Excelsior in Indigo

April 6, 2012 by Cassidy Frazee | 6 Comments

First Contact Day has come and gone, and dammit all, no aliens showed up to take me away from his misery.  Or to leave some kind of interesting knowledge about the universe.  Not even a single anal probing.  I guess they leave that last for the hillbillies The Grays pick up from trailer parks when they need another sucked to torture.

I guess that means it’s time to move on.

Moving on I am.  I had a moment of trepidation when I discovered there was no coffee, and the last thing I wanted to do was run out and get some, but do that I did.  After the long, boring day that was yesterday, by the time 9 PM local rolled around I was totally brain-dead.  I had great difficulty keeping my eyes open, and even greater difficulty editing.

Oh, yes:  I edited.  I got into Chapter 5 of Couples Dance and went at it.  I was clear in the mind when I started, really.  I saw what was good, what could stand a little polish, and what needed far better prose.  By the time I was a third of the way through a 3,600 word chapter, I’d cleaned it up, and added a little over 200 words to the passage.

But that was all I could take.  My mind was giving up the ghost, and I knew to try and edit any more I’d face a challenge I’d fail.  So it was time to pack it up and move on to other things.

I shouldn’t say that yesterday was a complete bore–I mean, there were a few good things:

First, I was playing around with a new piece of software called FreeMind.  It’s something you can use for mind mapping, which is a fancy way of saying one can organize their thoughts in a type of visual brainstorming.  (For my friends in the UK who are reading this, you probably know of this as a spidergraph.)

What was I using it for?  Character notes.

In particular I was looking at a character I’d developed for a story long ago, and I was not only working out her friendships with other women, but what they did during her lifetime that led to something of an interdependence within their lives.

I have to admit it was a fun thing to play with.  I can see using it for story plotting, or setting up a character history, then exporting my map to a jpeg or pdf and loading that document into Scrivener for reference when I need it.  There is a story I have in mind . . . I can use notes like this, because the story, as I envision it, would be fairly Timey Wimey, and when you’re diving through the time lines like that, you need to keep your wits about you.

And the other thing . . . well, this is more a dream at the moment, but I was speaking with someone I knew from a while back, and continue to keep in touch with through the Magic of the Internet (not to be confused with the Spirit of the Radio).  What came of our conversation yesterday–well, there is the kernel of a huge pipe dream there, but hey:  maybe there is something there in our insanity.  We’ll see, because one never knows what’s going to happen from day-to-day, do they?

Maybe tomorrow I’ll rant.  Right now I need more coffee–

And I’m not even in command of a ship in the Delta Quadrant.

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