Brainwaves

This is my brain, waving.

Hi!

No, seriously. What else would you be reading, if not the complicated interaction of mental impulses transmitted to fingers with just enough force to depress the keys of my laptop (I really need to set up a keyboard…)

Oh, look, a stray wave. One thought, conflicting with the overall flow of thoughts, and suddenly we’re dancing along a new current. Too much of that and we set up a riptide, sucking us out to sea and drowning us in, well, whatever this metaphor is swimming in.

Today is my day to make order from chaos. Which has a lot to do with the intro to this post. You see, yesterday we moved the last loads (pick-up trucks are So Useful!) from the storage unit to the house. We’d been whittling away at it, so one load was mostly things I’m storing for my daughters, and that’s gone right back into storage in the big shop. This leaves me with a two car garage half full of boxes. Most of those boxes contain books. I can’t do anything about the books until I build bookshelves, and that’s not scheduled for next weekend at the earliest. However…

My brain works best when surrounded by an orderly environment. Up to a point. There’s that tipping point of the story is going and I’m in another world, where the house could be burning down around me and I likely wouldn’t notice. I can’t get there, however, until I get the brain to stop wanting to rabbit off onto ‘must make kitchen useable!’ whenever I walk into it for cream in my coffee or a glass of water. The coffee lives in the office now. Maybe I should learn to drink it black. Or I could reduce the houseful of boxes to tidy space, and the brain would have some spare waves for the story I just found out is due July 1.

All this last week I have been working on writing every day. Not a lot, most days. I managed a whole 24 words one day. But that’s better than zero, and more importantly, I’m getting back into the habit, and the routine of making time for writing. That, I need if I’m ever going to be a Real Writer again. Something about having all of my schtuff back under one (ok, two, but we own both) roof again is helping me feel like we’re swimming towards land again. It’s been a long journey, this last 14 months of moving across country saga. It’s coming to a close, and soon? I’ll be looking for stories to keep my brain busy again.

That’s the trick, though. Getting the brainwaves into action. And then not letting the chaos in your surroundings develop into currents pulling you away from the direction you intend to go in. I’m not talking about pantsing vs plotting, although that’s part of it. I still have no idea what my story I was working on last week is: fantasy? Science fiction? Both? It really doesn’t matter, in that case. I was writing to be writing, not to be creating something profound (and I never attempt that, in any case). I just needed to start the exercise of words on the screen. I could do words on paper, but I do finally have the desk set where it’s comfortable to work at.

Short girl tip: footstools are your friend!

P.S. I have two books on sale this week, Possum Creek Massacre and The Case of the Perambulating Hatrack. If you should pick them up, please leave a review? Much appreciated! You can find them and a whole boatload of other books over at the Aether Czar blog in his Super Summer Sale.