in the near future.

I was browsing the knick knack section when I saw it. In among some other colorfully painted Victorian hat stands (with attached hats, of course), I found one that was entirely painted in silver. I saw it, and my first thought, I kid you not, was, "Victorians...in...SPAAAAAAACE!!!!" And then I thought, "Damn, now I have to write that."

Be Gone From Me

It meant staying up a bit later than I had intended, but I finished the revisions for Carson's Learning last night. It was a necessity. Over the weekend, I managed to reach that point in a story when you despise every word, every image, every plot point. I pushed myself to finish the revision, though, working mostly on blind faith that my subconscious (aka the Muse) knew what it was doing. Honestly, there are changes I made last night that I have no idea if they make sense for the story. Hell, I could've suddenly made the ending a big deus ex machina cliche and had the characters turn out to be robots in someone's futuristic version of The Sims, and I probably would've written that in with the same "gee, I hope I started threads for this stuff earlier in the story" attitude I had last night. After I collapsed in bed, I tried to summon up some positive thought for CL. I think I managed to tell myself that I had done very well with the last lines of the last two scenes before the negative tirade of what I hadn't done very well drowned it out. And then the jitters started: what if this does get published? Nevermind the fact that I'm submitting it to an anthology whose sole purpose is to seek out fiction that breaks genre rules and boundaries, I was suddenly worried that CL had BROKEN GENRE RULES AND BOUNDARIES! What had I done? If I can't put it into its niche, how can I sell it? And even if I can sell it, how will readers know what to do with it? And even if readers know what to do with it, it's going to get ridiculed by peers and industry pros because it has no niche. And...and...and....

So I have sent this bad boy far away from me, into Andi's capable hands for a critique. I'm trying hard not to say good riddance to bad rubbish because I know I love this story, and I know I can make it good enough to sell (that is, I can do so once I have Andi's far more objective comments to assist with the final revisions). But I also know that if I see so much as a page from this story right now, I will shred it gleefully into teeny, tiny pieces and sprinkle them into a toilet.

Another Organic Writer!

Tess Gerritsen discusses how she writes. I feel her pain. Strings of Discord started while I was camping in Grand Teton National Park the summer of 2002. It was sunset, and we were driving from Grand Teton to Yellowstone (they're connected by a little stretch of land). I just happened to glance to the right as we passed a meadow bordered on three sides by evergreens with a bunch of aspens clustered at the far edge of the meadow. The sun hit the trees just perfectly to cast the strangest shadows on the meadow and those aspens. I knew there was a story there. I could see in my mind a pale figure staring at me from across the meadow, beckoning me to follow her as she disappeared into those odd shadows. That was all I had for a couple months. Then we went on our honeymoon to various gorgeous national parks in Utah and Arizona, and a few other things shook out: I saw a woman with dark hair huddling in some of the vegetation that sprang up along a river on a road near Moab; that same figure struggled to climb the rocks opposite the Zion-Mount Carmel Highway while another figure looked down on her, waiting; a map of another world showed up in my mind and was quickly sketched on hotel stationary; and a quirky ghost named Elaynor rolled her eyes at a young man and said, "There's no heaven or hell, so just give up already." I teased a few more things out over the course of the next two and a half years, the basic beginnings of a plot.

Today, I have a sense of where things are going: Airen and Rayn have to get to Crae, which will be difficult; then they have to learn how to wield magic, which will be difficult in other ways; and then they have to stop the bad guys, which will be so difficult that they may not succeed, or if they do, they won't stop the bad guys permanently. I've got a few niggles about scenes that are telling me they belong at certain points in this book, and I've got a few characters who are telling me they're important, and that they've got something to do in the book(s), but they haven't told me what yet. One of those characters just revealed her past to me. I build a vague story around this and start writing, adjusting the plan as necessary as the characters and scenes start to make themselves known and flesh out. I've gotten better at anticipating the process, but that doesn't mean I can outline a plot or anything. Rather, my draft is better at providing a basic skeleton of what's going to happen, and as things are revealed, I can just go back and put in the necessary details, shed the vague internal and external dialog, and do some foreshadowing. Makes for a frustrating first draft to read as, by necessity, I tend to write obscure references all over the place. This is in part because I don't like to spend pages explaining everything at the beggining, but feed details to the reader as I go. But the bigger reason those details are obscure is because I don't know more about them myself.

