Everything feeds the muse. So, if you can’t come up with the next bit, sometimes resting isn’t the right thing to do… sometimes it’s action, and feeding the muse. Go have an adventure!
Sometimes the misadventure comes to you… there’s a joke about dishwashers in the last chapter. It’s not how my dishwasher died and flooded the kitchen (that was an intake valve failing at full on), but it’s a common enough user error to be hilarious, and make light of the damage done.
Do Not Recommend that exact circumstance of filling your well, by the way, but it’s all grist for the mill.
The more you know authors, the more you can read a throwaway name, a reference, a minor bit of byplay, and go “I know when that happened in real life!”
Go forth and do unto yourself!
Image by Cedar Sanderson, who is awesome.
Mad Genius Club 
7 responses to “That Time With The Thing”
Having watched what Cedar does with odd prompts, including visual ones, I can now predict that what appears to be a simple picture of a girl hold a cat Is really a picture of the Cat Emperor using one of his slaves as a comfortable seat. We know she is a slave because of the symbolic neck collar, which is brownish gold to indicate her status. “Why brownish gold”, you ask? The color was chosen by CE because it goes so well with his coloring.
I used a dishwasher story from my life in one of my John Fisher books. Portable dishwashers, during the drain cycle push a LOT of water out fast. To the sleeping submarine sailor brain, that sounds like FLOODING. The trained sailor’s body reacts to that flooding before the upper processes point out that 1) you are naked, and 2) the likelihood that your house is flooding is damn slim.
This can result in you in the kitchen in the all together looking for the source of flooding before you are aware that you’re now awake… Some folks found that funny, I did not share their humor.
A story one of my old supervisors told me from when he was new. One of the radio towers that State Radio uses is by a tiny town on the border by the name of Cayuga, which sounds vaguely like an alarm on a submarine. One of the troopers called out for Cayuga Tower late on night and the guy manning the radio, a former submariner, was half asleep. When he heard, “Cayuga Tower, Cayuga Tower, 10-39.” The dispatcher sat forward, hit the transmit button, and called out, “Dive. Dive. Dive.” Needless to say, that did not go over well with his supervisor.
I may have told you that story before.
nope haven’t heard that one.
Adventures are great as long as they happen to someone else, far away. Not, oh, discovering a broken pipe in the kitchen because the living room floor is wet at 0530, or the carpet goes “squish” (why the hot-water-heater now has a moat around it), or the skylight departs in the middle of a dust storm, or an engine goes “blarp!” and it’s the only one on your airplane, or a college professor or grad-school prof who [redacted to protect the guilty, the innocent, and the author.]
It’s all grist for the mill: foxhunting, marriage, fiddling… I’m hanging out with some seniors at the moment singing Barbershop. It’s all good.