Daily Tao ☯ 5.17.17

Lousy day for concentration, as I’m sure y’all felt too. I spent most of the morning getting the folks settled. Had a nice trip into town, even treated myself to a rare latte, and came back raring to go. But it was not to be. I needed to do a spot of research, and the next thing I knew, I'd lost an hour.

Here's the thing about research. It creates black holes of interesting information that lead to galaxies far, far away from what you really need for your story. I tucked five or six articles away for future work and dragged my brain back to my current story, only to find it just wasn't happening. I was starting to get mad at myself until I realized I’d somehow disabled my Freedom. Argh! No wonder I was lost in internet space.

What's Freedom? It’s the program I use to keep my Internet turned off so I can’t get distracted, and it really does work. I use it because if I don’t, I really can end up in another galaxy online.

These hours aren’t really lost, if you look at it from the writer’s perspective. You never know what little tidbit, story, or picture will spark an idea that turns into the next novel. But you also have to be careful you don’t spend ALL your time on the “research”.

I’m going to cut myself some slack, since I haven’t really stopped moving for a few weeks now, and I probably need a day off. I’ll be back at it tomorrow with vigor (she says, hopeful!)

In the meantime, for fun, I give you a little something I stumbled across whilst in the black hole… it really is quite literary, if you think about it...

Sweet dreams!