Revisiting Older Work (or "Who wrote this nonsense?")

I'm rather enjoying the May cold snap, though I know it will be shortlived, and my body will be disappointed when summer really arrives, since it seems to have decided that the 85-degree days we had last week were summer and fall is now here. Cold, damp weather tends to bring out my inner Betty Crocker. Yesterday, I baked scones for breakfast, baked shortbread in the afternoon and had grand plans to make pizza for dinner, with a new mix of toppings based on what I had on hand. I was going to do pesto (made with home-grown basil), chicken breast and roasted red pepper. But the one packet of yeast I scavenged from the cabinet turned out to be a dud (it was only six months past the expiration date), so I turned it into a pasta dish instead. I think the pizza would need some goat cheese, so I shall have to get some when I buy more yeast and make another go at it. I normally do a fairly thick-crust pizza, but I think this needs a much thinner crust, so I'll be trying a new recipe there.

I did discover that not only had I put away my cool-weather clothes, blankets, etc., but I also didn't have any cool-weather food supplies. I had no soup or ingredients to make soup and I had no cocoa mix. I do have regular cocoa powder and could have made cocoa the old-fashioned way, but time was a factor. I did finally find a gift packet of mix that was in the gift bag one of my choir kids gave me for Christmas, so that saved the day for drinking with the shortbread while watching Doctor Who OnDemand late at night.

Meanwhile, I started re-reading the previous project, which turned out to be pretty painful. There's a reason why it's good to let something rest a while so you can detach yourself from the fact that you wrote it. I was having a serious "who wrote this nonsense?" reaction. Actually, I don't think it's that bad, but my subconscious seems to have been rethinking the approach and rewriting it in the background while I was working on the other book, and what's actually there is very different from what my subconscious has already done with it. I'm having to force myself to read straight through to get the flow of the story instead of stopping to edit. Now what I need is a direct link between my subconscious and the computer so I can upload the version my subconscious has rewritten without all that pesky thinking and typing.

Normally I talk about books on Tuesdays, but lately I've been reading books for market research purposes, and I can't honestly recommend any of them. I wouldn't have read these books if it hadn't been work-related, and I had to force myself to finish them. Not that they were bad. They just weren't my thing, which I think proved that this wasn't the right market for me to go after. If you don't like reading it, then you're probably not going to be successful in writing it.