Well, technically, there's really no such thing, BUT.. that's the conclusion I came to last night after an almost hour long internal monologue by a hopefully future me.

See, every so often, my mind likes to play the daydream game. You know the one. Where it's the future and you've managed to successfully accomplish whatever it is you are actually currently working on.

In my case, at the moment, that happens to be one of two things- a new secret project concerning my bottlecap jewelry, and the short stories I am trying to write.

Last night's daydream was an internal monologue that happened to be the introduction to a collected edition of a series of my short stories. Simple enough, really, giving little clues as to how the story differed from the "standard" of each of the genres I've mixed together.

Then it tangented off into possible reasons why more people don't do what I'm doing, and THAT in turn led to an almost professor-like lecture on how to change or create even ONE thing, you have to have an entire background structure. A good visual would be the standard iceberg- if you want to change one little thing, or make up one little thing, you can- that's the tip of the iceberg... but in order to be able to DO that, (because "magic" can only explain just so much before it becomes so unreasonable that you lose the reader entirely) you have to understand, research, and create the entire huge rest of the iceberg that is under the water, that no one is ever going to see.

That way, you can write that one sentence with confidence that you know what you are talking about, even if the rest of that iceberg never sees the light of day.

The example I used for this one of my favorite characters in my world, who happens to be a vampiric being that isn't quite like any other. And for a simple 3-4 sentence paragraph, describing how he walks through an open air market during the day, I have an entire notebook dedicated to the base type of being he is- the different kinds, where they live, what they eat, how big they are, their basic temperments, how each is regarded in various areas of the world, their entire biology of how and why they work the way they do, powers, abilities, etc. AND, another half notebook dedicated to his vampire side- their biology, physiology, psychology- how and why they work, powers, abilities, ways they can die or be killed, how they become vampires, how the vampirism is trasmitted, what biologically and psycologocially happens to various classifications of creatures once they are infected (a vampire biting a deer will have different effects than a vampire biting a human, after all)...

And then THAT spiraled off into the actual mechanics of the transmission of the vampirism in my world, which, admittedly, probably gave me as many questions as it did answers.... but still.

Then end result of all of this is the revelation back in the present that I've watched WAY too much Discovery Channel.

Yeah.

My mind works in weird ways sometimes... LOL.

Anyway, just thought I'd share.