Coffee and writing...need more of both

There are days when I feel like writing, and days when I don't.  Today is definitely one of those days.

One of which days, you ask?  Hell, I'm not sure I know yet, myself.  As the politicians of the world are fond of saying, "I'm not prepared to take a stand on that yet," or maybe just "No comment."  Two cups of coffee oughtta be enough to help give me an inkling in the matter, but it's not. 

I did manage to get my muse on last night.  After making reservations for this weekend's getaway to Brooklyn, I sat down, quieted down, and revised twenty pages worth of text.  At some point in the revising, I actually switched into creative mode and tackled one of the manuscript's thornier problems.  Some of my readers have told me, see, that at the beginning it's difficult to believe the action, and I agree with them.  I had the first scene of the book all planned out in my head when I wrote it...lights go dark, world goes cold, people are terrified, Matt shepherds them to safety after calling his future mages in through his special doorways through space.  But when I wrote it, I forgot the part about the people being terrified.  I saw it, of course.  In my own head, I knew that the crowd was following him warily, asking questions, nearly running off.  That was the whole point of some of them trying to start their cars, in fact.  I just failed to actually write it, so instead you have a scene where the lights go out, a guy stands up and makes light globes out of nothing and crafts doorways to faraway places, and the people watching it just shrug and follow.  Like zombies...hmmmm...I like zombie stories.

No.  No zombies in this book...sorry.  And no more "oooh, shiny" moments in this blog, at least not today.

Ah, well.  The passage is sort of fixed now, though I want to let it settle for a few days and then go back and re-revise.  Inserting new text is dangerous.  Not only does it need to make sense from a technical "this happened first, and the characters didn't know about that till later" kind of thing, but it also has to match the voice of the surrounding text.  In short, I don't want it to be obvious to the reader where I went in and smushed prose in to fill a gap.

Speaking of gaps...there's a big one now between the "full" line and the "filled to" line on my coffee cup right now.  Off I go, then, to correct the deficiency, and hopefully along the way to determine whether or not I feel like writing today.