Kage Baker loved weekends at home. She especially liked it when she had a project burning a hole in her brain (as it were): then she could spend the Sunday not in lazy perusal of the newspapers or old movies, but in frenzied world building.

It was a quiet frenzy, usually; long periods of staring out the window or at her blank computer screen, twirling the end of her braid over and over in her fingers. Then, suddenly! A mad burst of typing, at which she was incredibly fast when inspiration struck her. As Kage never learned to type, it was all a two-finger tarantella – the sound of creation was the staccato percussion of Chico Marx playing the piano.

Few things made her as happy as spending the day like that,

I have no real blog post tonight, because I have spent the day in a similar state (although the typing is less machine gun and more regular – I can use all 10 of my fingers.) Yestreday, I decided to work on the Zombie story, you see: but somehow in the past year, I had misplaced some 30-odd pages of the story. I prowled the house desperately in search of the laptop I had recently replaced – assuming, not unreasonably, I felt, that I might have put the extra pages on a different document thereon. However, I rapidly recalled that 1) I could not remember my sign in; and 2) I’d replaced the laptop because the damn thing would not longer make an Internet connection.

Unable to open my old laptop, I was in despair: but then my clever sister Kimberly produced the missing section! I had sent it to her for a backup, and totally forgotten I’d done it. But Kimberly remembered – which is why she keeps all our records around here, while my brain all too frequently simply leaks out my ears …

Anyway, the project I so needed was restored to me. I have spent the day editing, re-writing, and stitching the various sections to date into a seamless (ha!) whole. It was a day of bliss. And horror – rewriting always has a plethora of WTF moments, when the words of Robert Browning resound: “God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows.”

But figuring out what I meant is a joy. And if I cannot figure that out, I can at least make sure it’s spelled and punctuated properly.

More story as it develops, Dear Readers. And now, back to following my own footprints through the mist …