Tess talks about how this method of writing is rather frustrating and prone to make one's hair gray. It can be that, sure. I bet it's even more difficult to write that way when you have a deadline to meet and the details just aren't coming fast enough. But for me, an aspiring writer with only self-imposed goals and deadlines, it's a ton of fun. I love to discover who these people are, what they're doing, and why as I write. And more often than not, I'll choose what seems to be a random name or location or situation as I start putting together the story, and find out later that it wasn't random, that it has a specific purpose. Those moments are so rewarding--and sometimes a bit creepy because I remember just pulling a name or something out of nowhere, I remember just tossing random letters together to get a name that sounded different, and later I'll realize that name has purpose and seemingly always has.

My muse does a lot more with my subconscious than she let's on. It's a love/hate thing, I guess.

Treading Water

I'm not sure how long this has been going on, if it started when I came back to the DDJ, or if it began a day or two before Christmas. I finally realized yesterday or perhaps Wendesday evening that my mind feels like an ocean at the moment. The resurgence of my dizziness this week certainly hasn't helped the sensation. I really want to write, I really want to read, I really want to focus on something for more than a few minutes and feel like it sticks with me. I'm treading water in the ocean of my mind, trying to toss my little life-saver-on-a-rope at the various flotsam bobbing nearby on the waves. The water is rather choppy, though, and one moment I can see something I want to snag, but then it disappears before my life saver can get there. Then something else will float into view, and it seems important too, and I toss out the saver--and come up empty. Meanwhile I tread water, expending nearly all my physical energy to keep from going under and using all my mental energy trying not to be bothered by the vastness of the ocean and the urgency of the situation (sooner or later, I won't be able to tread water and I'll have to use the life saver just to stay afloat instead of trying to grab something important). Sometimes I do just hang onto the saver and let the waves carry me along, studying the waters around me with each crest to see what else is in this ocean with me. I can see so much, but I can't reach it.

Ponderous, man, really ponderous.

Seriously, I can't seem to do much more than get through the day. I try to put my mind toward SoD or various other writing projects or just writing in general or even goals for 2006, but they seem to just slip through my grip. Putting this post together has been more difficult than I care to contemplate, and all I'm trying to do is describe my present inability to focus.

Maybe this is just a survival mechanism, keeping me from thinking too much about anything other than getting to the end of the day so I won't get upset about being back at the DDJ and being away from Drew. Maybe my muse needs time to recharge and has shut down more functions than necessary to keep herself sequestered. Maybe I just need to do some deep breathing and reflection to kick myself out of this. I don't know. All I do know is I'm ready to focus again, to ask myself a question and get a thorough answer, to write a chapter and feel immersed in it. I'm ready to snag a life boat so I can get out of the water and observe it and direct my path in it.

Drew's Room

I could talk about how the workload at the DDJ managed to get a notch worse this week. Or I could talk about how Muse is damn near liquifying brain cells, trying to get me to write, or at the very least outline. But I decided it would be much more pleasant to talk about the decor in Drew's room. (I've always like Drew as a nickname for Andrew; now I love it. :))

Before we knew we were having a boy, Mark and I decided we wanted to go with gender neutral regardless of our child's gender. Blues, yellows, greens, stars, moons, teddy bears. We found this amazing nursery pattern at Babies R Us. Isn't it great? We're going to highlight the gorgeous sage green. Unfortunately for Andrew, the nursery will be coexisting as our study until Mark graduates and we're able to jet on out of here and (hopefully) into a house with at least three bedrooms. It'll make for an interesting look. The rocking chair that Mark brought with him from his family's home will be perfect for nursing Drew and soothing him on rough nights. And we're slowly but surely building our collection of fun baby books and such.

