movies

Life, Art, and Christmas Movies

I was pretty selective with my holiday movie viewing this holiday season. I didn’t just sit and watch whatever Hallmark stuff was on Amazon. I watched a few older favorites and one new one, but in looking at what I found myself drawn to, I realized I had a few themes that are showing up in my writing, so maybe I should lean into that.

The two big themes that seem to be hitting me are “getting your act together” and “building community.” Which was basically what Tea and Empathy was all about.

I rewatched Last Christmas after having seen it at the theater when it came out, and I think I liked it more the second time because I didn’t have any particular expectations. That movie was basically all about the heroine getting her act together, but the way she does that is by building a community as she starts actually listening and talking to her family and then reaching out to the people around her. In the end, she’s pulled all those groups together. This is one I might bother getting on video because it’s so heartwarming and life-affirming.

A new one I found this year was This is Christmas, another British film. This one was less about getting one’s act together and was mostly about building community, but the act of building community helped a lot of the characters improve their lives. In some ways, this movie reminded me of a less problematic Love Actually in that it had a countdown to Christmas and involved a group of people whose lives overlapped (but didn’t have a guy making a move on his best friend’s wife). In this movie, a man realizes that he sees the same people every day on the train as they commute from their suburban village to London, but in spite of seeing so much of each other, they don’t really know each other. One day, he impulsively invites them all to a Christmas party, and then he has to pull the party together. The act of creating the party helps create a community among these people, and once they start reaching out to each other, relationships form. It’s really rather sweet.

One of my favorites that I rewatched this year was 12 Dates of Christmas, which is basically a Groundhog Day story in which a woman is set up on a blind date on Christmas Eve, but she’s distracted by her scheme to get back with her ex. After both the date and her attempt to get back with her ex fail, she finds herself living the day yet again. Over the course of reliving that day twelve times, she gets her act together and builds a community, as she lets herself interact with the people she keeps seeing.

Perhaps it’s because of the fact that I’m looking at making a move that these themes are hitting me, or maybe I’m making a move because of these themes. I’m hoping I can find a community in that new place — and considering I had more of a social life in a few days visiting there than I’ve had in years living here, that looks good — and I’m constantly trying to get my act together. But who would have thought that watching Christmas movies and realizing why I like them would give me so much insight into what’s going on with me? This is all a big theme in what I’m hoping to do with the Rydding Village series, as each of the characters gets their act together and as this happens a real community begins to form in the village. I think my life is coming out in my art and in the art that makes me happy, and that, then, is reinforcing some of my life choices.

writing life

2023 in Review

Happy new year!

I’m back at work, trying to not just get back into my old routine, but start some new routines that I hope will be more productive for me.

2023 was a bit of a mixed bag. I know I said that I was giving myself a year to get my writing business turned around or I might have to consider getting a regular job and scaling back the writing. That didn’t go so well. I made very little money last year. However, things did take a substantial uptick later in the year, which felt like enough of a turnaround to encourage me to keep going. I don’t know if I’ll set any kind of deadline for this year because this may be a big transition year for me. I’m pondering a big cross-country move, which is going to disrupt a lot of things. I’m currently veering wildly between “excited” and “terrified” at the concept, but I think what it boils down to is that I really don’t want to be in my current living situation anymore, but I can’t afford to live anywhere else in this area. I’m going to have to move some distance if I’m going to leave my current home. If I’m going to move out of this general area, I may as well make it to a place that doesn’t have a lot of the drawbacks to where I’m living now — mostly the climate. I’m not sure I can tolerate another summer like we had last year. It’s not the part about living in a totally new place that terrifies me. I’m fine with that, and if I could just teleport myself and my stuff into a new home, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But all the logistics of making that kind of move are daunting — selling my current home, figuring out how to ship my stuff (or if I should just ditch everything that doesn’t fit in the Subaru and start all over again instead of paying more than it’s probably worth to ship it), finding a new place to live, figuring out whether to find a short-term rental while I look for a home to buy and leaving my stuff in storage or finding a longer-term temporary place and shipping my stuff there to live for a while before I buy a house, dealing with things like banking and health insurance changes, etc. All that makes me want to crawl into a hole and stay where I am forever, even if I know it’s not where I want to be.

But if I’m moving, there’s no point in finding a job here. I’m considering looking for a job in the place I want to move to, which would have the benefit of allowing me to write some of the moving expenses off my taxes if I’m relocating for a job. But I would prefer to be able to really hit an upswing on the writing and not need that.

