Getting it Together
September 29, 1999
5:47 a.m.
So I'm getting my act together, slowly, ever so slowly. What this means is that I'm just trying to plow through one minute after the next until I find myself back into a comfortable rhythm. My plans are crowded as ever. First try to clean up the stories from last week, second get back into the novella that I didn't finish the week before, third, start the novel I've got planned for next. Monday I went to the library for lunch, whereupon I returned an overdue book and paid my debt to society--a dime fine for being a week late. I also checked out four books on World War II, specifically in Italy and Malta, in order to try to put a nail into one of the stories I wrote out in LA. Read most of what I needed by yesterday. With luck I'll have enough to finish the thing by tomorrow. One of the problems I have when I research things is that I tend to get easily sidetracked into things that aren't really germane to the point I'm looking for. For example: When we went to the library last week, I intended to get a bit or two about star systems. Instead, I got carried away, and just walked straight down a single aisle, picking three books at random. The idea was that I would write a story out of items I arrived at in each of them. The three I chose were "The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe," "The 2,000 Year Old Man" (or something like it...it's a Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner thing), and something on the Sepoy revolution in India. I actually have an idea I might write about that one. But the point of my rumbling is that I then spent the next hour reading a bunch of stuff about Poe, and a little stuff about the Sepoy revolution, which I thought was quite interesting never was much of an expert on either. Then I browsed, finding something about code crackers in the war, and about Roosevelt and Stephenson, and Montgomery and how he worked the political angles between them to protect the fact that the Allies could read German codes. Fascinating. When you're a dumb engineer like me, you can learn something new every day. Of course, it wasn't until I was back at the hotel that I realized that I had forgotten to even attempt to find anything about star systems.   See ya tomorrow.  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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"Is not life one hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?" Friedrich Nietzsche |
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