Cold Days

I just laid out a rough outline for an attempt on an urban sort of fantasy, a genre I've never done more than flirt with. And then today, out of the blue another idea for a more epic fantasy story jammed itself into my head, on top of the urban fantasy that was busy mud wrestling for brain space with the details of the books I've written and am still working on.
What is it about cold weather that brings me tons of ideas that I'm forced merely to hen peck while struggling to continue the physical tasks required for keeping horses maintained during winter weather? I find myself rigging heat lamps and then scribbling notes with a pencil held in my teeth while my fingers thaw and then it's back outside to break water troughs (one day I'll fall through the ice and then maybe I'll start using a sledge hammer rather than jumping up and down on the ice until it cracks) and writing is put off until my zipper thaws enough for me to climb out of the neck of my coat.
Ideas never come to me at convenient moments, when I'm staring at a blank page, thwarted by a conflict going on amongst my characters and their enemies that I can't resolve in an adequate fasion. They never show up while I'm sitting at the doctor's office bored beyond conscious thought, or during a traffic jam while I'm doing nothing more constructive than burning gas. No, the best ideas seem reserved for the moments when I have something else to do, and usually a horse depending on me to do it, which makes it impossible for me to forsake the task in favor of giving my attention to whatever little thought pops into my head and wants to be addressed. That's why all of my coat and jean pockets are stuffed with scraps of paper filled with notes that no one can read and why the dryer's lint trap is constantly clogged with malformed wads of paper that were lately something important that I'll spend the next week cursing over and looking for...

Blogging and Zombies

This blogging thing is an entirely new idea for me.  If you knew my family, you would wonder how talking in any form could be difficult, but nevertheless, it is at least right now.  The women in my family have the ability to talk a bullet through kevlar.  This is a well documented fact.  And yet, ask me about my writing and I will revert to something similar to a three year old who just got caught eating a goldfish.  Which is one reason that I felt blogging would be a good idea.  After all, it won't do me much good to get an agent interested in me if I can't articulate my goals and ideas to them. 

For me, writing is like a zombie (and I've met a few zombies in my time) because no matter what you do to the thing, it's still there, screaming for brains and crawling around getting underfoot.  The only way to get rid of it is either feed it or cut it's head off, and even the latter doesn't always work, sometimes you just end up with two zombies, like a fishing worm cut in half that just crawls off in two directions.   I prefer to feed my writing zombie, it's less messy and I don't have the floor space for more than one crawling around anyway.  Speaking of which, the thing is having a fit at the moment, demanding that I do something with it, so I'll leave this second post of my life as it is, a bit about blogging and a little about zombies, and go feed my own little undead, brain consuming obsession.....