The good news is that Tea and Empathy seems to be doing pretty well. It’s already outsold Tales of Enchantment, which came with a built-in fanbase and which had a two-month head start. That suggests I’m finding new readers. Sales for all my books ticked upward a bit after that one was published, so those new readers seem to be finding my other work. I’m starting the brainstorming process for book 2 in that series and hope to get it done before I move.

I’m trying to focus really hard on my work for now. I’m treating it like a real job, with regular working hours and dedicated time for my key tasks. I’ve always been pretty haphazard with my promotional work, so I’m trying to allocate time and come up with a plan for tasks I can do in that time. For now, that means doing a lot of learning about things I can do. My weekend is already full of webinars I’ve signed up for, with one on Friday afternoon, one on Saturday morning and one on Sunday mid-day. The next trick will be actually applying what I’ve learned.

In 2023 I took my first real vacation (involving travel, more than one night away from home, and not for anything to do with work) since 2018 with my epic cross-country road trip that’s what’s kicked off this possible move, as I found that I really did like the place I’d been looking at online. Then I got the new (to me) car that’s suited for that kind of place.

I feel like I didn’t do that much writing. I developed and wrote Tea and Empathy, and I wrote the new stories for Tales of Enchantment. The rest of the year was spent working on a book that refuses to fall into place. I think I’m finally on the right track with it, so maybe I’ll finally get it done and to my agent.

I don’t remember a lot about last year. Just about everything before October seems like a blur. There’s a little more detail between October and June, and before June is blank. It was a weird year. This year is likely to be challenging, but I hope to be in a good place and ready to move forward at the end of it.

 

My Books

Revisiting the Vanishing Visitor

When I wrote Case of the Vanishing Visitor, it was inspired, in part, by the story about Agatha Christie’s disappearance during the 1920s. Her car was found wrecked in a remote place, her suitcase and driver’s license were in it, but she was nowhere to be found. There was a massive search for her, during which it came out that her husband was having an affair and leaving her for another woman. She was later found in a spa hotel about 200 miles away, registered under a different name (using the last name of her husband’s mistress). She claimed that she’d lost her memory, didn’t remember the accident or how she got to the hotel, and for much of the time she was there she didn’t even know who she was.

I was intrigued by this idea and thought it would be particularly fun to do with a sleuth who could see and talk to ghosts. At the time, my snarky theory was that Agatha had set it up to out her husband’s bad behavior and possibly even frame him for murdering her — or at least get public attention focused on his behavior so he’d look shady. Making your cheating soon-to-be ex look bad while having a spa vacation sounds like the perfect revenge.

But last night I watched this documentary about that incident, with new research into what might have happened. (You should be able to watch this video in the United States until around Christmas 2023, but you will likely have to be a PBS member after that. It may be available on the BBC site for those in the UK. And I’m sure there will eventually be a bootleg on YouTube.) Historian Lucy Worsley (my TV BFF — from following her on Facebook and watching her stuff, I bet we’d get along really well) talks to experts in psychiatry and digs into Christie’s books to get clues as to what might have happened. She’s also written a book on Christie, so this information may be included in the book.

Her conclusion is that I was wrong about it being a clever revenge scheme. A psychotherapist said it sounded to him like a fugue state. Christie did apparently see a specialist in London, and Worsley tracks down the specialist it might have been. There’s a description of a character in one of Christie’s books getting hypnotherapy, and the description of the doctor fits this one specialist. There was a lot of trauma in her life around that time, and the news about her husband might have caused her to snap. She did do an interview years later in which she discussed the incident, but it didn’t get nearly the attention the whole search and all the speculation around it did, so what she said about it isn’t as widely known as her disappearance and what people thought was happening at that time.

What I hadn’t been aware of is that Christie wrote non-mysteries under another name. They sound more like what we’d call “women’s fiction” now, dealing with issues in a woman’s life, with maybe a romantic subplot, and no murder. It’s these books that contain a lot of plot elements and characters that can be traced to this particular incident. She seemed to have used this pen name to deal with her issues. My library has some of these, shelved under Agatha Christie’s name, so I’ll have to read some. I’m curious about her writing without murder in it.

But I won’t worry about this info undermining my book because I just used it as inspiration and a jumping-off point, combined with some elements from the movie The Lady Vanishes and all the stuff I’d set up in my series.

