Since I finally, after an untold number of weeks, have cleared the sleep deprivation-induced fuzz from my brain, I decided to make use of the writing generators this site links to.

Generally, I stay away from poetry as I would a communicable disease, but the exception to the rule is limericks (and not necessarily dirty ones). When I clicked on the exercise generator, however, and it instructed me to start a limerick with, "An old woman fell down a hole..." I couldn't resist:

An old woman fell down a hole,
Found a pit that was blacker than coal,
Met a miner named Grady,
Who exclaimed, "What!? A lady?"
She said, "You were expecting a mole?"

The next prompt instructed me to write a nonsense rhyme about a coathook. Seeing as the limerick form served me well before, I stayed with it for this:

My coathook I surely deplore,
Standing guard as it does by the door,
Its perch is so high, so much higher than I,
While I have to sleep on the floor.

Now I feel in a better frame of mind to do the child-star story I've been talking about. But the opening isn't set in stone yet. I want to establish that this kid is considered to be a bit of a hellion and a compulsive practical joker, when unknown to everyone our hero(ine) is trying to shut down production just long enough to have some time alone. At first I figured the best way to do that would be to take a page from Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, who supposedly urinated on a bank of lights, which not only shorted the lights but created a stench that took hours to clear. But the way television lights are set up, my character couldn't do that, and the child's personality would preclude him/her from doing that (which is one of the reasons why I asked about the arrangement of TV studio lights, by the way).

There are two possibilities--garbage from the studio commissary, or an old-school stinkbomb, an egg allowed to ferment under the lights. My character has a habit of climbing the catwalk where the lighting techs are typically situated. I thought at first the offending substance could be stuffed in an air-conditioning vent, but thought that would be hard for even my agile character to do.

I'm thinking I might have to rethink the whole middle section, but I don't want to say as yet what I plan to replace it with.

Still, I'm at least in a creative frame of mind again--for a long period there, I thought my imagination had permanently shut down.