Seeking Brain Cells

I haven’t written a lot this week. It may be because now that I‘m at the end of the first draft, it means going back to the beginning and really putting the thinking cap on. Before, it was just write to write. To get it all down so I’d have the story outlined and then it could Frankenstein itself alive. With a moving corpse, at least you have a place to start. But now I have to go back and start having it all make sense. Everything is basically there, but now it’s time to color it in, to take the blurry and sharpen the focus. To put a top hat on my cadaver and teach it to dance with Gene Wilder, so to speak. Okay. Maybe that’s a bad analogy, but going back to the second draft is sometimes harder than the first. Because now you really have to start making it better. And, I don’t know… maybe I don’t have enough brain cells to make it better. Like this post, for instance. I’m writing it on notebook paper at my job when I’m technically supposed to be working. It’s all chicken-scratchy with letters that aren’t really letters and it’s all pouring out of me, fueled by the free coffee from the break-room that I simply *must* enjoy. But when I go home and type this up, I’ll have to take an extra second and make sure everything written is like, coherent. Most of it is rambling, I know. But I still want it to make sense. So you’re not like “what the hell? I’m un-following her because she’s a bag of crazy tarts.”

And I am.

Anyway, back to the point—I haven’t written much this week because Hollywood keeps stealing my focus with Captain American and movies with Christan Bale. It’s like they sense my defenses are down and I’m looking for a reason not to use my brain cells. Alright. If I *have * to watch the first forty minutes of Captain America to see how he’s transformed from skinny geeky non-soldier to America’s finest specimen, I guess it’s not that big a deal. But while my brain thanks me for taking a few days off, my characters shake their heads in disappointment. You’re ditching us so you can be mindlessly entertained? Yes, yes I am.

I’ll get back to it again this weekend. Maybe tomorrow or next Tuesday. I’m not worried. I can only fall off the wagon for a few days at a time. After that, I get the familiar urges and start scratching again, my fingers itching for the feel of a keyboard.

Thank God writing is legal.