Fresh Eyes

(Note: Polish reader, if I email you some Polish dialogue translated by Google Translate, will you tell me if it makes any sense to you in Polish? It would also help if you could give me the corrections.)

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Yesterday I discovered the marvel that is looking at a Work in Progress with fresh eyes. 

After work, Richard and I spent time at the local corporate coffeehouse to play with ideas for NaNo. The neutral walls are plastered with glossy posters of their wares and perky, pithy sayings in vinyl decals made at the home office. I prefer independent coffeehouses with their quirky rustic walls and hand-chalked menus paying homage to local institutions, but the nearest one is 45 miles away.

This story starts with the fact that I have two computers, and one of them is more likely to travel with me. I discovered I couldn't get access to Whose Hearts are Mountains because it was open in Scrivener at home, a feature to prevent conflicted copies on two different computers.

So, as not to waste valuable coffee time, I pulled up the document I set aside to start a new novel for NaNo. That novel is Prodigies, and I was almost halfway done when I shelved it. Plotwise, that was the easier half, although I think my protagonists spend too much time running and I may have to go back and fix it.

When looking at it with fresh eyes, however, the questions began rushing through my head: "What if the mind control was a distraction? What if the little girl had her father's healing talent and could use it in reverse? What is the implication of doing this to a young girl?" This could raise the stakes of the plot -- who could you kill at the UN General Assembly meeting that would reduce the world to an exploitable chaos? 

I also found two resources I hadn't been able to find before -- the floor for the UN Assembly Building and the UN Assembly schedule, which will make writing this story much easier.

I may have learned a valuable lesson here -- sometimes putting something away for a while works better than beating your head against it. Lesson two -- work on more than one idea at a time.