Sicko

Why is it, just when I can't spare any more minutes in my day, my body decides to blow up? I'm on the home stretch with the book, going along great guns, knowing something's missing but I'll catch it on my rewrite. I'm good, I'm good, I'm good....

And then I'm not. I'm sick, I'm sick, I'm sick. I had some horrendous bug this past week that took me out for almost the entire week. I don't remember ever being so sick. I must have had some wild fever because I kept going in and out of reality.

Nothing got done with the book. I couldn't even have told you what the book was about. Assuming I could have uncurled my fingers from their claw-like position (did I tell you I was sick?) to type, it wouldn't have made any sense.

But here's the cool thing. As I was laying/lying (I can never keep those straight) in bed, feeling like a old bowl of Alpo, I got an idea of how to fix the story. Actually three ideas. One was probably the thing that, if I can pull it off, will make this story elevate, and the other two are thread fixes.

Most of you who read this know about the horrendous turn my life took two years ago. It was as if a great door slammed, and there I was, in a new room. An unfurnished new room.

I've been writing for years and years, and I'd managed to create a system that works for me. I use threads. It's very visual for me, the concept of these threads that run through each book--eh, I can't explain it easily here. It requires "twenty-seven eight by ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used...." (source given below--anyone recognize it without peeking?). Anyway, this is the first book I've written since the Great Slam and I hadn't set up my threads in my graphic synopsis (I totally forgot them) and sure enough, my threads had tangled into knots and some were broken.

Janet, is there a chance this train of thought might pull into the station any time soon?

What I'm saying, in my very roundabout, still kind-of-sicky way is that sometimes the part of my brain that runs under everything, the part that keeps my heart beating and my lungs breathing, remembers life before the Great Slam and reminds me about the threads even if my upper brain can't.

Kind of cool, huh? So now I'm back to working on this book again, still a little slowly, but I've got the threads untangled and we are GOOD TO GO!

(Pssst: "Alice's Restaurant" by Arlo Guthrie)