Roberson's Interminable Ramble

Okay, not spinning wheels. Maybe doing doughnuts in the parking lot, but without the fun. I'm going around in circles, with no sign of stopping.

I'm in the final stages of preproduction on End of the Century, having only a tiny bit of research left to do and a few days of tightening and polishing on my outline before starting the writing in earnest, but I find myself getting snarled up in the minutia. Yesterday I spent hours looking at Lewis Carroll's logic paradoxes online, trying to wrap my head around symbolic logic, and today I just spent the last two hours staring at birth, death, and marriage records of Victorian peers, trying to work out the name and backstory of a minor supporting character in the middle act. (As it happens, I ended up falling in love with the name of a real person, and am just dropping her into the story, instead. But for the purposes of fiction, it isn't really Priscilla Isabel Laura Dumaresq, but a fictional character who happens to have the exact same name and marriage history.)

I need to do a little more reading on the life of Joan of Arc, finish Martin Rees's chapter in The Far Future Universe, and then reread a bit of Douglas Hofstadter's Goedel, Escher, Bach, and then the researching should be done.

Oh, crap. I forgot about Buffalo Bill Cody's autobiography. Okay, maybe a little more research to do.

Oh, and Leo Marks's history of WWII cryptography. That, too.

But seriously. That's all. Then I can start writing.

Oh, and Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind.

(Please, someone. Stop me before I research again...)

Oh, and...