The Hard Work of Thinking

I spent most of yesterday staring at the ceiling and daydreaming/thinking, and it was one of the hardest days of work I've had in ages. I felt like I'd spent the day digging ditches and was left utterly drained. I did manage to work out my legend, as well as the truth behind the legend. But once I did that I thought of how that would impact my plot, and some of it may bring about some major changes. That was what I had to think about, weighing the various routes I could take and trying to decide which would make the most sense and create a better story. Sometimes I think this part is harder than actually writing the words. I'm still not entirely sure which way I should go. The really difficult thing is that these decisions involve backstory and behind-the-scenes events that will affect the entire book, so it's not a situation where I can wait until I get to that point and see how it goes. I have to figure it out now before I can do anything else.

Even though this kind of work is draining, it is pretty cool to have a job where lying on the sofa with a bowl of popcorn and a Dr Pepper counts as a hard workday. The downside is that I don't know if I'll end up getting paid for this work, and it could be up to a year before I get paid if I get paid. So, there are tradeoffs.

In other news, I've been rather remiss in forgetting to mention this, but if at this time of year you find yourself itching to buy a book by me, I've been part of another one of those pop culture collections. This one is on the series Supernatural, with the book called In the Hunt. I delve into the folklore (urban and otherwise) used by the series in my essay. This one may have broken my streak of killing shows. Usually, about the time a book about a series comes out, the series has taken a horrible nosedive. I could no longer bear to watch Desperate Housewives at the time that book came out. Battlestar Galactica went into "C-SPAN in Space" mode at about the time that book came out (though I think the series did recover). House had sidelined much of the original cast and started focusing on the least interesting of the newcomers around the time that book came out. Fortunately, I couldn't destroy Firefly because it was over before I contributed to that book. But I've liked this season of Supernatural and the last few episodes have been really good. Here's the publisher's web site for more info. I always get a bit giddy when I see the kinds of names I'm included with in these things (and it's rather flattering when they feature me like I'm "someone").

Now I have more thinking to do. My brain is tired.