back in the saddle

Woke at 3:30, lay in bed, got up at 5:45.

Morning notes: From Eden to Exile, The Grail Legend.

Saw Kimmie off to work, did my morning routine, then ran out of procrastinating strategies so I came down here and opened up chapter 17 notes and draft in progress. On!

I reviewed my last two note entries, and felt guilty to see that these were from 12 and 13 July. But they were good--especially the entry for 13 July, in which I pretty much solved my structural problems for this chapter. Why, I thought, if I just work off this I'll have a decent chapter. Jump! Go!

Where was I. I was in the middle of a dialogue exchange. Oh yeah...Sosigenes has just asked Alexander something. Hm, I knew what the answer to that was going to be, but now I can't remember. Argh. Back to my notes. Oh yes, it had to do with Hipparchus and his discovery of a star in Scorpio. Now what was that star? Do I have that in my notes?

I sidetracked into my notes. No, not there. I pulled Richard Hinckley Allen's Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning from my bookshelf and flipped it open to the entry on Scorpio. Maybe it's mentioned here... Hm, flip to the index, look for Hipparchus... Only mentioned on pages 11 and 12 in Allen's introduction to the constellations... Nope, not there.

Maybe a quick search of the web. I Googled Hipparchus, star, discover, Scorpio, and came up with a bunch of hits. Started checking them out. Yes, yes, they mention his discover of "a star" in Scorpio, but does anyone know which star?

Seems not. Does it matter? Of course not! Who cares? Only I care about which star it was that Hipparchus is believed to have discovered in 134 BC. It was an important event, for it got Hipparchus (antiquity's greatest astronomer) into creating his own star catalog, the basis of our modern catalogs. But do I need to stop writing my story while I dig into this bit of historical trivia? That's the question.

The only reasonable answer is no. After maybe half an hour (I'm guessing--might have been more) I abandoned my search and went back to the chapter. I felt a bit disappointed with myself for letting myself get sidetracked so easily, so immediately. All right, don't indulge that emotion. Just write something, push it ahead, any old how. Let them talk about the star in general terms. If you need to name it you can do that in a later draft. Don't hold up your story.

Timidly I typed. Just execute the outline, I thought. If you do that, it'll be pretty good.

Ideally I'd like to have fun with it. I should be able to: this is my project, my way. But it's not always so simple. I remember working on The Odyssey with Warren, somewhere late in season 1, when terrible outrages had been committed against us, and one of the executives said to us after another gruelling story meeting, "Have fun with it."

Have fun with it. I think I laughed hollowly, even beyond delivering a zinger in response. Fun. Sure, lady.

But now I should be able to have fun. As I lay doing my abdominal crunches this morning here on my office floor, I thought about that possibility. How to let go, just blurt it out. Write fast. I've proven to myself many times over that my writing quality is at least as good when I write fast as when I write slowly, often better. But only as long as I'm prepared. There's the rub. This material is not the stuff I can just free-associate. It is inherently research-intensive.

Nonetheless, I hold that as my goal: I'll pick up some steam and start writing faster, with more of a what-the-hell attitude.