The Undiscovered Country

Turning off The Brain

When Thomas gets frustrated with a toy not assembling the way he expects it to, he either pounds on it, tosses it across the room, or he stares at me and groans as if demanding I fix it for him.

Quite calmly I say, "Just walk away, honey. You'll figure it out eventually."

Whether or not he understands the concept is doubtful, but he does listen enough to walk away. Sometimes. The rest of the time I have to take it away and distract him with something else.

He takes after me, poor fella.

Now if only I would take my own advice more often.

Last night my single braincell told me to leave the premise alone. I didn't want to, so it distracted me with the desire to play with and upload more photos into my flickr album.

Two hours later and happily forgetful of my premise I went to bed. Not ten minutes later, I had it! I knew how to word my premise. Well, the first dozen words anyway.

With my still fully-functional braincell, I jumped out of bed, ran to the living room (okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration) and grabbed a notebook, booklight and pen. I returned to bed and wrote down my premise. I left the notebook et al by my pillow just in case another aha! moment struck me.

It didn't, but no matter. I figured out the hardest part of my premise. The rest could wait until the morning.

An hour ago I finished it up, using only 2 pages of notebook paper to get there.

It is now in the hands of two fellow writers who volunteered to bleed on it for me.

I changed my mind about posting it here, because if it's to get any votes in the contest, I want it on merit alone. Will that hurt my chances? Probably. But if my premise gets me into the second round or higher, I'll know the words alone got me there.

Okay, God, too *grin*.