I'm not lost, I'm right here

This seems like a good place to pause for a breath and do a blog post, so I will.

After my white-heat inspiration phase, I finished off the week with a grand total of over 6,800 words for the week. Most of it is not shabby, and most of the plot roads it led me down are also not shabby. I had to rein in some of it during today's more equilibriated planning session, and the aftermath of the "ZOMG on fire" creative days was an uber-cranky Saturday and a moody, weepy Sunday. I was aware, in some small part of my mind, that the three high days were too high and that I was going to crash and burn. I was aware during the rage day and the sad day that they were the expected aftermath of flying too high on those other days. I have yet to determine if/how I could've handled the high better in order to manage the aftermath--sometimes that awareness of the phase I'm in seems pretty cut off from the part of me that's too busy flailing in creativity/rage/sadness to listen, and I'm not sure that little voice has any power to change anything. I'm attempting to take it as a lesson and apply what I've learned to the next time I feel the manic phase start itching.

Today, although gloomy and rainy outside, has been a nice, quiet, calm day inside my head. I have thought through a number of plot issues, gotten together my act on my working outline, and even managed to write one of the scenes I still need. Post-blog, I will go print out what still needs printing out and weave those into my stack of first draft pages where they should go. Then I can take a look at the next chunk of scenes and see what needs to be added to those.

So, productivity in spite of a minor bout of crazy, even if I could've happily done without the crazy. Three working days this week, then off to the brother-in-law's for an extended Thanksgiving visit. I could also happily do without that, but sometimes there has to be that whole compromise thing.

Fuzzy day, a few links

I am having what I've come to call a fuzzy day--over the years I've learned to recognize that, much as with my emotional moods, my mental moods follow a cycle. In the past I've tried to analyze them and determine if they follow a predictable pattern--a certain number of days, phases of the moon, the weather. I finally gave up and settled for learning to recognize the moods themselves and determine the best way to deal with them. On the days when my intellectual faculties are high and sharp, I focus on keeping things on an even keel and directing that energy to accomplish as much as I can without overdoing it (and thus risking a burnout and crash). When the energy inevitably fizzles, I am left with a day or week or so of fuzzy days. I am not lacking in creativity on these days--that would be too simple. Sometimes the right brain actually increases output, spamming me mercilessly with ZOMG awesome ideas. But there is a force field between the two halves of my brain which prevents me from taking the ideas and breaking them down into anything useful. Sometimes just finding the right words for even the simplest things seems nigh impossible, let alone stringing together entire sentences or formulating complicated things like plot structures. Or grocery lists. Or even blog entries. (I am not actually writing this, in case you wondered. Robot-me is.)

Anyhow, my plan for fuzzy days has long been to just lie low on the creative front, jot down whatever ideas I can manage to grasp, and muddle through what really must be done as best I can. The fuzzy passes, eventually, at which point I'm able to kick back into high gear and do productive things with the mish-mash of stuff that fell out of my brain in the interim. I do not fight the current; I swim along the shoreline and keep my head above water until the current shifts and I can make it back to the beach, whereupon I build a fire and dry off and set about figuring out where I washed up and what direction I need to head from there in order to get back on my planned course.

I did manage to force myself through morning writing time, focusing mainly on writing some of the actual journal entries Ein's father made about Important Stuff so that I can better judge how she'd react to them. In the course of doing so, I uncovered two, possibly three, new characters. They brought a couple of boxes with them which were labeled "MISSING PLOT PIECES AND LINKS" and inquired if I'd been looking for those. I tried to be nonchalant and had them stack the boxes over in the corner until I'm prepared to check out the contents. So far, the muse has not attempted to hide them from me.

Random links to cool stuff I've been meaning to tell you about:

Shadow Unit is kinda X-Files, kinda Law & Order, kinda cool. I was up too late last night finishing the first episode.

Emily Short writes interactive fiction. I tried out Floatpoint and Galatea, after seeing them mentioned in a Strange Horizons article. Galatea I was kind of "eh" about, but Floatpoint had more meat to it and I found it pretty interesting--it was puzzly but not overly so, and it was as much about moral choices as about figuring stuff out. I recommend saving it toward the end so that you can play through different final choices and see the differences in the ending. You can play Galatea online; Floatpoint will require you to download both an interpreter to play it on and the game file itself. (Note: The link on Short's page to an intepreter is broken; I downloaded it here.) When you run the executable for the interpreter, it will ask you what game file you want to use.