I’m planning to take the next couple of weeks as semi-holidays (I may do some writing work, but I’m trying to spend less time on the computer), so I’ll resume blogging in the new year. In the meantime, have a happy holiday season.

Books

Recent Reading: Another Road Trip

I recently found a fantasy book that falls into that “romantic fantasy road trip” category. It doesn’t fit the plot pattern I identified for that kind of movie, but it’s definitely that “people fall in love along the way when they go on a mission/quest through a fantasy world” thing I love.

The book is Mystic and Rider by Sharon Shinn, and it’s the first book in a series. I’d read Shinn’s Archangel in a book group a couple of decades ago, but I hadn’t read any of her fantasy. I really enjoyed this one. The story involves an intelligence gathering mission for a king who’s worried there may be trouble brewing in the kingdom. He sends out one of his top agents, a woman with mysterious powers, and sends two of the king’s Riders, his loyal soldiers, to escort her. Also along for the journey are a young noblewoman with shapechanging powers and her friend with similar powers, and they pick up a young man with mysterious abilities along the way. A lot of people in the kingdom are leery of people with magic, so the mystics in the group and the Riders don’t get along at first, but the chief Rider and the agent gradually realize that they have a lot in common, aside from this difference.

It looks like this series is a hybrid between the romance series structure, in which there’s a different hero and heroine in each book, and the fantasy structure, in which there’s an overarching plot that spans books. There’s the big-picture plot about the scheming going on in the kingdom, but each book seems to focus on a different romantic couple.

I loved the characters in this book and I definitely want to spend more time with them. The romance is very subtle and slow-burn, so it’s more fantasy novel romance than romance novel romance. The main focus is on the mission and how this group learns to work together and use their various abilities as a team. It’s mostly a fantasy adventure story with a subtle romance that gradually comes to the foreground.

The only problem I have is that I got this book from the library and my library system doesn’t have the second book (it does have the rest of the series). I’ll have to put in a request for them to add it to the collection and fill out the series. This is exactly the sort of thing I’ve been looking for.

Life

Breaking Habits

I will confess to being a bit of a creature of habit. I don’t know how much of that is stubbornness and liking routine and how much is because once I find something that works I don’t see a reason to change it. That can sometimes mean I get stuck in a rut or don’t realize when things have changed so that this isn’t the best thing for me now. I’ve found a good example of that in the past couple of weeks.

When I first started working from home for my public relations job more than 20 years ago, I got in the habit of watching the local midday news on TV while I ate lunch. That kept me on a good schedule, since the news was on at noon, and they did the health news usually starting around 12:25 (I was still doing some medical writing then). That meant if I turned on the TV at 12:25, I could catch the health news, then the bottom-of-the-hour repeat of the top stories at 12:30 and get the weather forecast, along with any entertainment news that they put at the end, and I’d be back to work at 1.

Then about four years ago they moved the midday news to 11, which didn’t fit my lunch schedule. I got the bright idea to set a season recording on my DVR, and then I could start lunch whenever I wanted and forward past commercials or any stories or segments I didn’t care about. This meant I ended up spending more time, since I was often watching the whole newscast instead of half of it, and I wasn’t keeping to a steady schedule anymore. But I never questioned whether I needed to make any changes.

Until a couple of weeks ago. My DVR runs on Android TV, and Google did its usual thing of discontinuing an application, rendering the device that runs on it useless. The application that gives the program information is no longer updated, so the DVR season recordings don’t work. It can get the program info for the channel it’s set on, so a couple of hours before something comes on you can manually set a recording. It finally occurred to me to wonder why I should bother. I read the newspaper and then I watch the national and local news in the evening. I don’t need to repeat the same news throughout the day. I’ve started watching videos on writing, history, and other things that are moderately educational while I eat lunch, and after two weeks I already don’t miss the news at all. I’m learning something, am less stressed (without all the doom and gloom from the news), and I’m spending less time on my lunch break. The TV station has most of the individual segments on their app and YouTube channel, so I can get the weather report or anything else I want to see without watching the whole newscast.

