Strange things, I’m telling you. With Echoes done and sort of out of the way–I’ll likely start the first edits on it at the end of the month–I decided to run it through The Gender Genie and I Write Like to see how is stacked up. Gender-wise it came out female by a long shot, which I think had a lot to do with the last few chapters–though strangely enough, the longest chapter in the story involved a long chat between two men and that came out as very female-like.
But now I get to how I write and I’m bummed. The individual chapters all come up looking pretty well, but when I threw the whole shebang into the editor and ran it . . . it said I write like Dan Brown. Really? I write like a fucking hack? I write like a guy who couldn’t cut it as a musician and decided writing would be an easier way to generate coin?
I gotta work on that, ’cause that’s sort of embarrassing.
Yesterday I did more work on a little thing I’m doing on the side that I call The Salem Project. This is really nothing more than me taking the stuff I did when I was role playing at the Salem Witches’ Institute and putting it in a Scrivener project, so that if I want to see something, I have it right there where I can see it without having to search through a ton of threads.
I seemed to be doing this more out of a sense of melancholy than anything else. Late in the evening of 10 April will mark the 1st Anniversary of the “founding” of the Institute by the lovely Annie, and to put it bluntly, I miss the days when I helped create this place and then ran with Annie into the adventure of our characters.
Right now it sits quiet and empty, and perhaps one day Annie will find the time to return and continue our story. Right now I dream of what might be–as I was doing last night–and think about how this adventure did a lot to keep me from falling into the abyss. And I catalog everything so that I’ll have it. Oh, yes: I’ll have it all.
Last night was a time for reflection. I was a little bummed, I won’t deny that, and when I went to bed I had a lot of conflicting things going on in my head. That’s not a strange thing: my mind is my own worst enemy: it’s this fracking pain in the ass that does nothing but grind me down when I least need said grinding. So I ran a few scenes through my head–well, actually talked them out as I sat looking out the window–and drifted off to sleep.
My dream was, for once, pleasant, one where I was sitting around the house with someone I know, and we were chatting about nothing in particular, and there was a bit of touching and hand holding, and it ended with a cuddle that made me feel warm and protected. I still remember it as I write. It was nice. It was simple.
It was something I needed.
But then I started waking up, and I was in that crazy half-sleep state where you don’t know if you’re awake or dreaming. And it was then that I started having vision, and it was related to a story I talked about some time ago–in particular one scene that has sort of stuck with me–and in the vision something came to me: the end of the story. In a matter of, I don’t know, maybe 5 minutes, the way the story should ended was right there. The vision told me, “You have it all now”, and then sat back and laughed its ass off, as if it were taunting me to do something.
Yeah, I know how you work. Make me feel like a schmuck and browbeat me into writing.
This story has been with me for some time–at least the opening scene has, because it came about when I was talking with a friend and they told him it was something they would love to have someone to do them. The way I was hit this morning, I get the impression that I should do this. Because it’s prodding me to get to work. And it’s going to keep prodding. And if I don’t do something, eventually it’ll just whip out a big stick and club me over the head.
Erotic fantasy, here I come . . . once again.
