That title immediately makes me think, “Get off my lawn, hippie!”
As an impressionable fifteen-year-old, I wanted to be a hippie.  The fashion of the 1960s had come back around, as it is so oft to do, and I was going through an obession with The Monkees, the Beatles, bell bottoms, flower power, peace and love and whatever.  My hair was down to my waist.  I can remember thinking, “Man, if I’d been alive in the 60s, I totally would have been a hippie.”
My dad, a New York City boy, told me a bunch of his friends decided to go to Woodstock and invited him, but he opted not to go because he “didn’t like the bands.”  (Doing the math now, he was also only 16 in 1969, which probably also had a lot to do with it.)
A few years later, I saw the movie “Hair” for the first time and realized…yeah, I actually didn’t want to be a hippie.  I didn’t want to be barefoot and stinky in the park, dancing around–GRANTED–with Treat Williams and Nell Carter.  But.  No, actually, I probably would have been just the same as I am now, just wearing cooler shoes and amazing pants.
Not that any of that is relevent to my post topic, but there you go. 
So, I’m back on the editing horse.  This morning I also instituted Day One of “Editing with Breakfast” to give myself at least fifteen additional minutes of editing time each day.  We’ll see how that goes and then gradually, my plan is to bring a few pages with me to work each day so I can edit during my lunch break. 
Pro:  The potential to edit for an extra thirty minutes to an hour each day.
Con:  The potential for food stains on my manuscript pages.  “Is that an em dash or a smear of Nutella?”
I love having a plan.  It’s the overachiever in me.
While I was avoiding my editing, I started brainstorming new ideas for my next book.  Possibilities included another novel about the Civil War.  Or, maybe something different!  Maybe dig out some ideas from my box of ideas past, such as the Edwardian era or the French and Indian War!  Colonists!  Colonists and zombies!  Colonists, zombies, and men in loin cloths!
Or Steampunk.
Steampunk intrigues me a bit.  It seems fun, a little bit Gone with the Wind meets The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (and if you haven’t read Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, you need to get up and do it now.  And then read The Door into Summer.  And A Stranger in a Strange Land.  Seriously, I can go on for twenty minutes on all the Heinlein you should be reading).
But Steampunk goes against my genre.  My chosen “author platform,” or whatever you want to call it.  I’m a “histfic chick.”  I’m not sci-fi…or speculative fiction, whatever we’re calling it these days.
So then I thought, well, maybe that’s the time to utilize a pen name.  A stark, different genre, and a stark different personality to go with it, possibly with pink hair and a nose ring.
The only problem is…that sounds like a lot of work.  And this is coming from a person who can carry on a completely normal conversation and at the same time, be coming up with plot lines in my brain.  Would I need a separate blog?  I think so.  Which means instead of two new blog posts a week, I’d need four new blog posts a week.  I’d need to be doubly awesome and, although I like to think of myself as doubly awesome anyway, I’d simultaneously feel schizophrenic, due to trying to figure out if I was writing as “her” or “me.”
Kudos to those of you who can pull this off.  Maybe it’s just the Thursday fatigue sitting in, but I have hard time wrapping my brain around all that.  And, trying to figure out how I would have time for that kind of thing.  Although, I can completely justify purchasing a pink wig for author photos.  The Hubs would kill me if I dyed my hair pink.  My job would probably frown on it too.
I think my Steampunk days are something I’ll have to set on the back burner.  I’ll stick with the Civil War for now…
…but just in case you’re curious, yeah.  There’s a file on my computer with the start of an untitled Steampunk novel.  Just in case.