the fun part

RESEARCH baby.Today I spent the day Christmas shopping, and making soup, and getting discouraged when I saw that my absolutely pared-down Christmas card list* still topped 50.

But for the few days before that (and hopefully again tomorrow), I was lost in a fog of research for my second book: just me, a pot of green tea, a notebook & pens, an open Scrivener doc, 13 open tabs, and a pile of open books. 

Research is the best, happiest, most delightful part of writing, in my limited experience. All the tendencies that make you Bad Writer when you're meant to be actually writing -- wandering around the nets following up every little thread that strikes your fancy, spending hours buried in a book -- they're exactly right when it comes to research. I can be as random as I like, and full of dumb ideas, and that's just right. Research is just pure play, and you can lose yourself in it for hours.

And then the sad time comes where you have to grow up and be a good farmer and start cultivating some of these randomly-flung seeds, see what fits the ground. That's the getting up at 4am (metaphorically) (usually metaphorically, anyway), put on your boots, go out in the cold, get your hands dirty part. It's NOT AS FUN.

But for now I get the fun part, at least for a few weeks, before I have to buckle down. Whee!

I can't be the only writer who feels this way?

*I haven't done Christmas cards in years but I had such a happy, lucky year, I want to send out some prettiness into the world. But apparently no more than 50 prettinesses, specifically.