Dec Dare Day 14 - What To do With An Addlepated Brain

Day 14 - 830 Words on Harsh Climate
Running Total: 12950 Words.

My schedule was not bad today but my cold was really bad. While so far it's staying out of my lungs, breathing is still not fun because 1) it hurts and 2) I'm not getting any air through my nose anyway. And the coughing is starting to give me a headache.

So I think 830 is plenty close enough.

But I'm also being productive in one other way. I'm using my addlepated imagination to do some free association, and I'm getting some interesting plot development and idea generation going.

This is one way to turn off your internal editor. Wait until it's asleep. Serious writing will often wake up your weary brain and you'll just struggle, knowing what you're writing is not right, but too tired to resolve minor problems like whether the mouse should "race" or "scurry" along the baseboard.

But if you let that part of your brain sleep, and you sit down and do some brainless word association, or play with random ideas, (or watch old Boris Karloff b-movies on Hulu) you can just have fun. If you happen to scribble the thoughts down, you have the start of some great new ideas, or great new directions for a story to take.

Today I thought about many things, from what the pearl really is in The Serial, to the fact that George (the title character in The Man Who Did Too Much) has such excessive energy, what if Karla turned him on to parkour? And given that the setting is a place where rich people vacation.... what if George then hires himself out as a "fox" for Clean Boot fox hunts? Wouldn't that be a great situation for a puzzle mystery? I also had a couple of short mystery ideas and some spy story ideas (that would probably still go into The Serial).

You can do more than just word counts.

But tomorrow, let's see if we can finally get past that halfway point in Harsh Climate. I don't have to go anywhere tomorrow, so I should get all the sleep my nose will let me have.