And that's about as far as we've gotten with the nursery. We probably won't get much farther, though, since we know it's likely that we'll be moving right about the time Drew's six months old. It's still a heck of a lot of fun to think about.

Self-taught

Didn't get any writing done this weekend for The Masque. Basically, I had hit a chapter where I only had vague ideas of one or two things that needed to happen. I kept hoping that Muse would get her act together to give me at least a thousand words over the weekend, but no. So I used the time for other things. On Saturday, I read all the relevant bits of a book on Satan and his crew to finish up the research I wanted to do for "Princess Incubus". Got a few more ideas about that story, and I should be able to start oulining shortly. (Incidentally, I've marked this story with the status "in worldbuilding". That phrase as come to be my personal indicator for "pre-writing". Not sure why, just seems to make sense to me that way.)

I figured Sunday would certainly see a few bits of inspiration trickling from my fingertips, but no. I even tried to sit down and force just my questions and vague notions about the next chapter, but my thoughts kept sliding all over the place--to the point where I sat at my desk, pen poised, notebook open, and all I could think about was the chorus of a song I had just heard and it kept repeating for large chunks of time. I eventually got pretty pissed at this, so I put together a rather long playlist of good songs that strike me as appropriate for The Masque and the characters therein. I probably won't be able to write to it all the time as the songs, while good and relevant, can often distract me from the writing. Instead, the CDs will serve as driving music on my commute. I get a lot of good scene and idea sketching on that drive, even moreso with the right music.

But still my thoughts kept skittering away every time I tried to focus on them. I thought a movie might be nice, and "The Fifth Element" was on TBS. But I found that I couldn't even concentrate on the movie because of the regular commercial breaks. I got sick of this pretty quick and decided to trek over to WalMart and pick up stuff to teach myself how to crochet. My grandmother taught me--or at least tried to teach me--the basics a good fifteen or so years ago, but I never got into it then. And I've been wanting to learn for the past couple years so I can crochet while watching TV or movies that we've already seen. I picked up two little how-to booklets, the needles, some yarn, and a bigger cross-stitch hoop just in case I struggled too much with the new craft and wanted to go back to something more familiar. Then I put on our videocassette version of "The Fifth Element" and went to work.

My practice pieces are certainly nothing spectacular, but I've got the basic stitches down and enjoyed the learning a lot. My thoughts were still kind of skittery when it came to writing afterward, but at least they had settled with regard to every thing else. And then once we had dinner and settled into watching some "Simpsons" episodes...THAT'S when the writing ideas started clicking into place. And then they kept me up past midnight. That's my muse, though.

New Look

It took three hours, but I think the blog is stable for a while. I'll probably continue to play with it over the next few weeks (particularly the archive list - ick!). But I like the color scheme and layout. And I've figured out this whole title thing. I guess I'll have to think of another reward for writing tomorrow - assuming I can get Muse to clue me in a bit more on what exactly my characters are going to be doing in the next chapter.

Argh

I've been slowly pulling a new draft of The Masque from my fingers for just over a week now. The cool thing is that a lot of characters and plot lines are just clicking into place. The bad news is that I'm trying to write the first chapter of a book that kicks of a millenium of story in this universe (not in one book, I'm not that cruel to my readers). So the first twenty pages are so thick with information, foreshadowing, and character introductions that reading a paragraph is enough to induce a headache. I've already got some ideas for fixing this issue, but I'm still waiting for a decent amount of inspiration to strike. All right, subconscious! Sit down with Muse and figure it out!

More Writing Progress

I figured out Friday night what was wrong with Part One of HD. The plot's driving the characters' actions instead of the other way around. And I had actions left over from the very first iteration of the novel (you know, the part that I wrote back in 2000). So I've rethought some of the action of Part One and made things a bit more energetic and understandable given the characters I set up in the first thirty pages. I still have to write all these changes, but it feels better knowing what was broken and knowing it's fixable.

