State of Mind

Howdy!

Last night while I was trying to fall asleep with a huge headache brewing, I thought of the state of mind you have to be in to do different things. Work, play, whatever you are doing requires a particular state of mind. For me, I can't write unless I'm somewhere close to the zone. It's why some weeks my blogs will make sense and other weeks they will be just a bunch of rambling nonsensical words. If I'd got up last night instead of willing my brain to slumber, I would have had an awesome blog that I could be happy with. Instead, this morning I woke up with the start of a migraine and had to take some pretty heavy drugs. All my great thoughts from last night are gone but I'll try to amble along the right path to something that at least makes a tiny bit of sense.

Right now I'm pleasant;y exhausted. I spent most of the day making a costume for the RWA conference's themed dinner. My state of mind is nowhere near any kind of zone to be writing and I long for the warmth of my electric blanket so I wouldn't dare open a word document and start typing or editing. I do wonder if I was a plotter, would it be easier to manipulate my story when I'm out of ideas? So far all of my manuscripts have pretty much written themselves so far as the character is making choices and I'm merely guiding their way. I like it like that but if I already knew the end result it would be easier to get there. Wouldn't it?

Do you think when Stephanie Meyer started book one of Twilight that she knew exactly where all four books would take her? Someone asked me the other say if I write the book in parts and then slot the pieces together like a jigsaw. It never occurred to me to do anything like that but there is some logic in the question. If I wrote the end first and then the middle, would the beginning be a walk in the park? I have watched a movie where the end was the first half of the film and the beginning the last bit. I think it was a Quentin Tarentino so he can probably get away with it but my partner lost interest and didn't watch the beginning cause he'd already seen the end. Am I making sense? I think I'm confused...

Anyway now that I've got you reading what I wrote twice to try to work it out, I will tell you about the compliment a very smart man gave me but was worried that I'd be offended. He said something along the lines of "You are really good at dribbling shit and then making it make sense". I would never take offense at this kind of compliment and I knew exactly what you were saying and thankyou!! I'm just happy that people read my blog every week and I hope like hell one day soon I will have an audience to read my novels.

So, I'm hoping tomorrow morning when I wake up I will be in a better state of mind because I have to start planning my pitch for the conference in 3 weeks time. In the meantime, I'm going to work on lots of different things and put some thought into what a very smart man thinks me capable of...

See you next week =)