More things to do when you should be working on your masterpiece

We're back in business, the arms are healing, the old camera charger has been found, the darned cd is still missing, but it'll come home eventually.
Here's something I tried when I started to first get a bit disheartened with D'aul novel. I casted it. Took a bundle of papers and magazines and cut em up. Deciding what my characters looked like, in some cases showing where they lived etc etc. Stuck em all up on a big piece of wallpaper, that was supposed to grow and change and act like a bible for the book, but guess what? It ended up down the back of a set of drawers. However it did provoke a bit more thought in myself, showed me more about what I was thinking about some of them, helped me get excited about the thing when it was dragging a bit, so from that point of view alone it was useful. One of the major characters, and her friends are all obsolete now, she was replaced by a dog. (That's another good tip, if you can replace a major character with a dog in your book, it probably means they aren't adding too much). This little collage also means I'll be so ready when Hollywood comes a calling. Although it might have been a bit ambitious - looking to cast Colm Meaney (that's him with his head on sideways) - altho it's only a small role, he could do it in half an hour of shooting, so maybe the budget would stretch to that.