As for the other projects, The Masque is now outlined through the first story arc (Act One, basically). Unfortunately the outline revealed that I still didn't have the specifics on my MC's research project and the baddies' research project. These are things I need to figure out. That's tonight's goal. I'm hoping to start writing actual new material for this book by the end of the week. Or at the beginning of next week, depending on how my HD revisions go this weekend.

Man, this is a lot to juggle. And in the back of my brain is the goals of writing the HD synopsis, getting four more queries out, submitting it to a writing contest, AND being finished with a draft of The Masque by the end of the year, no later than January 2005. Yipes! Maybe I need to rethink some of this. Especially because my intergalactic archaeologist story is refusing to go quietly into my "to be written later" room in my mind. And my fantasy trilogy, which starts out with Strings of Betrayal, is still lazily doing worldbuilding and outlining in my head. I don't think my muse has any control over these ideas any more. I can see her sitting in my head, tossing up her hands and saying, "YOU sort this out. I'm done."

Break Through

I finally pushed myself through my weird writing issues yesterday! It's been about a month since I've really done anything with my writing. Impatience to hear back from the agent or to hear about the job held me up for most of that time. Then finding out I'd been laid off get me away from writing the rest of the month. Finally on Friday I decided to change my attitude. The Waiting Game was making me miserable. I realized that I should just assume I would be out of a job for at least the month of April, and that I could use that time to write full-time. If a job possibility comes up to change that assumption, great. But I'm not going to count on it, and I'm going to stop hawking the phones and my email expecting it.

So I spent Friday evening and all day Saturday getting used to the idea of a Unemployed and Full-time Writing April. As Saturday wore on, I could feel the job impatience fade and the writing impatience build. But in a good way. Writing impatience as in my Muse saying, "C'mon, Kellie! Let me at 'em!" I should've guessed on Friday that when I got a decent chunk of inspiration for Strings of Betrayal that I would be ready to dive back into my writing. It's been a long time since I've received scenes for that book. Granted, it still didn't tell me much about my hero. That man's another tight-lipped ingrate like Darren. By Saturday evening, I told myself I was going to write on Sunday. I was just going to say "Screw it" to whatever hang-ups I still had about my HD revisions. I was just going to ignore the sense of "This is WAY too much work" that was bothering me about The Masque and look at some research ideas.

And that's what I did on Sunday. I even did a few things for Strings of Betrayal: I created a Write Way doc for it and started transferring the notes I already had into that doc; I redid the map so it was bigger and accurate to what I wanted; and I did tarot readings for the four main characters. I didn't have time to do any interpreatations, but I wrote down the results for a later interp. I did all the SoB (what an unfortunate acronym) work while watching A&E's The Last King. The only reason I watched it was because of Rufus Sewell. And my warped memory of history told me that Charles II was the king during the American Revolution. Isn't that the last king that matters to me? :) My AP US history teacher is weeping if he's reading this - as are any of my readers who have a passing interest in English history. I should've taken a moment to read the blurb about this show, or even to have looked up Charles II on the Internet so I'd have a better idea what I was going to devote 4 hours of my Sunday night to. Because as near as I can tell, the only big deal about Charles II was that he fought to stay out from under the thumb of Parliament. And it took him four hours of sleeping around with various women, watching plague and fire take London (which seemed to have nothing to do with anything about the Parliament buisness except to provide stunning dramatic "cliffhangers" for A&E to end an episode with), and yelling about how he would name his heir not Parliament or about how he would not stand for ill-treatment of Catholics. Overall, I was very glad I spent the entire four hours doing stuff for my writing and only half paying attention to the show. I would perk up whenever they took that God-awful wig off Rufus' head or when he was wearing somewhat revealing top or when he was fencing. But that's about it.

