When I was in France this year, I picked up a poem book with local poetry. One of the poems really struck me (and I wish I had the book with me, but sadly I don't). The part that really got me was, and I'm paraphrasing here: The best ideas come in the shower,
The best ideas come on a long ride on a train
Then they are passed into the ether never to be seen again. That isn't the poem, but the basic "idea" of the poem. I loved it, because I always have these flighted ideas in the shower, or waiting for an airplane or at 3:00am. I never revisit them (but to my credit I have started a text file on my laptop where I just throw them in now). Milk-Thirsty is exactly like one of my ideas, but I'm never thirsty for milk. Please keep doing these (Whoops thought this was posted by someone else) fuffle!
Reminds me of a story I heard about Tom Waits (and now you've read it). What idea did you have that was milk-thirsty in a different format?
I absolutely loved that Waits' article! That is perfectly fitting to the conversation. Here are two ideas from my text file:
Robot Dragon story, something about a boy who builds a robot dragon who ultimately destroys an entire town Asteroid story, an life long astronomer discovers an asteroid and gets it named after herself, only to find that it's heading straight toward earth and will kill her grandchildren. She has an existential crisis. I also get a lot of software ideas.
This is what separates writers from others - the ability and desire to put the fucking pen to the fucking paper. I have a couple friends that hassle me during NaNoWriMo. One of them wrote me an email recently saying "I've got all the big set pieces but all the stuff in between is boring and I don't like writing it. How can I change this?" I told him "that boring stuff between the crap you want to write? THAT'S THE JOB. The art of writing is the art of taking the shit that isn't interesting and making it interesting not just for you, but for everyone who reads you." That is what keeps people from "writing the stories."
We are getting about 4 1/2 hours now, usually we get the sun from about 11:30am until 5pm then it gets dark again. The snow is completely covered in ice right now so it's hard to even walk very far without slipping! Planes aren't coming in or out, and there is an Olympic Cross Country skier (Lars Flora) stuck at the school until the planes can get here. Sorry about the misplaced shout out I think I was looking at the shared items and not the "By"!