Day# 16 - Week iii - 2010

The day of the papers

When I was 12, I wrote my first short novel. I did it because I had what I call IOS, or "Information Overflow Syndrom". Your brain is swirling in a hurricane of ideas that your eyes absorbed reading and researching and listening to a million bits of information floating around you in sound bites, encyclopedias and books. Then storing them all in your mind becomes so intolerable that you just have to spill the beans out. And out they come like a torrent that was just waiting to burst through a cracking dam. Intelligence gives them form and structure as it connects them into a literary form. Then some critique will call it genius.

Today I spent about 4 hours - at least - going through WSJ papers from last week and this weekend, looking for bits and pieces of information and/or events that could b used to build the pieces of the puzzle in my new novel. For the last five years, I have been definitely exposed to a much different sets of information, opinions and experiences. My brain has been absorbing by and large a different type of information and learning to link events and information in a different paradigms far from detective novels and teen adventure books. I was more being formatted to the tune of an Economist and a WSJ subscription, while being on the mailing list of no less than 10 other newsletters, news aggregators and other public information (i.e. web bites).

My cork board is now full and (I think) ready to start the process of lying the foundations of the plot and space-time around which the story will take place. The rest is details. A ton of details...

Before going to bed, I just read something that I fondly agree with. Something you can't explain to somebody who can't relate to; something you don't have to explain in the opposite case.
"Behind every successful man, there's an untold pain in his heart" - Bill Jacobs.