So yesterday was a stunning entrance back into the writing world. And it feels like it's going to last and that the attitude adjustment will help me immensely. I'm sure I'll have bouts where I just can't stand the fact that I don't have any Answers. I just hope they'll be much more short-lived than they have been until this weekend.

The Funk is Over

My little Poor Me funk is on its way out. It was actually completely gone on Saturday. I did some revising, Mark and I took a pal out on a nice birthday dinner, and then we all went to a showing of Opportunity's landing at our local satellite lab. I was riding a nice buzz after watching NASA's live feed of the landing and clapping along with everybody and thinking about all the cool things we're going to be learning this year. And then I came home to a less than happy message on my answering machine, denoting the beginning of a small family crisis which consumed the rest of my weekend. I read a book, did the laundry, and made cookies instead of revising yesterday, mainly because I could just feel the tide of depression getting ready to break every time I looked at HD. Family matters have a way of consuming everything. And of keeping you up until 1 AM, sorting out the phone call you just finished at 12:30 AM. And of intriguing the muse, giving her a chance to scribble notes while muttering, "This is drama. I can use this. Much better than those silly plots she keeps insisting I inspired her to write." Staying awake so late also provides the opportunity of hearing your husband snore, gently prodding him awake enough so he stops, and then hearing him say, "Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to fall asleep." To which you can say, "No, it's OK. You're allowed to sleep right now." And then he'll respond, "OK, thanks," and mumble a nearly unintelligible "Love you" as his meager struggle with consciousness ends.

Bad Muse! Bad!

I was exhausted yesterday and eagerly fell into bed around 11PM. Only to toss and turn and stay awake until 2AM. The reason for this bout of insomnia? A fun bit of dialogue that morphed into a character who morphed into another novel idea. And the ideas just kept coming. The whole first scene is written partly on a scratch sheet of paper when I got up to munch on something and partly on the notebook by my bed. I still haven't seen what the notebook looks like - I wrote a good two pages in the dark. I'm pretty irked at my muse. I had a decent day of revising yesterday. It looks like I'm on track to (finally) finish the revisions for Part 2 this week. And I was able to do a decent amount of writing in The Masque on Friday. All in all, it was a good writing weekend, of the sort that I haven't had in quite some time.

Apparently my muse got a little carried away with the spirit of things.

I don't mind the new idea. Svink is a cool character, very irreverent, very unlucky, very fun to write. He's the sort of character who I can just turn lose in a story idea and see what sort of trouble he causes. All the while making me laugh internally and sometimes even chuckle out loud. And this is just after one scene. Of course, I can't do much with him right now. I've got two projects (technically three, counting worldbuilding) that have higher priority. I suppose I can use him as a carrot and Block Breaker (my "blocks" are project specific).

But I can't quite sing my muse's praises. I mean, 2AM??? She couldn't have dropped this idea in my mind earlier that day, say at 8 when I had called revising quits for the day and was playing video games with Mark? Work with me, Muse! I'm not good to you when I can't keep my eyes open.

Who's Fighting Who Here?

OK, so I've been laboring under the impression that my muse is the one who runs the show. When things are rough and I can't put a subject and a verb together to save my soul, I've always grumbled about my damn muse, yelling at her for revoking her capricious gifts of creativity and inspiration. Something made me reconsider last night as I struggled to fall asleep for the second night in a row (ask me how tired I am today!). Maybe I'm the one fighting the muse. Maybe she's trying to force ideas and words into my consciousness, and I'm not letting her.

I can't remember exactly why I thought I might have a role in the "Where's My Muse?" game. It made sense to me at the time as I tried to get comfortable and prayed for sleep last night. Now my reasoning seems fuzzy through a two-nights-of-bad-sleep haze. Regardless of why, though, I realized that I need to work with my muse more. Instead of just complaining about her and trying to bend to her whim, I need to start chatting with her. It's time to make inspiration a two-way street.

That's why I'm going to force myself to outline HD. And sketch out Denise, Aidan, and Mike. That's the goal today. To just get that stuff done and stop fretting about perfection. Then I'll have the weekend to let it stew. Which reminds me....

