I’m back home after a night spent with my sweetheart, and then a walk through a nature preserve–wherein I was supposed to be concentrating on my writing headspace, and not getting FOUR calls from work. People: I’m off today. Save it for next week. Anyway, it was a nice time out in nature. I saw a swimming baby turtle, a chipmunk, a great egret, and a very strange and naked caterpillar which landed on my foot after falling out of a tree. Oddly, that has now happened to me twice in less than a week. I guess I need to take some advice from a caterpillar–or two. (The first caterpillar landed on my head, however, not my foot, and it was super hairy.) After all of that, I sat in some ridiculous traffic caused by two different spin-outs. Probably caused by people texting, since that doesn’t seem like it’s ever going to go away until we’re all dead or someone makes a car that shuts down cell phones. I would invest in one of those cars in a heartbeat, if it meant I could make my 40 minute drive to/from work in peace!! Again–I digress. Day off, remember?!

While I was amidst Mother Nature’s living room, I came up with a few little details for TOB, and I’m going to type them into the book once I’m done here, and cross my fingers that it will boost me along into writing several pages–close up some more chasms, yes?? While sitting here a moment ago (before starting this post), I was thinking about my long writing runs–those 2 weeks or so where I write 5 to 18 pages in a day…What is it that makes that happen? What triggers it? What keeps it going? Am I eating differently? Am I somehow altering my routine? Is someone out there in the world sending me the good juju?? I have no clue. If and when I get into one of those stints again, I’ll try to pay attention and see if I can later duplicate it and keep that kind of writing going all the time. I know having muses freshly in my mind helps quite a bit. The more I can see the movements and hear the voices and see the faces of my characters, the easier writing can be. Sometimes, however, the characters don’t ever develop a voice, and if they aren’t modeled after a live person, it can be very hard to keep that all going. Melissa and Teagan in the Twins Trilogy, for instance: they have no such origin. Ironically though, it fits the nature of their characters…Read the books if you want to know what I mean by that. Especially TOB when it comes out.

Not much else to report. I just felt like writing a blog. I guess that’s not out of the ordinary for me though: just writing randomly and without any purpose. Blah, blah, blah. At least I have this wall to throw words at, and see if any of them make a difference in the world.