Dreams, Distractions and Creativity

Really they are all the same.

Pretty much.

Sort of.

I should be editing audio. Instead? I fell down an Easter egg rabbit hole.

In fact, I've just told myself (quite sternly) that this post will be interspersed with audio edits. So here goes...

[wanders away for first round of edits]

Well, I took a shower, moved some extra sheet sets around, and shopped for bath wraps. Seriously, get to those edits!

[disappears again]

Six minutes of edited audio after I started a cabbage soup and fed the dogs and checked over Cottage West before a new incoming guest arrives. Six minutes of finished audio might not sound like a lot, but there are a ton of stops and starts as I edit.

Lunch comes and goes. And before I know it, the clock reads 1p.m. I'm at 20 minutes of edited audio and not even to the halfway mark on this one G581: Plague Tales short story!

[fine, I'll disappear again, and hopefully get further on The Earth Sees Me]

I think that the hardest part, or at least the one that gives me the least sense of reward, is audio edits. And I continue, despite reminding myself over and over that I need to GET THEM DONE, to find other things to distract me from them.

This week, I've excelled at avoiding them. I've instead:

• Baked bread (mmmm, fresh bread)

• Made soup

• Spent hours doing financial forecasting (a.k.a. counting chickens before they are hatched) on our Airbnb biz for World Cup

• Organized the main bathroom medicine cabinet

• Sorted through unwanted clothes and toys and added them to the donations bag

• Ordered a whole mess of curtains for the various windows in Cottage East

• Cleared my desk

• Shopped for Christmas (rather obsessively, I might add)

• Fleshed out a couple of storylines for books that just wouldn't leave me alone until I did

• Worked on a world map and individual maps I'll part up into regions (and hey, I figured out how to import images of pteranodons into Inkarnate!) for The Chronicles of Liv Rowan book series

• Brainstormed ideas for Kickstarter, including rolling out hardcover gilt-edged special editions

And if all of this sounds like a schizophrenic attempt to avoid audio edits, well, you aren't wrong. But I'm also drawing a hard line - I can't start any new projects (or finish mostly done ones like The Glass Forest) until the audio edits are done.

Which, if nothing else, keeps me dragging myself back to the computer for more edits every 20-30 minutes or so. Even the edits themselves are distracting. I find myself wanting to create images in Midjourney of the scenes in my head as I edit The Earth Sees Me. I want to show you Bridget "Bite" Kowalski, a child living alone on the lunar colony after everyone she knows and loves dies from the ESH virus. I want you to see the city block sized housing units back on Earth that stretch into the sky, many disappearing into the clouds, where tens of thousands of people live, shop, work, go to school - rarely leaving, as these massive buildings have everything they need inside them at the end of this century.

Here is Bite, by the way. In those first days when she finds herself alone...

And then years later, when lifeships arrive from Earth and find her surviving on her own in the long halls and ventilation shafts of the lunar colony...

And then there is the brainstorm I had this morning, of first expanding on a book thriller idea, and linking it to the shadowy criminal organization I dance around in the first three books of my romantic suspense series. I'm figuring out how to incorporate the Indalo links into the sequel to Winter's Child, perhaps a real explanation of why Elizabeth is the way she is?

I even found myself running down a rabbit hole with the idea of the term INDALO actually standing for the six arms of the criminal organization, that truly has its fingers everywhere, world wide, and figuring out how to link it to the various books I have written or will be writing.

I - Inveris Industries-real estate, provide properties for illegal activities

N - Novara Financial - loan sharking, money laundering, cryptocurrency manipulation

D - Deltan Defense Solutions - security and tracking, warfare, mercenaries

A - Aetherline Logistics - Human trafficing, VIP services for the rich that subverts the rule of law

L - Luminex Medical Group - Illegal human testing, biochemical agents for warfare

O - Oladni Corporation - international shipping, illegal waste dumping

They might move and change as I dig into the book projects. Some of them are years out.

I do love my Easter eggs, and I love planting them in the different books, connecting one genre to the next in order to tell a deeper, wider story that goes beyond one single book.

And all of this, all of it that I have rambled about? It needs to wait. And I desperately need to finish Story 8 - The Earth Sees Me.

See you on the other side!