all your mental armor drags me down

My head is hurting from spending the last eleven hours on my laptop, but oddly my neck isn't...this may be more proof that the actual culprit for my neck issues is my bed. Not that I particularly want to buy a new bed since I'm pursuing this starving artist lifestyle (ha), but my neck pain has really subsided since coming to Iowa, just as it subsided when I went to LA. Or maybe I'm allergic to the Bay Area. Either way.

sssanyway, today was utterly lowkey and hermity; I spent some quality time having a late lunch with the 'rents (at home, so don't get excited - not that you would have regardless of where I ate lunch, unless I had some amazingly gruesome story of slaughtering and eating one of the miniature cows). Then I got out my laptop with the intention of writing, but instead got sucked into a ridiculously long project of my own making. One of the blocks I've hit with Ellie and Nick is that I don't know what, exactly, happened to them ten years ago and when, exactly, it happened. Since I have to add some of that backstory into the beginning of the book, I've been stressing about it. But I need to keep track of it better than I've kept track of plots for the last couple of books, since this Muses universe is expanding and I need to know where everyone else was ten years ago too in case they overlapped with Nick and Ellie's early exploits.

So, I downloaded some fancy schmancy timeline software and started tracking tings. And I ended up putting in the entire plot of HEIRESS and half the plot of SCOTSMEN, and all the birth dates for all the major and minor characters so that the timeline can tell my automatically how old everyone is when something happens. This will, I believe, be super helpful as time goes on, particularly since I can track *everything* (like, which of my characters were at Eton together in their youth and when they overlapped there; when various people were in mourning after various deaths; when chicks were pregnant, etc.). And it may not have been utterly crucial to do it all now (I know I'm procrastinating), but I did figure out the timeline for the crucial spring when Ellie and Nick almost got married and instead parted ways, so that was work well worth doing.

And now I desperately need to sleep...goodnight!