Despite Armageddon, we're making progress.

Right after I blithely said, "See? The Armageddon isn't so bad," a sale book with 916 cows hit my desk and I got buried in the detritus.

Which meant I spent a lot of time staring at the sale book and longing, yearning, to get to a computer or notebook and work on my story.

Though if I'd had actual hours or even days to work on this story, I'd be devising all sorts of nefarious schemes to get out of any form of writing.

I seem to get more done when I have less time to do it in.

So lately I've taken to walking around the basement track during lunch time, thinking about story. I do a kind of walking meditation, working my way down into a trance state as I walk, and then I can come up with a few things to write about. Sometimes I come back with two or three useful story things, sometimes I come back with nothing. Sometimes you catch a fish and sometimes you don't. That's just how it goes.

A lot of it is just trying to visualize the characters, trying to see exactly what's going on. I like it best when I get an image. But usually everything's so blurry.

Sometimes I'll do a little typing during lunch, usually when other people show up in the basement to do some walking, and then I can't think and I go to my computer.

But in this way, over the last two weeks I've pulled together two chapters, and there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in them. I really think that walking, and giving myself time to visualize, and giving my unconscious mind time to pull goodies out of its metaphorical hat, has really helped get these chapters going.

Another thing that helped was finding (at last!) a song to listen to while writing. Last Saturday KKFI played Eric Clapton's "River of Tears" from his One Car, One Rider album. I bought it today (no time yesterday) off i-Tunes for 99 cents and during lunch I played it while I was writing. With the music, I finally got the emotion, the feeling, I was looking for from my main character. That was worth the price of admission.

And earlier tonight I finished up the sale book and came home. Did some storywork and finished this week's chapter and I'm ready to move on to the next.

So I'm feeling good.