So far, I’ve already gone through a series of writing workshops and a few history documentaries. Or, if it’s a nice day, I take my lunch outside and just read. I guess I could bring out my tablet and watch videos outside while I eat lunch. I feel rather liberated by removing this bit of routine. I suppose this means I should look at other things I could change, but I don’t want to shock my system too much.

movies

The Holiday Movie Onslaught

I’m almost ready to start dealing with the holiday season. I’m planning to put up my decorations and start my holiday movie viewing this weekend. For some reason, I’ve developed the kind of reputation for being a Christmas movie fan that has people tagging me on posts about Hallmark movies and sending me memes, but I should clarify that I like some holiday movies. I’m actually pretty picky about them unless I’m hate-watching to snark on them. This is one of those things where I like the idea of them more than I like the actual things. I like the idea of a romantic comedy, especially with a touch of magic, in a holiday setting but I’m generally disappointed by what I see.

I’ll confess that I’m not a huge fan of any of the Hallmark movies, especially the ones from the past eight or so years — when they took over the holiday movie trend and theirs all started following the same pattern, with the person from the city going to the small town and falling in love with the small-town person. While I’m currently planning to move from the city to a smaller town, the town I’m planning to move to is more than five times as big as the small town where I went to high school and it feels like a city (though I’ll admit that this town is right out of a Hallmark movie). And since this isn’t a town I’m from, I won’t have to worry about getting back together with my high school boyfriend (definitely not high on my list of romantic fantasies, plus I didn’t have a high school boyfriend) or keeping my family business running.

I prefer the movies with a touch of some kind of paranormal element, though not the “Santa is real, and he/his son/his daughter is hot!” storyline. I’m a little creeped out by any story that requires an adult to believe in Santa Claus. I’m more up for the Sliding Doors or Groundhog Day kinds of stories, or things that make wishes come true, various versions of A Christmas Carol, that kind of thing. About the only “Santa is real” movie I’ve liked was one in which a woman got her hands on the Naughty List and started out using it to get revenge on people who’d wronged her (Naughty or Nice, currently available on Prime Video).

I’m also not a fan of the royalty movies in which our main character ends up with a prince/princess/duke, etc. That works in fairy tales in fantasy worlds, but that’s not a fantasy I can buy into in the real world today. It seems like all the obscure royalty comes crawling out of the woodwork during the holiday season, based on the number of “Christmas prince” type movies.

I think the first TV Christmas movie I noticed and found myself thinking “I like this!” was one called The Christmas List that aired on what was then called The Family Channel (now Freeform) in the 90s, in which a department store employee made a wish list just for fun, then her co-worker stuck it in the mailbox in the store’s Santa display as a joke — and then all her wishes started coming true in weird ways that ended up complicating her life (this doesn’t seem to be streaming anywhere, but there are bootlegs on YouTube). Some of those early movies were really out there, like one that involved a frantic mom crawling through her clothes dryer into an alternate reality where she was a single woman. Lifetime got involved somewhere along the way, and that was when we got more of the regular rom-com style. A lot of these could have been romantic comedies that took place at any other time, but they were set at Christmas. I remember one year when I still had cable when I found Lifetime’s schedule and figured out which ones to watch when. Then Hallmark made it their brand, and the other channels seemed to back off and produce fewer movies. They became depressingly unoriginal and cliched.

Probably my favorite Christmas rom-com type movie is The Holiday, though it’s actually more about the time between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. It kind of skips over Christmas itself. I think I mostly enjoy the idea of spending a vacation holed up in a cozy cottage with a stack of books. I do like that the holiday content is mostly to provide the situation and some emotional stakes without it being rammed down your throat.

I’ll need to scroll through the menus of services I get to see what I want to watch this year. One of my favorites, The 12 Dates of Christmas (basically a Groundhog Day story) is on Prime, and I’ll have to re-watch it. I haven’t watched While You Were Sleeping in a long time, but I think that’s one for between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Any recommendations for things currently on Prime Video? I don’t have Netflix, so don’t even think about recommending something there.

Twice Upon a Christmas cover showing couple in a holiday setting reflected in a shop windowMy book Twice Upon a Christmas actually started as my attempt to write a screenplay for one of these movies. I decided I didn’t want to deal with trying to figure out how to get a film agent and sell the screenplay, so I rewrote it into a novel. Every year or so my agent gets a nibble from a production company, but nothing’s ever come of it. I was targeting Freeform, and they’re one of the ones that nibbled, so I figure I was on target. I keep saying I need to write another one, but I only really want to write that sort of thing around the holiday season, so it takes planning my work schedule in advance. This year, I’m working on a different project, but maybe I’ll plan next year to write a Christmas rom-com, and then it’ll be ready for the year after that.

