Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Distractions

I don't know why I bother to monitor weather reports. Today is supposed to be worse than yesterday, storms, gale force wind, heavy rain, hail... yet here I sit looking out an absolutely gorgeous still, but chilly, morning with nary a cloud in the powder-blue sky. sigh Maybe it's going to be a 'Melbourne' day - four seasons in twenty-four hours.

So. I'm editing and researching at the same time: American prisons, muscle anatomy, fire-arms, genetics, Asian culture, time zones... and that's the first thirty-odd pages.

I'm the kind of person who is easily distracted by information. I'll be looking up one thing and bam! an hour later I'm reading stuff that has nothing to do with the original question. The encyclopedia is my best friend, and my worst enemy.

There I am, reading up on relative and subjective time and the next thing, I'm reading stuff on the Woollamai Pine. Or searching for prison locations and I find cool stuff on the forests of Romania. What's up with that?

It's a wide and interesting world. Who knows what I'll find as I research the Amazon rain forests. Art? Mechanics? Politics?

Time to get to it; a deadline awaits.

2 comments:

Pandababy said...

You may find pink dolphins - wonderful critters who inhabit many of the Amazons rivers and streams - but my favorite may be the ant colonies that eat cloth. explorers leaving their pants on a bush overnight to dry out can get up and find nothing much left but the belt buckle.

Jaye Patrick said...

I'd forgotten about the pink dolphins, but I do recall a certain species of spider that live in colonies and have webs that can spread out over metres. Having a phobia about spiders, I wonder if I'm brave enough to put a character right in the middle of one.