As I was driving to work this morning, and the sunrise was painting pink mountains floating in a sea of misty gray clouds, I thought, "whyinthehell am I going to work before dawn when I don't even have an early meeting?"

I'm a mystery to me sometimes.

Words written last night - 0. After dinner out and a trip to the grocery store, my head never really settled down to it.

Other items of interest from my personal life - 0.

A Kind Friend sent me some suggestions for the opening scene of the SEN and all morning my brain has been distracted with brooding over Scene Structure.

I never know how much 'business' to shove in, you know?

1. How much about what the characters are doing does the reader care about? How many details does a scene need to anchor it in the (story) physical world?

2. If the two main characters aren't on screen together, do you skip those story bits? Are you, the reader, only interested in their interaction and are you bored with the development of the actual case in "case stories"?

I've also been thinking about a PSES (Previous Stupid Effing Story) that I wrote. I've always regretted that that one was such an exercise in How Not To Write. I mean, I had the whole story written (in the 'what physically happens with the assignment' sense) before I was forced to admit it was a truckload of garbage.

The reason I'm thinking about it is because it occurred to me today that what the story really needs is for me to go out and find a really cool and kicky new pen, maybe with a dark green ink, that I can use to edit it. Mind you, I haven't looked at that file for three or four years and I'm not sure if there's really anything there to salvage, but I'm inclined to indulge any impulse that leads to the buying of New Writing Implements. And I don't have a dark green pen at the moment. I have red, black, blue, purple, and teal. I have light green and light orange and hot pink, in case I want to circle something on a page. But I don't have a rich, dark green. I don't have a burgundy pen, either, but I know where I can get both of them.

That Shopping Urge will have to wait, though. It's only 8:56 a.m., which is a bit early to be leaving the office for the day.

A client just called and asked me to write her a walk-though for how to enter new data into the software. I like the way they do that, don't you? Just ask you casually to write a walk-though, as though it's a matter of ten minutes' work.

I'm never sure whether to be flattered that I make it sound so easy to use that they assume I can, in fact, produce a detailed walk-through in under 30 minutes or to roll my eyes and think unflattering thoughts about people who assume what I do is easy. Never underestimate the complexity of other people's jobs. It's insulting.

I've been brooding over that for ten minutes, in a vain attempt to forget the memory of my voice promising the client that I'd sketch out a walkthrough and fax it off to her this morning.

In her time zone, it's already 11:00, which means that in her little world, I have an hour.

Spike...you know...all naked and stuff. Totally worth thinking about.