It’s a rather simple idea yet also a momentous one. I put eggnog in my coffee (along with some skim milk and Splenda) and it’s marvelous. That touch of eggnog flavor just screams “holiday season” with every sip. Marvelous, I tell you!

I wrote a little yesterday. I also started outlining (for real, on paper) one of the novels because I realized when I’m writing the first draft and I have no idea what’s going to happen except for some vague impulse pushing me forward, outlines don’t really help because I just scrap them anyway. But with this one document, however, I technically wrote draft one of it back in 2000. (Yeesh, yes. I was in high school.) And it’s changed so, so much since then — its entire plot, for one thing, as well as the natures of the characters, at least superficially — and I’ve added a cast of wholly new people and deleted a truckload. But all of that editing has basically gone on mentally and you see those differences between the 2000 version and the 2005 version I wrote (somewhere buried on my harddrive). This version, the one I’m on, was started in early November of this year as one of my NaNoWriMo clean projects, to start from scratch with, and it’s taken off since then, but I’m still crawling with it mostly because I don’t know what’s going to happen other than a series of scenes and inevitabilities sketched out in my brain. Bryan suggested the other day that I write outlines of everything in my head because, “It doesn’t really count until it’s on paper in some form, Erin.” His logic and reasonableness scare me a little sometimes because he’s so frickin’ straightforward it’s hard for me to realize that I couldn’t see that before.

So I started an outline. (There were false starts: I have issues with writing things down “just anywhere” because naturally I want to FIND them again, so even if this is the earliest, sketchiest, crappiest outline that ever did exist somehow I want to put it in a notebook, a document, or a folder somewhere that classifies it as “important” in some regard.)

(Note: Microsoft OneNote is a lifesaver. If any of you are considering the Vista upgrade and Office 2007 switch, make sure you get an Office edition with OneNote because it’s an invaluably helpful program and it really makes a huge difference in life. If you want to know more about it, contact me… somehow.)

Back to outlining! So I started one. For one document. I really should actually have real outlines for all of the novels, shouldn’t I? Get into the habit of doing it now so I don’t get yelled at by someone to do it later? Yeah, probably a good idea. But I get so finicky about outlines! (I was the kid in grade school who took the outlining lessons seriously, like I. Section followed by A. Section followed by 1. Section followed by a. Section… yeah. With crazy margins and possibilities of color coding action. You should have seen my AP Biology class notes — which now reside with my freshman year roommate who never gave them back, curse her!)

It is so easy to get me off-topic and rambly today. Not that I’m not like that every day. Ahem. But I refuse to move to footnotes unless WordPress enables awesome digital cool terrific amazing footnoting capabilities involving hyperlinks and coding. Look, I’m even going off on a tangent about going off on tangents…

Back to my points: Eggnog in coffee is awesome (if you like eggnog); I’ve been writing and I mean to write more; I’ve begun outlining and it’s driving me crazy but I still will keep outlining because it will likely help my unsettled, jumbled brain to get more settled and less jumbled. Even if all I manage to tack onto paper is a list of “Things That Need to Happen Eventually and Not in This Particular Order.” We’ll see. Wish me luck!