A day with no clever titles? Oh crap, the muse is asleep at the wheel!

It is a Friday and I let getting my hands dirty with some yard work be my inspiration today. I think sometimes we have to allow ourslves to be as well rounded as possible. If all I did every night was come home and write for six hours, I would get a lot of words on paper, but would that make me a better writer?

I have said frequently that writers write. I have also said that the best writers also spend time reading. Now, I have seen people say that they do not want the style of others to bleed into their own writing, but I think it is a GOOD thing to allow great writing to infiltrate our minds as we attempt to hone our craft. That would be like me, as a weightlifter to say that I don't want to watch others lift because their bad (or good) habits might become my own! I welcome the challenge to learn and become better. If all I were to do is wrap myself in my own words, my story would get written, but would it be better or worse for the lack of reading? I contend it would be worse.

Again, though, I cannot spend all of my free time reading and writing. I need to keep the mind and body healthy. Which means I need to lift weights. I need to exercise. I also need to keep some form of balance (Karate Kid?) in my soul, so doing house work and yard work is something that creates a calming influence on my mind and has the benefit of creating a peaceful surrounding for when I do sit down and write, or read.

And, what do you know, after working in the back yard and pulling a bag full of weeds, I got some nice work done on the WIP. In this work, I have to find ways to make the entire globe fail, but it needs to be something more complex than a freaking flu pandemic and nowhere near as simplistic as 'global thermonuclear war.' But I do think that there has to be a nuclear component. So, rather than have the US of Carthania (an alternate United States of America) launch a nuclear war against Asia (or vice-versa) I create a situation where the continent implodes in their distrust of each other... assisted, of course, by Carthania which gives N. Korea nuclear armaments knowing that China will become distrustful and the two will destroy each other...

But because this is an 'end times' situation, there also has to be some destruction in the U.S. which is more convoluted, and that was my topic for the night. I really am finding this work challenging and it will not be as easy to write, edit and copy-edit this work. Either I am going to make a masterpiece out of this or the biggest pile of rubbish since Gigli!