Digging to the truth

So I'm still in a rewrite of Crashpoint Cascade. And I'm plowing through this scene, feeling itchy because it's not right. It's not immediate enough, it's like a rough draft that I hadn't noticed is a rough draft.

It's a scene around a picnic table, with a number of characters, some of them minor. One of them is trying to convince the rest to stick with him through a political crisis. So a few characters just pop up out of nowhere who were at the table the whole time but I just had not focused on them. And they start talking, pulling the scene in other directions.

Before I know it, the scene is going off the rails. I've got some new characters raising issues that don't fit, I don't know why they're saying things, where they're going with various positions and statements. Chaos. but some of it is interesting, and a little voice says not to throw those tidbits away.

And then I move a paragraph that had made the whole narrative disjunctive. And pieces start to fall into place. Motives appear, things start to make sense. I realize that the true scene was there all along, lurking somewhere in my subconcious. It needed to be pried out slowly and carefully. There's a process to make this happen. I must keep doing it and not rushing to get so many pages done per day.

30 Years later, the Trackball rolls into the Lair

Today is the Trackball's birthday. It's funny that as one ages, that a whole bunch of old birthday traditions no longer have much interest while new ones appear.

  • The donut breakfast? The soda for lunch? The large amounts of cake, the favorite food for dinner? I'm post food (ignoring lunch today).
  • The money that financed summer entertainment? I'm self-financed and almost post money.
  • The Legos? I bring my own.
  • Celebrating the day on the day, regardless of how convenient? Now I wait for the weekend
It's not that the idea of the birthday has diminished as the birthdays rack up. The same level of excitement is there, it's just redirected to bigger objects. To the gift I have given myself: my own personal lair. A dream many years in coming true. It's 1.0, but it's done. Ever since seeing the Batcave as a 5 year old, I have wanted my own lair.

New birthday tradition: chilling out in your own personalized Lair.