It cannot just be me.
I spend a lot of my time daydreaming. I’ll admit it. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to write or to find much of my creative spark. I have to let my mind wander, and when I was younger, I think actualizing was easier. There was no underlying structure readily available at a moment’s notice for me beyond what was in my house (20 year old encyclopedias kind of sucked). So, if I got an idea, I simply got down to executing it. Research was a luxury, and when you’re young the little details and nuances that make things more plausible go out the window. I didn’t want to research mutation. I wanted to make turtles that could kill people with ninjitsu.
Now, there’s a great wonder that is available to me as air – so long as I pay the bill. It’s the Internet. It ties into everything in an orgiastic display of information in which I could metaphorically swim through like Scrooge McDuck in his Money Bin, and when I fix on an idea, I can instantly begin to research via this tool (so long as I don’t have to fact check too hard).
Today’s topic: space. A link posted on G+ this morning caused me to click it and begin reading about a Trojan asteroid recently discovered. Beneath that link were pictures of more space stuff. Click. I then found more space stuff. Click. My mind then turned towards the acquisition of space stuff. How we get it. My brain shifts to Arecibo. Click. I’m on Wikipedia looking at images and skimming for content. This in turn makes me think of SETI. Click.
You can see where this is going right? All of this in maybe… fifteen minutes.
I cannot be the only other person that does this. If you give me the internet, and a stray thought and an ounce of spare time, I can become an attention deficit poster child that picks up enough information to be immediately sated but not well informed enough to relay that information accurately – ironic given that I write as a relaxation exercise.
That’s when the real research starts.
The problem is that this happens a lot. It makes it hard to stay focused on one story at a time since I can simply be seized by a new idea and then it’s all over but the click, click, click! I have no less than three short stories presently knocking around in my head. Some written, others only in initial phases. Mostly because in the background the Internet is coaxing me with all of its sundry bits of data.
Ah, the travails of the creative.