Random blatherings

Yeah, not a whole lot of structure to today's post. Some days I just feel like rambling, ya know?

I'm rather pleased with the results of last week's poll -- 59% of you stated you'd buy pretty much anything I decided to write, and 31% said it'd depend on the subject matter, so if I manage to find the right amount of geek interest, I could conceivably get 90% of my readership to buy my work. For someone who's only been blogging since February of this year, that ain't hay.

So in the interest of generating hype, interest and random speculation, let me say that I am writing something that has a better-than-decent chance at getting picked up commercially. It's little more than an outline at this point, but things are going well and in the next few months the serious writing begins. It's my hope to have this enterprise ready to throw at a publisher by Christmas... and wouldn't that be a fabulous little present to myself?

Since I want to baste my brain with creativity, I've been reading and watching all sorts of things unrelated to my story. I don't know if this works for anyone else, but it holds true for me: the more I think on a subject, the more likely I am to fixate on it and not be creative; but if I allow my mind to wander all over the place, I get some very creative (and very strange) notions:

• Once, I was reading up on the Kabbalah and I had a flash of insight about computer Operating Systems, GUIs and the psychology behind both.
  
• Some time later, I was fixing my computer when I realized that the Revelations of St. John of Patmos were neither Serial (chronological) nor Parallel (concurrent), but was in fact SCSI. (Let me know if that doesn't make sense and I'll explain it in another post.)
• Most recently, I was pondering dialectical materialism when I came to the sudden conclusion that Greg Land is an artistic hack.

(Okay, maybe not that last one.)

ANYhoo... the point remains that, if I'm writing about N, then clearly I should read/watch/experience Not N. Thus, samurai. (And you may safely deduce that I am not writing a book about samurai.)

Now... I'm not declaring a theme week or anything (and yes, I'm fully aware I still owe you a week of My Lurking Sound), but since I'm currently on a samurai binge, you can reasonably expect me to blather on about them for at least a post or two. If I get a week out of it, I'll call it a week in retrospect.... but I'm just as likely to shift gears and start talking about Zelazney's Amber Chronicles or somesuch.

As I said before, I am a literary trainwreck.