Story Fuel

I'm in full-tilt writing and revising mode, having cleared the decks to write for the next couple months with few interruptions. It's a good feeling when that time is there and the story is cooperating.  In the above pic, the white stack is the newly revised portion, the second draft; the blue stack is the first draft, with chapters yet to be revised.

Yesterday, a reader asked me "What do you eat when you write?"

Well.
I'd never been asked that before.
I thought it interesting that the reader did not say "Do you eat when you write?" but rather, "What do you eat . . ", seeming certain that some eating was going on.

Yes. Eating does go on.
Until recently, the munching was any or all of these: nuts, chocolate-covered almonds, mini Milky Ways (dark chocolate ones), popcorn, kettle corn, more chocolate . . .

I know, I know.
And so last week I stopped eating sugar and re-booted my food supplies.
Take a look at the current snacks-for-writing:

I'm not kidding.

And here's what I drink when I write:

Water.  Fizzy.

I know, I know, I'm being so virtuous I can hardly stand myself.

The question is:  which fuel will produce the best words/stories, mm?
Stay tuned . . .

Meanwhile: what do YOU munch on and drink as you sit at the computer, mm?

On the Desk, Part Two

More things on the desk . . .

Above, the essential computer plus a couple lucky turtles.

Dozens of family photos . . ..

Flowers from the yard (these are Rose of *Sharon*) 

in Ikebana vase

Mini-dark-chocolate Milky Way

Camera

And oh yes, the manuscript-in-progress:

66 pages of rough draft prose

And observing me and my desk is this squirrel

three feet in front of me

eye level.

Is your desk near a window? 

The Colors of a Draft

I use pastel colored paper for manuscript drafts; it feels more tentative and fluid than white. It also gives me a visual record of when parts of a draft were done.

In the above stack, the gold pages (approximately 100) were written between May-July, 2009. The blue were written between August-December, 2009 (only about 30 pages because I was on book tour and in England during that time.) The green pages are the most recent (about 100), written in my recent immersion in North Carolina.

I'm not done yet, and the draft is exactly that: a draft. It's like the frame of a house without the windows in it. No paint yet. No electricity. Definitely no granite countertops.  Lots more work to do in subsequent (and new-color) drafts.

The colors help my memory. If I need to quickly refer back to an incident, I can remember when I wrote that scene and what color paper it is on, and I can find it easily.

The final draft (maybe 2 or 3 drafts from now) will be all white and pristine.  Subsequent revisions will be on colored paper to easily identify where changes were made.  I guess I like things fairly orderly; otherwise writing a book and keeping all the details straight might make me crazy.