Oh, lordy...

I ganked this from guipago, and I can't remember when a meme made me giggle so much:

In 2007, desperance resolves to...

Pay for my androids on time.
Put fifty dragons a month into my savings account.
Tell my family about musicals.
Spend more time with my new words.
Take evening classes in tequila.
Overcome my secret fear of cats.

Get your own New Year's Resolutions:

It is, to be frank, just perfect.

Writing a synopsis

How it works, when I really have no idea where a storyline is going: I get the hell out of here, go for a walk and think about it. Work out something that sounds reasonable for the next stretch, come home and write it down. And repeat. Three or four times a day, to make sensible progress.

Trouble is, I'm still full of cold and very disinclined to go outside. I dragged myself to the supermarket this morning, and that's a walk; came home and wrote two pages of plot, hurrah! Felt cocky. Realised I had run entirely aground again, and didn't want to go out again. Had lunch, gathered together all the dried fruit in the house (actually, I nearly wrote 'dead fruit', but that would be unfair: just that some of it is, well, very dried indeed) and have thrown it into a cake, sooner than throw it out. If the cake's horrible, I'll just throw that out instead; what's it cost me? Three eggs, butter, a bit of flour, a bit of sugar, half an hour's work. It's a very pure cake: no spices, even.

During all this labour - nope, nothing occurred to me about where the book might go next. I said, I have to be walking. All I achieved was to spill dried fruit on the floor and splatter everything in the kitchen with cake-batter. Yup, including Barry. It's his own fault, he shouldn't have been underfoot; I'd already trodden on him once today. Oof, he has a yowl in him. But I was working in the kitchen, which always interests Barry. By then he might have figured out that I was not in fact working to his benefit; but I'd grated my thumb while zesting an orange, so there was blood in the air. Hence, Barry. I keep telling you he is Teh Evil. He wants to suck my blood.

So the kitchen is now full of dirty bowls & stuff, and also besplattered, and I could go down and clean it. Or I could go out and think of story-things. This is how cake-making works, see: it drives me forth despite the weather, despite my sickness, despite everything. I'd even rather write synopsis than clean the kitchen. Or would I...?

Yup. Definitely. 'Bye.

See, told you so...

Went forth empty-headed, tramped for twenty minutes round the hospital grounds, came home with a Brilliant Idea. It was all there already, inherent in the setting and the background and the characters and the story-so-far, but I have to go out and look for these things, they don't come to me. And now I have resolved half my problems with the middle section of the book in one splendid stroke, and all I have to worry about is whether my cake will burn while I write it all down. I have an hour and a half, before it should be ready; and I daren't open the oven door before then, because it might just flatten if I do. So I 'spect I'll end up with one blackened half and one pale half, 'cos that's what my oven does if left to its own devices. Oh, for a decent cooker; oh, for a decent kitchen! I have kitchen envy, to the max: I was at two friends' house last night (and I still don't know how to say that euphoniously. "The house of two friends" is what I mean; if it was just one friend I'd say "a friend's house", but it really doesn't pluralise well that way round) and oh, I lusted after their kitchen. If I'd had that to cook my cake in this afternoon - well, just think how much more kitchen I could've splattered with batter!

And when that hour and a half is up, when I've written what I can write and checked the condition of the cake, I'm going to stop working and watch the TV adaptation of 'Earthsea'. Which I understand to be appalling, but I'm going to watch it anyway, 'cos I'm like that.