I Love My Brain!

OK, so that sounds a little vain. What I'm really thinking at this moment is that I love my treadmill. I can always use the cardio workout, since gym time has been hard to come by since the advent of the kids. But what I really love is that I can use my brain while walking, to write. As I mentioned in a recent post, I've become pretty adept at composing in my head, though I have to limit myself to dialog. I have a hard time maintaining descriptive passages in the gray matter until I can write or type them down. But conversation, I can hold onto.

For example...

Last night, I hopped on, fired up the treadmill, punched in 25 minutes on a 4.0 incline at 4.2 miles per hour, and walked down a road to nowhere. 

I started thinking about the next scene in the book I'm working on. The words kept coming. And coming. And coming. I do have a little digital voice recorder. I really should get the Dragon speech recognition software, since this recorder has a USB plug, and was made to work with that application. Plug it in, hit play, and voila! Words! It will save me a lot of after-typing. Someday...

Anyway, by the time I had finished, it was pretty late. I thought I would be able to keep it all in my head until tonight. And I was right.

I just completed a 1,500-word brain dump. Not a bad job of caching, if I do say so myself.
 

As an added bonus, as I was walking around the office today, in the back of my head, I recalled that in this particular conversation, one of the actors makes reference to having twins. But what was the context? I kept asking myself. I couldn't remember. I assumed / hoped it would come to me as I wrote. It did.

Here's the setup: my hero has been in the hospital with an injury. His eyes have been taped shut due to light sensitivity. The doctor has just removed the bandages.

    “So you can see the three of us?” he asked.

    “I can. And you’re all beautiful.” I glanced behind them and focused on the wall. “Is it...11:00?”

    The doctor looked over his shoulder, then back at me. Even though I still was a long way away from high-definition visual processing, I could tell there that was some degree of amazement on his face. “Not quite,” he said. “It’s five until noon. But if you think about it, the hands are in the same place at both times. You just can’t distinguish between the big hand and the little hand yet.”

    “The big hand and the little hand? Do I really look that young?”

    “Sorry, I have four-year-old twins at home. So right now, Elmo and I are busy with helping them learn to read clocks.”

OK, I do love my brain!

Now if you'll excuse me, I hear the treadmill calling.