days of future past

I'm still on my Moody Blues album title references bandwagon this week (see title of this blog entry). Perhaps because I have been cooped up inside for most of it. My week so far: home, hospital, home, work, home. I will be seeing real people today and tomorrow (woohoo!) even if I have to be doped up on pain medication to do it.

I don't like that I have to take the pain medication at all. It bothers me that my body is being a bitch. It bothers me that I wake up in the morning and wonder if I will ever have a perfect day health wise again (usually it is my second thought after I wonder about the weird dream I have just had). It has been such a long time.

On the plus side (there is always a positive in every situation), being cooped up for much of the week has not been wasted. I've spent most of the time editing the second novel (in between the drug induced sleeping through the pain and the borderline obsessive viewing of the Terminator - Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series, as I have a tendency to do when procrastinating).

And the editing kicked off with my excitement over finally figuring out a time conversion model for the novel - the story covers two worlds whose measure of time is different and consistency of timelines is paramount to the quality of the story. So an excel spreadsheet later, I finally found a solution that had me (and I expect some of my geekier eventual readers of the novel) feeling like I had discovered the Holy Grail. Okay, I am exaggerating a bit, but it was just the "pick me up" I needed. With the added bonus of now being able to include a modest appendix in the novel with a historical timeline that will please any discerning fantasy novel reader.

The other thing that got my brain engaged this week was an article that a friend of mine posted on FB this week:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/science/16tier.html?_r=2

The premise of the article was that 'daydreaming' was a contributer to unhappiness. I have to admit I was surprised by this theory. Though it did lead me to think that meditation - clearing your mind - is aimed at giving a person peace. I'm pretty sure I've been a mind wanderer since, well, birth so now I'm going to worry if I was born unhappy! I'm going to treat mind time as "me time" and the real world as the distraction from now on so that I don't have some psychologist telling me that one of my key sources of creativity is bad for me!

By the way, I've made no explicit reference to why I chose the particular title for this week's blog entry. I am leaving it to the reader today to connect the dots.

Back to the editing.