Life

Holiday Resistance

It’s the time of year when I usually gripe about not being ready for the holidays. I may be better about that this year since I got to experience actual autumn in October this fall by going to Virginia (and driving through the mountains of Tennessee on the way). I think a lot of my holiday resistance usually has to do with it finally feeling like fall here around Thanksgiving, so I don’t get to experience the autumn vibes before the holiday stuff hits.

But I’m still not ready for all holidays, all the time. The trees just started turning fall colors, which makes it hard to make the mental switch. The classical radio station I usually keep on in my office switched to all holiday music the day after Thanksgiving, and I’m not up for that. I’d have preferred a more gradual transition, like start with most of their usual programming and then add in some holiday pieces, increasing the proportion of holiday content as the season progresses. As it is, I’m already sick of some of the holiday pieces not quite a week in, with me just listening while I eat breakfast, read in bed at night, and drive. I can’t listen to Christmas music while I work. Most of that music has words that I know, so even if it’s instrumental my brain tries to sing along, which distracts me from work. Even worse, I’ve performed a lot of the music, so it catches my attention even more.

On the other hand, I rack up the score on the little “six degrees of classical music” game I play when listening to the radio. I get points for a piece I’ve performed, a piece I’ve seen live in concert, a recording I own, or a performer (individual artist, conductor, or group) I’ve seen in person. As a veteran choir member, I’ve performed a ton of Christmas music. I get a lot of points from John Rutter. I’ve sung most of his Christmas music and have seen him conduct in person, and I have his Christmas album, so I own most of the recordings they use on the radio, which gives me triple points. I’ve sung Messiah. They play a lot of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas stuff, and I’ve been at a choir workshop with the former director who’s the conductor for most of their recordings and have been conducted by him, so I get points there. They play a lot of things by ensembles I’ve seen in person, like the Dallas Symphony, Boston Pops, Turtle Creek Chorale, and Baltimore Consort (and I have their Christmas album, so double points). But all that means I can’t listen while I work. My brain zooms in on the music and puts words to it, which clashes with the words I’m trying to create in my head.

Our neighborhood tree lighting is this weekend, and I may go to that, which could help me kick off the season, and then I may get around to putting up my own decorations. I’ve told myself I’m taking a staycation when I finish the book I’m working on, and then I’ll really indulge in the holiday vibe. I’m putting together a “bucket list” of local holiday things I want to do in what may be my last holiday season in this area. Next year, I may be in an entirely different place. The seasons seem to line up better there, so maybe I’ll be more ready for the holidays next year.

Life

A Week of Adventures

I’m more or less back to work after a big Thanksgiving adventure, but then there was a follow-up adventure that threw this week out of whack.

Thanksgiving week, I drove to my parents’ house in East Texas (about a 2-hour drive from where I live). Then on Tuesday, I drove my parents in their car (bigger, nicer, and more comfortable than mine) to Houston to my brother’s house for Thanksgiving. Then Friday morning, I drove us back to my parents’ house, and then I drove home on Saturday. I got to hang out with my brother and his dog, see his house, and spoil his dog. I got lots of good puppy cuddles and ate a lot of good food. The good/bad was that I didn’t get any Thanksgiving leftovers since it wouldn’t have been a great idea to transport them for that long a trip. I wouldn’t have minded a bit of turkey, but it was nice not to have to worry about getting sick of it. I certainly ate enough on the day itself.

Driving my parents’ car gave me a sharp contrast to my car, which is nearly 16 years old, the bare basic model, and with a stick shift. My parents were getting concerned about me driving such an old car, even though it didn’t have too many miles on it. I know if I go through with moving to the mountains, I’ll need a new car. I doubt mine would survive the trip or manage all the hills in Staunton. I’d been researching cars ever since that trip. It looked like about half the cars in the town were Subaru Foresters, so I figured that was a good place to start. I’d read all the reviews and had started doing some online shopping, but the only cars in my budget were used and had more miles on them than my car had.

Until I was scrolling through the dealer sites over the weekend and saw exactly the car I wanted, low mileage, and at a good price. It was even the color I wanted. It felt like it was meant to be. I checked with the dealer Monday morning, went in for a test drive that afternoon, and decided to go for it. I picked it up this morning. It’s a lease return, which explains the relatively low mileage, and it’s one of the fancier trims, so it has all the fancy bells and whistles. For life in the mountains, it’ll be especially handy to have all-wheel drive, a special mode for driving on ice/snow/mud, and heated seats. I’ll have to get used to rolling a window down with the touch of a button instead of cranking, and it will be an adjustment to drive an automatic transmission after driving a stick shift ever since I was 18, though I did get some practice on my trip to Virginia and on the trip to Houston, so I’m not quite as rusty.

