Yesterday was, that is. (Today bids fair to be nothing but work, work, work to finish my book on Sea Mammals.)

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend whom I hadn’t seen for a while. She’s a writer (plays and short fiction) and was curious about my experiences at the Taos workshop. During our conversation, I mentioned an idea for a new book–or at least a premise that might be nurtured into an idea–that I’ve been mulling for the past few weeks.

Now, I’m not by any means going to abandon my large and messy time-travel trilogy, but I’ve been thinking about writing a shorter, simpler, stand-alone novel to put some of the plotting insights from Taos into immediate practice. And I’d outline this one first, rather than writing a flabby, unstructured, overlong novel and retrostructuring it. Anyway, I mentioned this germ of an idea to my friend. Just now she called me about an article she’s reading that is directly connected with the premise; it could offer some good plot possibilities. So I have a starting point: Get article. Read article. See what happens.

In an embarrassment of riches, I had another idea, or set of interconnected ideas, completely unexpectedly, while I was washing my hands in the evening. These ideas were for BS, the first time-travel novel. They concerned some fairly sweeping changes that would make that book a lot stranger, but better. They would also go a long way to solving a couple of its biggest problems. I immediately scribbled them down on my whiteboard, happy to have experienced my first out-of-the-blue breakthrough in a while. (Thanks, subconscious mind!)

And then we watched Children of Men. But even that couldn’t buzzkill my day.