More outlining and innate fear of crits!

I am a useless, completely unproductive goober. I've spent something like the last two days... including breaks at work... working on outlines and notes. And outlines. And pages of notes. Longhand. When I have a perfectly good Horace (er, a Neo) sitting in my bag all the time, just begging to be used (Horace might interject that he would prefer to be left the hell alone, thank you and get the fuck out, snarlcough).

Brainstorming, outlining, connecting the dots... it's one of my favorite parts of the process. Never mind that I got an awful lot of previously unwieldy detail work pounded out, or that it's brilliant (clearly I haven't read back over my notes yet), or that I even sketched out a new character*. It's all coincidental. The last two days have been about self-indulgence, and that bothers me a little. Even productive self-indulgence feels a little shameful.

*A character with a bee allergy. A character who is an angry, twitching little man most of the time but an angry, twitching, terrified man during the summer. I love neurotics. They are so much fun to write, and it gives the rest of the cast someone to make fun of other than me!

I figured out how I want to catch the guy, though... I'm not wholly in love with it, but I threw the thing to the mercy of the comment box on AW and got a great post with a very useful factoid about incinerators. That information helps a lot, and while the solution still doesn't thrill me, I have an idea with which to add to it that does. I'm going to write it and let it fester a while.

To wrap up the night, I posted the first little section- just under 1000 words- of this particular project in the SYW section of AW. Now I'll sit with my legs crossed to keep in the pee of fear. Or maybeprobably I'll take an Ambien and go to bed. But I'm sure there will be fear pee in the morning. Maybe they won't see it!

Aah! So excited!

My AlphaSmart 2000 has arrived!

It's an older model (I assume, as it does not actually have a model- not the Neo or Dana) 2000... but I'm already in love with it. The screen is bright and clear, and there is no lag time between keys being stuck and words hitting the screen. It's also extremely lightweight. It has a couple of sticky places where tape has been pulled off, but those will come off... and oddly enough, a large gold and black "H" sticker on the back.

As such, I shall call him Horace.

The missing character bios have been partially regurgitated... it isn't as enjoyable the second time around. I'm changing a few things, tweaking character ages here and there. My old people were too young. I realized that the older woman I'd cast as my villain's wife was around my mother's age, which was not old enough... so she (and her husband) are ten years older now and more true to themselves.

I've also added a couple of goldfish as minor characters.