Now that I have all that excitement out of the way, I’m hoping I can settle down and concentrate more on work.

Oh, and I even got one of those cheesy big, red bows like they have in all the car commercials.

A blue Subaru Forester with one of those big, cheesy red bows on the hood and a smiling woman who just bought a car.
It’s not a brand-new car, but it’s new to me, and I even got one of those big, red bows.
movies

Amnesia and Action

I discovered this week that a post I had scheduled for while I was on vacation never posted. I’m going to have to figure out why my scheduled posts don’t post, but in the meantime, here it is, with updates as needed.

You’d think it would have occurred to me as I wrote a book about a person with amnesia (Tea and Empathy) that one of the best examples of the kind of amnesia story I like — the “who would you be if you didn’t know who you were?” story — is The Bourne Identity. Only after I had the book totally done did I stumble across the movie (the Matt Damon version, not the 80s version) on Prime Video. I rewatched it anyway.

I read the book in high school when I was going through a spy thriller phase, and that may be what sparked my interest in the amnesia plot. I don’t remember a lot about the book now, but it did have the same basic premise as the recent movie, that of a man who wakes up with no idea who he is, but he turns out to be hypercompetent when it comes to fighting and killing, and the CIA is after him. In the recent movie version, he’s not entirely comfortable with how good he is at killing. He’d prefer to just put it all behind him and start a different kind of life, but his handlers don’t want to let him go.

I suppose I inverted that story somewhat, in that my guy is kind of hyper-incompetent — at least in the skills he thinks he ought to have. He’s good at different things, and realizing what he is and isn’t good at makes him reconsider what kind of person he is.

I also realized while rewatching the movie that the action thriller in which a man and woman go on the run together also fits my romantic road trip outline. There’s the bargain — the reason they’re traveling together. In this case, he offers her money to drive him to Paris. She’s in desperate need of money, so she agrees. There’s bickering as their personalities initially clash, or else they’re at odds because of the reason for the journey. Here, she’s not sure she believes his crazy tale about amnesia and the bank box full of cash and passports, and they argue about that. There’s an attack — usually a big chase scene in the middle of the story — followed by some kind of bonding moment. We have the car chase through Paris, and then the sexy scene when he dyes and cuts her hair to disguise her. Then there’s some kind of split up or departure — he sends her to safety before the final confrontation. And then the return when they’re reunited.

Some of the Bond movies might also follow the pattern, though it varies when the main Bond Girl shows up, and that may mess up the pattern.

I guess now I need to look for more of this kind of thriller to see how it works.

Life

Scattered

I’ve been really distracted this week, doing the thing where I stare at the screen and am a million miles away even though I know what I want to write next. Random things pop into my head, and I find myself following mental rabbit trails. I know part of it is because I have a lot of stuff to think about right now, like getting ready for a big Thanksgiving trip and making decisions about where I may spend the rest of my life and whether to move halfway across the country. But mostly, this sort of thing happens when my brain knows that the thing I’m planning to write is all wrong and I need to figure out the right thing.

And that turned out to be the case. I was stuck on a scene I had planned. I had it all outlined, had seen the “movie” in my head, and yet I couldn’t seem to make myself write it. Every time I sat down to try to write it, my brain would get distracted by random things and I couldn’t focus. Last night, I gave up and sat down with a pen and paper to see if I could outline the rest of the book and add more detail to that scene so it would be easy to write. That was when I realized that the scene doesn’t belong in the book at all. Not only does it not really add anything to the story, but it would change things for the next part I had planned, and that was why I was having trouble outlining that part.

The writing went a lot easier this morning when my brain agreed with me that I was on the right track. I should make a note of that. If I can’t seem to focus, if my brain wants to do absolutely anything but write, I need to look at what I’m planning to write and see if it really belongs in the book. Sometimes, I feel like my brain tries to get me out of the way so it can work things out without my conscious interference. It’ll send me searching for recipes for some dish I had once and have a sudden craving for or looking up books in the library’s collection or other kinds of busy work that suddenly seems urgent, and when that’s done and I get back to writing, I suddenly know exactly what I need to do.

So, next time I’m feeling scattered, I can tell myself that maybe this is part of the process. Though sometimes I do suspect that I’m just being scattered.