Processes

We're still having unseasonably cool and damp weather, and I'm afraid I'm getting spoiled. When summer returns, it's really going to hurt. My body is already thinking fall. I even baked muffins this morning because cool, damp weather turns me into Betty Crocker.

Some random things, in no particular order:

Why do I have the song "The Rainbow Connection" from The Muppet Movie stuck in my head? I don't remember the last time I heard it, other than maybe a punk rock sort of version I swear I heard once on the radio. The really annoying thing is that I've forgotten an entire verse, so I can't even sing it properly to myself to get it out of my head. I had it on a 45 RPM single, so maybe next time I'm at my parents' house (they still have a turntable), I can listen to it, learn the missing verse, and get it out of my head. But that still won't solve the mystery of how and why it got there in the first place.

I think I've achieved Olympics burnout. I no longer care. I guess one person can only cry so much before numbness is achieved. It does provide a pretty constant source for background noise, though, which means I've been getting some annoying, nagging tasks done.

I'm making real progress on The New Project in following that screenwriting process. I started by writing a three-sentence summary of the book, then expanded that into a three-page outline. Then I started on the notecards, with one scene per card, and then added the emotional consequences of each scene on the back. And then I did the scene analysis, figuring out the purpose of the scene, the story question raised in the scene, the point-of-view character's objective for the scene and what the stakes are if the character doesn't achieve that objective. And then I figured out the emotional pivot -- where each scene is supposed to either change from positive to negative, negative to positive, or else move way up or down the scale within negative or positive. I think there may be a few scenes I'll need that haven't come to mind yet, but that may come to me today when I do the more complete outline based on all those cards. I'll be able to see where some cause and effect pieces are missing.

Then I might actually start writing narrative! We'll see how much massaging needs to be done on the outline. I suspect there still will be scenes that occur to me while writing that aren't on the outline, but my main point in doing all this outlining is so I won't go through the agony of not knowing what the book is about until I've already written it. The really detailed outline should tell me what the book is really about. Theoretically. We'll see how it works. I think it is helping me to do all that analysis for each scene because they're all really coming to life, and I'm having fun mentally playing with them to make them have action and conflict in them.

Why is it that when someone improves something to serve me better, it usually ends up being more of a pain? I used to have all my e-mail addresses conveniently mapped to each other, but now they've separated the e-mail address associated with my ISP from the addresses associated with my domain name, so I have to go to two different places to check my e-mail, and I can't use my e-mail software to retrieve the domain name mail (because I need to upgrade it). And this is serving me better. Yep.

And now I should go to the post office while it's not raining, then it's time to work!