Primero!

Still lost in the quagmire of no job. However, I do have ideas, millions of them, bombarding me like rays from some superhero-generating freak experiment gone wrong.

The downside of this is the sublime torture of taking them and turning them into something useful. This is why I stopped trying to write SF - I had the Idea, but the resulting story was just Idea and little stick figures worshipping it in dark Cthonic meaningless gibberish chant.

For a real writer it isn't the having Ideas, it is doing something worthwhile with them, that is the measure. This is where sitting with other human beings (preferably in a warm pub) comes in handy. I haven't seen another human being since last Tuesday. Anyway...

So I have the Idea for a book Primed, the one with Dee and Prime numbers and golems and World War II and I discovered that there is even a game I can use in my opening Dr No pastiche called...Primero! I love how these things come together - but then I just am stuck on a plot for the next 100K words.

I have an Idea for a World War II set TV series (always handy to use the same research twice I think), a Robin of Sherwood meets Secret War type thing. Got the top level arc, and even some of the smaller plot details. I sit down to do an outline for episode 3 (it is, so the received wisdom goes, better to pitch a mid episode than a pilot) and >bang< it all goes blank.

I decide to start work on a kind of prequel short story to Enoch's Vault called Clatty Pat's Needle, which is about my detective Alex McEwan looking into a shooting next to an obelisk in Glasgow*, and how the obelisk is actually sovereign territory for an African state...And I can do all that, but there's no plot...argghh.

That's before I even start on investigating the bottle of Nelson's Blood rum...which, you know, isn't sitting in a cupboard in my flat.

Its not so much writer's block and writer's white noise.

*It should be noted that there isn't actually an obelisk like this in Glasgow (that I know of), which is kinda part of the point of the story.