I found out that my muse is as warped as I am when she gave me the inspiration for Velorin during my honeymoon. While Mark and I drove around the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, Moab, Zion, Monument Valley, and Bryce Canyon, Ms. Muse gave me a map for Velorin, complete with what most of the world would look like, geographically speaking. And she also gave me a character that was a ghost, of a sort, which eventually helped me figure out the magic of Velorin. Because these ideas that she dropped into my mind were extremely cool and fun, I thought nothing of scribbling down notes on hotel stationery in between other honeymoon, uhm, activities. To add to my odd view of things, I also thought nothing of sharing my exciting ideas with fellow writers - including that they came to me while on my honeymoon. Enter the teasing and snide comments about my husband's sexual prowess - or implied lack thereof.

These jokes took me by surprise. I hadn't even thought about the implications of me getting ideas for a book during my honeymoon. Poor Mark. If I had realized that people would immediately assume that I came up with Velorin because I had less entertaining things to do, I never would've mentioned it. After a couple rounds of these wisecracks, I found my comeback. Anytime someone gave me hell about Mark's ability to please me on our honeymoon, I said that Mark's attentions were just that inspiring. With an appropriate nudge and wink and "if-you-know-what-I-mean" eyebrow wiggle, of course.

This weekend Mark and I are going out of town to celebrate our first anniversary. Knowing my muse, and my own recent illuminations, I will be scribbling all sorts of writing notes during our trip. But I'm not so sure that I'll be telling everyone about the circumstances in which these ideas came to me this time.

Productive Moping

Either I've sent the Muse away so I could be more dramatically forlorn over Mark's absence, or the Muse has deserted me while I wallow in self-pity because I am without my better half. Either way, my Muse has the better end of the deal, and I come out looking pathetic (or just overly sappy). While I don't expect to get much writing done today, I will at least get all the chores done that I've been ignoring so I could curl up on the couch and stare at the TV. And now that I know what it's like to be home alone without Mark, you can bet I'll never let this mewling and "I can't do anything" whining happen again. Even if it is sweet in a romantic comedy way.

Writing

Chugging right along. I haven't written as much in Red Rocks as I had hoped to by now, but it's still coming right along. About 27,000 words. I revised another 60 pages of Human Dignity last night. I would've finished going through Part One, but someone decided it would be fun to repeatedly bang a sledgehammer against my sinuses. So I went to bed a little early. And Velorin worldbuilding is progressing rather well. I increased my language vocabulary, came up with some planetary mechanics (see yesterday's post), and started writing the backstory of my prime baddie. She's a fun one.

I've realized through these three projects that I'm very much an organic writer. (Gah, I hate how the word "organic" has been tossed around without any real idea as to what it means.) But, near as I can tell, being an organic writer means that you don't do a whole lot of planning. You just kind of start writing an idea and see where it takes you. I do plan, outline, research, and sketch a little before I start writing something, but it's very basic compared to what most people do. For example, I have the basic plot of Red Rocks sketched somewhere in the notebook devoted to this project. But I have no real idea how I'm going to get there. My characters have been doing a great job of keeping me in the loop as I write. But they're not telling me everything. Especially those damn heroes. The villains can't help themselves and blab motivations and plot twists that the rest of the group would berate them for if they ever found out somebody was spilling the beans. I would love to be in on my characters' secret meetings. Where they all get together and decide who's going to do what, who loves who, who hates who, who really just wants to be left alone, and so on. But they find a nice quiet corner of my brain (didn't know I had one), set up a wall of blankets, pin on a poorly written sign (secrut metin: no writurs), and make someone stand guard in case I stumble onto what they're doing. The guard's really good, too. He usually distracts me by saying, "Kellie, look at that fascinating new story idea over there!" And off I go. I wonder if my muse is in on this too. Or if she's just as pissed at my characters and sneaks into their meetings complaining about all the extra work they're making her do.

