I’m a bit more than halfway through Rydding Village book 4, and I seem to have a bad case of Book Brain. For instance, I managed to forget that this was a blog day, in spite of writing it on my to-do list this morning. Anything that isn’t the book seems to fall by the wayside in my brain. Not that I’m spending all my time writing. In fact, there’s a fair amount of procrastination. But I’m thinking about writing, playing out the movie of the next scene in my mind, often while I should be doing something else. When I get like this, cooking and driving can be dangerous. I’ve missed freeway exits because I’ve come up with a good idea and lost track of where I was. I have to set timers when I’m cooking because I’ll get sidetracked and forget that something has been on the stove too long. This is where my air fryer oven comes in handy because it will automatically shut itself off when the timer goes off. There’s a lot of microwaving during a bout of Book Brain. I really should do a better job of preparing for when I get about halfway into a book and make sure I have food I can throw into the air fryer or microwave.

I’m also not really fit for social interaction when I get like this. There’s a lot of tuning out the surroundings and staring into space. I’ll lose track of what the person I’m talking to is saying or what I just said because I just had a thought about the book.

I find that I’m more tired in this phase of a book. I’ll finish writing for the day and just collapse. I might be able to watch TV — at least, I have the TV on and I might be able to follow the plot of a TV show, but I wouldn’t be able to summarize it for you later — but reading is a challenge because the page becomes a jumble of words that have no meaning since my brain takes off into la-la land. I tend to sleep harder and longer and have vivid, intense dreams that may or may not relate to the book.

Although it’s disruptive to my daily life, Book Brain is usually a good thing because it means that I’m immersed in the story. Sometimes it’s like I’m writing fan fiction for the story in my head. I’ll come up with scenes that will never make it into the book, imagining conversations the characters might have that aren’t about the main plot or backstory scenes for the characters that aren’t relevant to the present. I do often get good insights about the characters from these mental detours, and that makes the characters more real to me as I write. Book Brain also means I get a lot of writing done and hit my deadlines. I’d far rather spend a couple of weeks spaced out and not able to do much other than write and collapse and have the book get written quickly than stare at the screen and go blank because there’s so much going on in real life. A balance would be nice, but since Book Brain usually doesn’t last for more than a month, at most, I can get the balance at other times. I do try to make myself leave the house so I don’t become a weird hermit. I can brainstorm while taking a walk, and I’ve found that going to classical or jazz concerts is great. I’m supposed to be sitting still and staring into space, so I can let the music wash over me while I think about my book.

If I keep on at the current pace, I may finish the first draft next week, and then I can emerge from my cave, blinking into the sunlight, and try to remember what I was doing before I fell into my book.