Some days it feels just normal to go work on the trailer in the afternoon, and some days it's just a drag. Well, today was one of the latter, but the insulation is close to being ready for the finish layer to be put back in place.
Here's what it looked like yesterday, after completing the scraping and cleaning of old glue off the ceiling.
Today I learned that although the spray glue has almost no odor when I can keep the door open, when it's cold enough to need to work inside with a little heat on to make the glue a happy temperature, the fumes can get a little bad. Thus, I didn't quite finish. I had to give up and let it all air out a bit. That center section has to have a double layer, so there's a little more to do than what might be apparent, but I'm close.
I also checked out how easy/hard it is going to be to mount the new light fixture. I decided to change it while I had everything apart. What I had was an LED light that was really bright. I liked it a lot, but it wasn't dimmable, and some of my helpers had trouble with that. So, now I have a dimmable one, and it will actually be easier to install than the previous one.
The big news of the day is that I couldn't sleep again last night. But I know exactly why. I finally got a brainstorm for the details of the plot line in Vacation from Dead Mule Swamp.
Have you ever had a brainstorm? If so, you know why they are called that. The neurons in my brain just fire off so fast and continuously I'm like in hyper-drive. I can even physically feel it- almost like my brain is pulsing. I did speech to text in Google Docs, and managed to get most of my ideas preserved. I've learned that when things are coming to me so fast and furiously I'll never remember them all if I don't make notes. Now I know exactly what additional research I need to do. I wrote the next scene and started a Chapter List. I don't really do outlines, but I sort of block out what might happen in each chapter. This helps me see if I have enough/too much material, good flow, story arc, etc.
The books don't always happen this way. The Hollow Tree at Dead Mule Swamp did. The idea came to me and I wrote the whole thing in a weekend. OK, it's only 15,000 words, but boom- there it was in my head. Dead Mule Swamp Mistletoe was essentially written on a 12-hour drive home from Alabama. That also got recorded in Docs as I drove. I worked out all those crazy relationships- how so many people hated each other and why. It still took me several months to actually write it, but I didn't have to agonize over what was going to happen next. The rest of the series basically came one chapter at a time, as a slog, with only a rough idea of the ending. In one of them, I even changed my mind about who the guilty party was about half-way through.
I also edited.
 | See 1A - Insulation |
1 comment:
Sounds like you've got quite a system going for writing your books.
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