This organic writer business is going to be a problem. I was hoping to write a proposal of Strings of Betrayal for a possible submission to Luna by mid-September (end of the year at the latest - do you like how I just flexed that personal deadline?). But writing a proposal requires that I know a lot more about a project than I usually do before I start writing. Like, I don't know, how the book's going to end, what the characters are going to do. I really need to have a chat with my muse and characters. Some things have got to change.

Moved.

Everything is out of the old place (well, aside from lots of dust and dirt and tiny cat toys). And we've got the new place almost entirely settled. We need to organize a couple closets so they are neat, orderly, and able to store more stuff in the future. And we still need to hang up all those pictures and such. But everything is else is good to go. Feels wonderful. We celebrated by spending Mark's roulette winnings at The Melting Pot, an amazing fondue restaurant. I know I mentioned it in my last entry, but the food is just that good and it bears repeating. Check it out.

Big changes like moving always do weird things to me. Last night, I couldn't shake the feeling that things were going to change again. Like somehow the move was temporary or something. I'm choosing to interpret this as a sign that I'll win or just move on to the final round of judging in the Colorado Gold writing contest. Mainly because I don't want to think about moving or anything else that would make me feel like what I'm doing now will drastically change. And, knowing my life, this will just turn out to be a delayed reaction to the move and there's really no big change coming. That's the problem with Instinct (or whatever you want to call it). It's not an exact thing, and it often gets you really worked up for nothing. But it works well with my muse, and that helps.

Sometimes to the muse's detriment, I think. As we were driving home from dinner last night, a song came on the radio. For whatever reason, the song evoked a glimmer of a story idea. But very faint. I just knew there was something there but I had no concept of a theme, a plot, a character, a setting, or even a scrap of dialogue. Just that I was getting close to one of those elements. But as the song ended, the glimmer faded. And all I was left with was an image of my muse wiping her overworked, sweaty brow in relief. And it occurred to me that Dear Ol' Musey might get just as annoyed, frustrated, happy, sad, and irked with me as I do with her. She probably had a nice plan set out as to how she was going to reveal all these great ideas. A little snippet here. A little idea there. A few characters later. Back in 2000 when Human Dignity wandered into my head, she probably thought, "Oh, good. She's listening now. Let's just ease her - and me - into things and take a nice leisurely stroll into Inspiration." And then I left the PhD program and got a secretarial job for a summer while preparing to teach. This gave me more time to write and join a critique group. At this point, I'm sure Muse started to get worried. I had wandered away from Her Plan and looked to be catching up with her too quickly. I bet she was relieved when I started teaching and saw how little time I would have for her. She could afford to relax. But then I quit teaching and became a secretary again. And I went full throttle into the idea of writing for a living (well, for a supplemental income to the fortune Mark will be earning as soon as he gets his PhD). That first month I think really freaked poor Muse out. She tried throwing all sorts of things at me to slow me down. Self-doubt and laziness worked the best. As I battled through those, she and I came to a good understanding. We seem to be a pretty snazzy team. But she must still get a little tired. She must not be ready for me to snatch certain ideas from her just yet. Hence the whiff of Inspiration, but no dice in the frenzied search to find the idea sitting out on the windowsill to cool.

More Late Night Inspiration

My brain has been so energized the last couple nights. After four hours of moving boxes and unpacking things and so on, I collapse into bed and the brain just goes bonkers. Last night, I was thinking about strings again. One thing I had wanted for the magic of this world was for it to have elemental parts to it. And strings can do that! With vibrations, wavelengths! And this gives me a good idea for the "cost" of the magic. Headaches, faintness, etc. And this also gives me the scientific opening I was needing for Airen and the potential to continue this as a series. I think, at least. This is going to be fun. Now, if only the plot would make itself more clear to me....

