Twisting Perceptions

June 14, 2012 by Cassidy Frazee | 3 Comments

The last couple of days seem to have hit me in a particularly strange way.  Actually, this whole week has.  It has become one long, drawn out, seeming like a never ending ride on the Wonka Boat, with that maniac bastard spouting spoken word rhyme the entire way.

If you can’t tell, I want this week over in a very bad way.  Like . . . yesterday.

Part of it is this story.  Diners is hitting me a lot like Echoes did; it is resisting me in a lot of ways.  I don’t want to say, “Oh, I’ve got writer’s block!”, but it’s starting to feel like something along those lines–

Which isn’t actually true.  I’m rolling though this post pretty well, though it seems like, these days, I’m not able to go more than one or two words before I misspell something, and I have to stop, return, and fix it.  That is getting to be one annoying son of a bitch, and it’s one of the reasons I was never able to write until word processors came out.  Word processors with auto-correct that doesn’t replace “pattern” with “penis”.

All the nice things in life.

But for all the excitement I had for restarting Diners at the Memory’s End, it’s as if the moment I’m in it–bam!  It wants me to be somewhere else.  Now, Echoes I got:  there was a lot of emotion behind what I was writing, and it was tearing me up.  This?

Well, I think I know.

As I once said on the pages of the blog, most of my stories are about relationships.  Even the science fictiony ones are like that.  There’s a guy, there’s a girl–or there are two girls, or even three girls.  But anyway you look at it, there’s some kind of relationship there.

Diners is a bit about taking one of those relationships, and twisting it apart.  Just a little, but it’s there.  And it’s going to hurt one of the people in the story, and hurt them in a very bad way.

One of the curses of being a writer is that you have to show this to your readers.  So you have to think about it, and you have to figure out the words that are needed to convey those feelings into images.  In order to do that, I’ve got to spend a lot of time inside the heads of my characters, and after a while, even though they are pretty nice people, you get into some mind spaces you’d rather not go–

Like your own.

I think that’s why I’m finding myself distracted a lot these days.  My own head is a mass of spider webs any more, and while I’m driving my characters crazy with personal stuff, I’m doing the same thing to myself.  Not that I’m fooling around, or anything, but damn–there is a ton of shit that appears to be ready to reshape my life these days, and a couple of days ago I had a bit of a mini-meltdown because I was starting to feel “overwhelmed” by everything.  Maybe it’s time to go The Elvis Route, and fly out to Vegas to pick up a few thousand Quaaludes because I need to decompress, or perhaps some recreational Dilaudid is in order; just a quick skin pop and kick back with a few hours of Farscape to occupy the time.

Only a few days ago I said change was coming, and you can’t believe just how true that statement has become.  It only takes time to get there.

I wish the hell it would get here and stop driving me nuts.