Shuffle that plot!

Today, I was awakened to the sound of CBU telling me about the explosion of destruction that Entropy has caused. At 7am. After just falling asleep at 5am. Knowing I had a meeting at 11am.

Entropy had decided to 1. SHRED the paint off of a nice swath of base board. 2. EAT the rubber door stop. 3. DUMP OVER her litter box. 4. PEE all over the floor/food. 5. DIG in the tile grout. and 6. DESTROY anything else within reach.

The words, "SQUALOR HELL HOLE" came to mind this morning.

It most likely WASN'T the food that caused her recent bout of blockage - it was probably the MOFO LATEX PAINT she decided was super tasty.

It took over an HOUR to clean her hurricane demonstration of the title, 'BATTLE BUNNY OF DARKNESS, THE BRINGER OF THE APOCALYPSE' off the floors, walls, boxes, etc. until her area was habitable. (Of course, I then promptly passed out at around 8:00am-ish while CBU went down to the hardware store to get paint, grout, stuff.)

OOOH! But the CBU brought home gifts - INDEX CARDS! I had been needing some index cards for my book(s) for a while. I had some events and I wrote those down pretty fast and then, I was empty. No more plot ideas. No more event ideas. UGH!

My friend Alex and I were talking about books and I started telling him that I needed 'events' and we started discussing morbidly funny types of events.

[01:55:18 AM] Alex2: I really don't want to become metallic hydrogen, thought Aaron as he zipped his insulating suit up. The methane-gathering mission was normally not very dangerous, but during the fuel strike, he had seen people hit by pellets of fuel, fired from the orbiting refueling points. The irony of being hit and killed by a giant pellet of methane derivatives as he gathered its gassy precursor from the atmosphere made him grin, a rictus, against the cramping fear it had sown in his guts.

That's just classic.

While we were discussing these kinds of things, I started describing some actions of one of my main characters. I listed a series of themes that a particular character goes through to explain why I was looking for events and all that jazz. As I was writing it out, I thought, hey...

Why don't I write each of these themes out onto an index card, SHUFFLE THEM, and then put the cards out in order to see what it looks like? (I've only got seven major themes, so, it's not like 52 card pick up...)

HOLY MARY MOTHER OF GOD, IT WAS AWESOME.

I shuffled the deck, played down each card and looked at the 'progression' of themes... and they spoke to me. The themes play out just right for each character now. It's exactly where I wanted to take them, and now I can see the correlation of events! YIPPEEEEEEEE!

I HAVE PLOT!