Distracted by "research" again

My writerly duties today consisted primarily of selecting somewhere to submit a story or two. Ended up being one--and not one of the ones that recently got rejected, though I'll submit those as well, just elsewhere.

It's a strange thing to throw those darts: there is no way to anticipate where one of my stories might find a happy home, or which one to send to what journal or magazine.

But I also got distracted by some research, as I was also doing some revising. I came across a file with a title I didn't recognize, so I thought I'd look at it. It seems I once had an idea of turning the "story suite" I've been noodling with into a novel, though I'm now very sure there isn't a novel in there: the interconnected stories are the right size and shape for what I have to say in that setting. But I realized that my mental image of the common setting has varied some over the years, and I wanted to try to get some of the details more clear to myself so the setting coheres better among the stories--and indeed, in the one I was looking at, so the setting coheres within the story. For instance, I had imagined a town with only about three businesses along the main street--but with a relatively large high school and a public library. That doesn't hold together. Any town large enough to have a high school of its own and a library is decidedly going to have a few more businesses in it. (I should know: I live in a town that size.)

So I was digging around, trying to find towns I could use as approximate models for the one I'm imagining, but that led me into thinking about growing zones (could there be a melon farmer, as in the story I was revising?) and who the local big-wigs would be (mentioned in one or two stories, and one story is that of the daughter of that family, assuming there's only one). (And I just got distracted for a minute there by what the family's source of income would be, which will require more thought and possibly more research.)

I also opened up some of my other stories because I wanted to record word counts (it matters for some submissions), which got me revising a different story--actually, the first that I wrote in this suite--and that led me to trying to find out what plants would be growing beside a creek in that setting, which also led to an attempt to find a good synonym for "weed"--and I don't mean the kind a person smokes, so I was rather out of luck on that one.

And I was going to work on another story, or at least record the word count, and I suddenly realized that I have to do some snow removal before I head off for tonight's get-together with my mother and sister, but I wanted to post to the blog first so ... here I am.

And here I go. That driveway isn't going to shovel itself.