The oil change actually went quickly yesterday! Just over an hour. Usually, they leave me sitting, and I've learned to bring plenty with me to do. Yesterday, I chose to bring the Alphasmart Dana with me, thinking I'd get some writing done--or at the very least, some worldbuilding. It ended up being worldbuilding. There were two men already in the waiting area, Muzak on the loud speakers and a steady stream of people walking back and forth just feet from where I sat. Not a conducive atmosphere for creative writing.
I mentioned that I don't like my Dana much and a lot of that has to do with the keyboard. After a while, though, I started getting used to it and it wasn't so bad. I'm not sure that it's something I'd chose to write on regularly, but I think I might be able to do it now. As I was working, I had two people stop and ask me what that thing was. :-) Good thing I wasn't writing because that would have pulled me out of the groove.
On the worldbuilding, I hadn't put any of it down before--it's all been in my head--so I think it was a good thing to do. There's something about writing down ideas that solidifies them for me and helps me figure things out. Yesterday, what I started questioning was relationships between these different groups in my magical society. What is each group's function? Can the skills overlap? And that helped when I got home and went to work on my story.
As I was typing up information about the world, time flew by. I was amazed when I heard the car was ready. Not only did they change the oil, but they checked the muffler (nothing was wrong with it) and they found a tire with a slow leak. There are a gazillion nails around my new house, and despite my dad's obsessive effort to pick them all up, I had one lodged in the right front tire. So they plugged that and rotated the tires around.
I didn't get a chance to finish getting my worldbuilding information down, but I think I might pick up where I left off when I go to have my taxes done on Wednesday.
I spent most of the rest of the day writing. I finished the chapter I was working on, sent it to one of my friends, started on the next chapter, and then I got her comments back. She had a problem with the end of the chapter. We discussed that a bit, I trashed what I'd started and answered her reservations at the start of the next chapter.
The only thing about that, though, was that I'd deliberately wanted to skip ahead in time and now I wasn't. There was a bunch of boring stuff in there that I hadn't wanted to cover, but now I was going to have to and I tried to come up with a way to make it interesting. I had the epiphany after I logged off and went to bed. So this morning I'll fix that up and see if it works, then go on from there.
