Keybard

I'll check out the keyboard. Yes, you're right to warn me off the researching but it's too late I tell you, too late! Yesterday I was outlining the plot in Visio, and then I started looking at the boxes I'd drawn and thought how nice it would be to attach metadata to each box. And maybe organize each box by facets.

And that got me thinking about facets and how perhaps there was something useful in using a kind of ontological approach of associating one-word metadata fields to each scene and then arranging them by theme, right? The way really clever writers do, when their chapters are all organized not only by the dictates of the story, but each section explores some theme or preoccupation. Kundera, for instance. I was momentarily breathless w/excitement. Did I suddenly find myself in Kundera's section of town? Look how impressive the solid brownstones with their sweeping staircases and look at the doorman with his genial but forbidding expression! Yes, Kundera was nearby, sitting at a plate-glass window with a view of the city below and from his altitude all the messy problems of composition had been reduced to small and easily solved mathematical puzzles.

So I'm totally fuckin' nutso off the rails blocked but I know this can be solved by a simple good morning's work. Of which I've already wasted 35 minutes (now 43). I need one of those days when it simply flies out...when it's controlled regurgitation onto the screen. More vitamins! That's what I need. It's all a vitamin deficiency. Do you like water, Mandrake? I first discovered this problem in the act of love, Mandrake.

All of my frustration somehow resolves itself in the image of my brother-in-law. He puts his bare feet up, compulsively, on any surface. If he's sitting on the sofa, his dogs sprawl on the coffee table, toes nudging magazines, remote controls and bowls of potpourri out out of their way. If he's at the dinner table, he'll pull a chair close by and the dogs go up; his hairy phalanges wrestle with themselves as he chews. If he's upstairs watching my baby son play, the dogs go up on the playpen. At which point my baby son seizes a toe to thrust it into his mouth.

I can recall every detail of those naked feet; their length, width, the ragged yellow bits of nail that capped each restless toe.

More vitamins! More technology! Anything but words on the fuckin' page.