Brainstorming with the Wonder Wheel

I feel like my brain has left me.  I keep forgetting about the wet laundry in the washing machine. I make supper but forget to cook the potatoes or rice (or start to and don’t turn on the stove!) There seems to always be something at the back of my mind that is niggling away and I can’t figure out what the problem is. Oh. Wait. Yes. I’m starting a new novel. I really am operating on lower brain capacity.

Please tell me I’m not the only one like this. I think I am worse this time around because I just completed my NaNo novel ’08 and shipped it off to my first readers. So part of my brain is still a little bit in that world. A large part of my brain is in a brand new world. And my real world? Hmm. I seem a little flaky.

As part of my gearing up for NaNoWriMo ’09 I am reading books set in coal mining towns. I love the acknowledgments section of the book THE MINER’S DAUGHTER by Gretchen Moran Laskas. She writes: “For my son, Brennan, thank you for taking in stride a mother who sometimes gets so lost in thought that she walks into walls.”

My distracted brain really likes the visual clues in this little tool I learned about at the BloggingBistro. I had never seen Google’s Wonder Wheel before, but it is really cool! Almost as cool as Kitty’s packing-sheet bubble charts.

After you do a Google Search and you get your results,  look near the top left. There is a tiny line that says “Show Options.” Click on it. Scroll down until you see Wonder Wheel on the left sidebar and click on it. This is what you get:

Then, when you click on a subtopic you get this:

And so on. If you go down the wrong rabbit trail, retreat by clicking on the previous wheel. The actual links to websites are posted along the right-hand side of the screen. So fun to play with. You might find a plot point you hadn’t thought of before.