on saving a cat and and killing a phoenix

i must be coming out of my fog. i started reading AND commenting on blog posts last night. i haven't done that for weeks. i just haven't had the mental capacity to do anything but the bare minimum of thinking. it felt good to get back to reading blogs. it made me want to write a post of my own.

but then the lists started running through my head again this morning and the brain is going back to mush. so rather than write an original post, i'll tell you about a couple of posts that grabbed my attention...

---R. L. LaFevers over at Shrinking Violet Promotions wrote a post that describes and reviews a book on story writing called "Save The Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need." i read through the post, clicked on the link to the website that goes with the book and spent 30 minutes perusing the posts, especially the ones that applied the "Save the Cat" structure to movies. (the one on Avatar had my attention for quite a while.) not that i need another book, but i may end up using this to help jumpstart the work on my sequel.

---Deirdra over at A Storybook World described the Creative Phoenix Lifecycle. the part of the cycle labeled "Creative Murder" helped me understand why i haven't been able to write lately. i knew that the stress, fatigue, and unsettled-ness of moving have stifled the creative process in me, but i also realized that trying to write my novel for other people (a subject i'll expound upon in another post) has almost killed it. it's just nice to know my "creative phoenix" will rise again. ironically, that may be when i finally exit the City of Phoenix. (sorry. couldn't resist.)