I Would Take My Brain To The Dumpster But It's The Only One I've Got

Hmm...Change "brain" to "heart" and there might be a country song there.

What I should do is take the unsigned contract for The Shade Of The Moon to the dumpster, because my bad wicked brain is coming up with short story ideas and book structures and all kinds of things that take time and energy and bring back insomnia. Not stress, because the contract after all is unsigned (and probably already buried under a pile of things in the file cabinet, which isn't the tidiest place in my apartment).



I don't like insomnia and I'm still trying to regain my energy, and while I have plenty of time, I ought to be spending it on cleaning my apartment and atoning and useful stuff like that. Not in making up Rules For A Volume Of Short Stories, when I'm the one writing the stories, so why do I need to make up rules?

Wanna hear the rules? Every story has to have a character with a stated connection to a character in Life As We Knew It, The Dead And The Gone, or This World We Live In. For example, a story could be about Alex's friend Chris Flynn (that's one of the ones giving me insomnia), or it could be about a figure skater who casually mentions knowing Brandon the figure skater. And the stories will take place over a 2 year (give or take) time frame, so it can end with Miranda and/or Alex making it to the safe town, because lots of people want to know what happens to Miranda and Alex. The stories would be chronological, and have some kind of date (like March Year 2), so the readers will have a sense of when it's happening. I even have a prologue story and an epilogue story in mind and I remembered a moment ago a middle of the book story that would connect in its way with the prologue and the epilogue, but I'd almost forgotten it, which is what happens when you have insomnia and an unsigned contract and you really really need some time off.

Really.

Anyway, there's a big difference between coming up with ideas for stories and actually writing stories, and then there's another good sized difference between writing stories and having your publisher like the stories you've written. So the contract will remain unsigned (although I did notice when I took the file cabinet pictures that it's right on top of the files, and easy to locate, at least for the time being).

Oh how I love killing off all humanity. Which is probably something I should seriously atone for!