Will You Still Laver Tomorrow?

July 7, 2012 by Cassidy Frazee | 7 Comments

Back to The Real Home, and it’s all rainbows and unicorns this morning.  I actually slept in, which is to say that rather than getting up at 5:30 AM, I slept until 6:22 AM, and had enough time for a quick cup of coffee, getting ready, and then taking my daughter off to her martial arts class.

Whereupon I blog.  Such is life.

I even managed another 700 words on Part Ten of Diners at the Memory’s End.  It was a tough write, not because I didn’t know what I wanted to say, but because my eyes were telling me they didn’t want to stay open the whole time.  However, I managed to find a good break point in the story, so I left Meredith and Cytheria more or less glaring at each other from across a table, a nice, big plate of bara lafwr with cockles and bacon between them, all of it a setup to the hell that’s about to come.

Even though I had half a mind in the process last night, I was starting to enjoy the play I was setting up between the women.  It’s going to get a little ugly, but at the last moment, I felt, “Hey, you know, Meredith is a feisty girl, she’s probably not going to roll over and play bottom, not even for a bad-assed duchess,” so when I ended the scene, I had Meredith doing just that–getting her back up just a little as the Duchess Scoth starts getting coolly medieval on her ass.

So much of this story is really about feelings, how people are with each other, how they handle new situations that they never envisioned.  Part Twelve will get into that more, but right now–yeah, Cytheria ain’t a happy girl.  And when you’re a woman with abilities like telekinesis and you can read minds–it’s a good thing she has a lot of willpower.  Or does she?  I guess we’ll see.

But even more so than Echoes, this is turning into a very emotional story.  That story had hit me in the stomach over and over, but this sucker is giving me some serious groin kicks.  Just when I think I’m going to be able to walk away unscathed, I write something else and think, “Damn, I didn’t need to do that, did I?”  And then I realize that I’d going to get harder before it gets better–getting better happening somewhere around the end of Part Thirteen and the start of Part Fourteen.  After that I’m hoping for a much better ending, but until then–pain.  A lot of pain.  So much so, I should be listening to country music, the music of pain . . . naw, I ain’t goin’ that far.

If there is anything I’ve discovered as a writer, it’s that we not only half to push ourselves into places we don’t often want to go, but even when it makes us feel bad, we do it again, and again, because we understand that by going there, we are learning.  We learn about our characters, our story, and ourselves.  If you aren’t growing as you write, then you’re not really writing.

Trust me, why pay for a therapist?  Just write some fiction and see what happens.

If you aren’t crazy already, you’ll probably drive yourself in that direction.