Friday morning, I walked into the gym. My trainer was out for an emergency, so it was only my promise to deliver some stuff to friends, and my own self-discipline that had me there.
I looked at the deadlift written for me in my logbook, looked at my friend, looked at the bare bar, back at my friend, and said, “Nope! I’m skipping deadlift and running away with my husband to the zoo.”
We did, too. Cheetahs and lemurs and foxes, oh my!
On the way back, we stopped in Meunster, TX, and did some grocery shopping. (German colony. Great local sausage, lots of german import stuff in the grocery store.) While my husband was talking to the butcher about weisswurst, I wandered off toward the long refrigerated rack o’ strudel, and got distracted by the massive shelf of wine. Blue Ostrich winery, it turns out, makes a tempranillo. Although the winery is rather local, the grapes are actually grown near Lubbock, and trucked to St. Jo for crush and ferment.
As we drove home laden with sausage, cheese, spaetzle, sauerkraut, strudel, and the bottle of tempranillo that happened to fall into the grocery cart, I explained to my darling that I was startled by it, as I thought only moscato, sangiovese, and cab sav were growing locally. But the High Plains are a totally different climate and…
…and my back brain helpfully supplied “Not unlike your WIP! You could set a tempranillo vineyard there!”
About ten seconds later, it said, “…and that’s what happened to (person from an three-year-old abandoned WIP that I really liked, but it had a couple unfixable structural flaws that killed it about 13K in.) Which means that this is set a couple years after that, which means that this is how that one ends, and the main characters in this explain where that guy in that one was coming from, and… that’s why that structural flaw, and how to fix it.”
And now I have two live WIPs in my head instead of the bare-bones start of one, and I may have to rewrite the abandoned one from scratch in order to get all the backstory to continue writing this one.
I should have done my deadlift.
I need a drink.
Fortunately, I have this bottle of tempranillo…
Mad Genius Club 
7 responses to “They’re multiplying!”
I am glad you are enjoying life and making progress on your WIPs both. Particularly since this little snippet makes it clear you should continue writing.
I like starting my Sundays off with a smile.
What frequently wakes me up in the middle of the night is my back-brain knocking. “Hey! Hey! Wake up! I know why character X is the right one to tell character Y what happened to character Z, and this is how he knows all about it!”
Then the voice goes away and I stare into the darkness for hours trying to remember all the places I would have to make adjustments to support this (admittedly better) solution to a problem I’d been ignoring.
Sigh…
I used to sleep better before I took up writing fiction. A lot better.
You’d think a guy wandering around ALL THE TIME, it would be easy to plant the Chekhov’s gun that he has a sense of absolute direction.
sigh
At least I remembered in time that he didn’t have it when he went through the labyrinth. That would have been handy for him.
And I will be that little voice in the back of your head whispering “hey, I bet we could declare the cost of the entire shopping trip off on the taxes by calling it research!”
I’m the same voice that tells you if you drive really fast you can get home before you run out of gas.
Bwahahaha! Congratulations.
Stories do that (multiply). And Leaving them alone doesn’t help, it just encourages them.
He he. He, he, he, he! Now you know what happens whenever I do anything Europe-related.