Coffee and Imagination

October 23, 2012 by Cassidy Frazee | 2 Comments

Let me get this out of the way:  coffee usually doesn’t wake me up.  Yes, I know, the caffeine should have me bright eyed and ready to rock, but isn’t how it work most of the time.  I’ve been up about an hour, and two cups in my eyes are still half-masting.

Don’t know the reason for this.  A few times I’ve poured on the coffee and came away shaky and sick to my stomach.  Sometimes I’ve had one cup and been ready to tear up the world.  I don’t think it’s so much the caffeine, but more how my mind is handling the situations laying before me.

I do believe that it limbers up something for me, though, because my imagination can take off once I’ve downed a couple of cups in the morning.  Notice I said I’m not thinking; no, that’s something different.  Having your cognitive abilities online and working is not the same thing as letting yourself daydream about events which exist only in your mind.

I have one major thing to do for my NaNo Novel 2012.  I need to do it today.  Yesterday was a busy day, and I didn’t get around to writing anything.  No, all the writing and editing took place over the preceding weekend, but yesterday all about thinking and dreaming.

Besides the work I need to finish today for my novel, I was off thinking about another of my characters who have nothing to do with the characters in my upcoming story.  This story would take me back into the future, take me back into space, and take me into a place that started out with a dead body on the floor of a woman’s billet.  Yeah, you had to be there.  I guess the instructor who was teaching the writing class had to be there, too, since she didn’t get it, either.

I’m such a mystery, ain’t I?

I like heading into that which is fantasy–though I don’t consider my stories about space and the future fantasy, per say.  I know there are no happy, singing elves, and dangerous dragons flying about–though in this one line of stories I have ideas for, it might be possible.

After I’ve put NaNo behind me, I believe I will move towards this new story that keeps bopping about in my brain.  It keeps pulling at me, and it lets me get out there, lets my mind expand and churn, and gives me the chance to play with things–like putting a future history together.  Which is something I need to do for my Transporting universe.  I have no future history for that place–and why not?  That’s something I usually do just because.

See?  I’m getting lazy in my old age.

The clock on the NaNo Wall says 8 Days, 14 hours, and 30 minutes until The Crazy Train leaves the station.  I’ve got my ticket; all I need right now is to finish packing.  I’m setting today aside for that.  Then all I have to do it wait around until after the witching hour on Halloween night, crank out my prologue, then head off to bed after I update my word count.  Oh, and start laughing at people who, a couple of days later, are saying, (a) “I need help!  I need a name for a town in Kansas that has 2,000 people living there (which was one of the statements I saw last year)”, or, (b) “I’ve finished; I wrote 100,000 words in the last three days,” in which case, I wanna look at that manuscript, ’cause I’m guessing most of it says, “All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy.”

Coffee is cold.  Oh, well.

At least the imagination is perking.

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