Weekly Update: 3-6-15 Brainstorming

You do not want to be in the mad torrent of my mind right now. If my brain were a river, it has stopped its steady pulse and plunged into white-water rapids, churning and spitting froth.

I've been brainstorming.

I feel like a mad scientist, throwing chemicals together that exploded into purple smoke. I feel like an artist in a fevor grip, oblivious to the world. I feel like a kid in a library grabbing every book off the shelf, determined to read all of them at the same time.

What I don't feel is particularily productive.

In the real world, I have laundry to do, dinner to cook, emails to send, dogs to walk, jobs to find, bills piling up, and I am supposed to get them done. It seems irresponsible to shove my nagging to-do list aside in order to indulge my whims.

Yet if I don't take this crucial step, my writing will suffer later.

What's frustrating is that it doesn't seem like I have a finished product. Not even a full draft. All I have is horrible scribbles in my notebook.

26 pages of messy blue ink.

Plus 3 more pages of typed.

Seems like I spent the whole week being lazy.

* * *

I was lazy this week. I felt lazy on Monday, when I spent the whole day reading half of Jewels: A Secret History and about a third of A Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of Three Great Cities of Spice. I was lazy on Tuesday, when all I did was watch Dr. Who, in one long marathon.

Then I got less lazy. Wednesday I had a subbing job and was not lazy. Thursday I cleaned, volunteered, and did critiques. Friday I brainstormed The Originals and worked on my blog. Throughout the whole week, I brainstormed for Counterfeit Diamond, the novel I hope to write in April. I have all of March to figure out what to write.

I was pretty disciplined and consistent throughout most of January and February, but these last few weeks seem to have broke that up, allowing for the deluge of laziness and procrastination to break loose.

I think part of that break is feeling overwhelmed by everything I have to do, from the little tasks that nibble away the minutes of my day, to the knotty plans I have no idea how to execute. January and February I worked hard on Three Floating Coffins. Now, I need to figure out Diamond and work on the Originals. My schedule says, I still have to produce a chapter of the Coffins every two weeks, but I'm starting to get bored of re-writing the same thing over and over. I want to work on something new.

And that's only one part of my life.

All right, this is getting too long. I'll end it. But let me just add that last weekend, I took a trip to the Cerritos Library on Saturday and the Bowers Museum on Sunday, so be on the lookout for those travelogues coming up soon.