After several seemingly disjointed days, where it appeared I was making no progress and being very undisciplined, things began to come together a little today on Black Box. I have two sequences of backstory in my hero's life to get worked out and I feel like they're very close to being there. It's weird how for several days I just felt blank, and everytime I tried to work, the next thing you know I'd be doing something else. Then, today, snatches of scenes and ideas began to emerge.At least for the most part my "something else" was reading and researching. My topics have been varied and weird, one of them the Nazca lines in Peru. I didn't even know what they were called two days ago and had to Google "ancient lines in South America." Turns out they're actually "geoglyphs" made by the Nazca peoples between 200 BC and 700 AD.
The virtually windless Nazca Desert where they lie is one of the driest on earth and maintains a temperature of 77 degrees year round. Which is the only reason they've survived since they are just dug a few feet down into the sand and would have been long gone by now in any other environment. There are hundreds of figures, some of them geometric shapes and lines, some, like the monkey above, fanciful figures. They are huge -- some as much as 900 feet in length -- and none can be recognized as anything coherent except from the air.
The biggest question about them is why they were made and the article on them at Wikipedia gives the various theories -- from labyrinth-walking religious paths to landing strips for alien space craft to designs to delight the eye of God (full solar eclipse) that appeared in the sky over that portion of the world a number of times during the lines' creation.
And that's only one topic of those I've been reading. Others have been Cimmerians, Dolichocephaloids, Tihuanca, Army Special Forces, Genetic diseases, and methods of collecting DNA from a crime scene... No wonder I've felt somewhat fragmented of late...
Have a Great Weekend,
Karen