And I also got slammed with inspiration for a barbershop song. The chorus and tag just kind of wandered into my brain and kept singing itself over and over. So I had to go scratch down the words and plunk out the notes. At 11:30 last night (thank God for headphones). I don't know if I'll do anything more with a song (like, I dunno, come up with the rest of the chorus and a verse or two) because I know nothing about composition. I've heard a little bit about how the really important chords will be sevenths (or was it fifths?) and that the notes will do other things at other key times in the song. I would just compose it how I think it should sound without any real thought to what I was doing. But it was fun to give it a try for a couple bars. And I do have a complete tag, so maybe I'll show it to Sharon and see what she thinks. I was just thinking about how there's not a whole lot of those good tongue-in-cheek barbershop songs getting out there as much now (you know, like "Who's Sorry Now"). And then the tag jumped into my head.

Well, I never did claim to understand my muse.

Dreams

OK, how about another trip into Kellie's subconscious. It's a dark, dangerous place, but together we can navigate it. So my brain decided to kick up some dreams this weekend. Friday night (or maybe it was Saturday night), I had a dream that I was back teaching high school. Of course, the school itself was really sweet, nice big windows, huge classrooms, tons of supplies, great students. You name it. The funny thing is I was still working at IBM. And after a really good day of teaching, Dream Kellie was trying to figure out how she could teach and be a secretary at the same time. Very odd. But it was a nice dream. It's actually the second dream I've had about teaching in the past couple months. I really don't want to think about what my subconscious might be telling me with this. I'm not ready to rock my boat with thoughts like that.

The other dream? At some point this morning, in between snoozes I'm pretty sure, I had a dream that I was in some nice big house with all sorts of people I didn't know (including Tim McGraw - whose picture I saw on the cover of a magazine while grocery shopping last night) and we were getting ready to have some kind of party. Well, Tim McGraw decides to take an active interest in me (not to worry, I was still single in this dream) and I, of course, had absolutely no problems with this. So while things get, shall we say, interesting, at this nice big house, everyone else goes to the party. And gets mowed down by mobsters with machine guns. But Tim and I are fine. In fact, we're more than fine. And just when I'm coherent enough to realize that continuing this dream might be odd, but I wouldn't really mind it all that much, the alarm wakes me up fully.

So what important life lessons should I take from these things? That I shouldn't have quit teaching? That I should be trying to off Faith Hill so I can get with Tim? And what the heck do mobsters killing a bunch of housemates as I have a merrily old time with a studly country singer mean?

But here's the biggest question: Do I really want to know?

A Case of the Mondays

OK, I haven't had a Monday this bad in a while. My back is nothing more than a mesh of twisted, knotted muscles. I've got a dull headache that's sort of hanging around, just being annoying. And the dizziness is making itself known a bit more than usual. All I want to do is soak in a nice hot bath and go back to bed. And then curl up with a mug of tea and play with words. Days like today, I really wish money grew on trees.

So I didn't write anything for Human Dignity yesterday. But I did write about 1300 worldbuilding words (what I was supposed to do Friday). And I really enjoyed it. I finished the creation story and moved on to the government and societal impacts of the governing. I really like where this is going. The ideas came pretty easily, too. I hope my muse is as kind to me when I start trying to describe the culture and regions of the world.

Speaking of my muse, she sure is an odd bird. She gave me a fantastic idea of Part 3, something to wrap up my theme and give Aidan something to do. But she was incredibly tight-lipped about how to get this plotline going in Chapter 3. Hence I didn't even try to write Chapter 3 yesterday. I had absolutely no ideas for it. Nothing. So I did the worldbuilding instead. So the day wasn't a total crapshoot. And I've got stuff to keep me busy today, so we'll see if Muse will be kind and send a bit of inspiration to me for tomorrow (which will hopefully be better than today).

Silly Muse. She gave me yet another bit of action to start out my next chapter with. She told me what Denise should be doing. And then I managed to forget what that action was. This is what happens when dear ol' Musey gives me tips in the two seconds before I fall asleep. But I've since figured out something else she could be doing. So I'll go with that when I write today.