The Socket’s Got Juice

One time in my eight-grade chemistry class I got bored. Go figure. For some reason, I decided to stick a piece of moistened cardboard (or maybe a paperclip, I'm not sure) into the electrical socket of my table. Ah... I don’t know what drove me to that.

I do know that I got a vibrating, teeth-clenching few seconds of voltage-driven unpleasantness for my efforts. I sat there afterward as my teacher droned on, sitting desperately still, feeling like smoke was puffing out of my ears but unwilling to let anybody know what had just happened. I swallowed down little smoke burps, and promised myself I would never, ever, do that again.

And I haven't. At least, not literally.

That's a rather round about way to introduce a bit of good news. As I've been working on Acacia 3, I've been aware that a couple of the plot threads didn't have juice. The sockets were there, but when I plugged in to them nothing happened. I wasn't sure where that particular aspect of the larger story would go. I just worked on other stuff, hoping that at some point I'd connect the right wires...

Yesterday, I did. One of those sockets sprung to life. I figured out a whole lot of stuff all through one revelation. Weird. I had to take a walk afterward, with my mini-recorder, getting all the little tangential ideas down. Today, I'm at the computer trying to make sense of it. This is a good thing. The socket's got juice, and I'm plugging into it.

Hoping it doesn't blow my head off...