Swirling Skeaming Desires

Today has been one of those days.  Between idiots on the highway–including someone who nearly hit me even though I was hard on the horn to get their attention–and idiots at work, I’ve had distractions up the yang, and getting into the blogging grove has proved difficult at best.

There was also the issue what what to say.  I had something to say this morning, but like my ba-lance, I lost it and having had time to find it.  My life seems to go in these directions these days:  distractions on the road, distractions on the job, distractions on the internet.  And now I have to deal with road construction tonight–oh, goody.

I worked on the new chapter for Replacements last night, and the brain was dead:  far deader than zombie Amy Pond.  I was writing, I was getting the ideas out, I was making the scene–but it was coming so slowly.  I’d do fifty words, then I couldn’t think, so I’d read a little.  Then another fifty and it was time to look for music.  Went like that for two and a half hours, and in the end I came close to my thousand words, but just like light speed, I didn’t make it that far.  A gallant effort, but I had to sigh when it was over because I felt I’d let myself down.

And yet . . .

Maybe it was the complexity of the scene that thwarted me.  Though my story is sort of science fiction with borderline erotic elements, it isn’t screaming sex.  It’s all about the characters:  one who becomes so obsessed with doing something that she literally takes over someone’s life, and another who wants her own relationship with the main character, and has pushed the relationship into a new direction.  There is a lot happening between these two people, all of which is coming out in these new chapters, amounting to about three to four thousand words of character development.

In trying to get the information right, I’m having to think about what I need to have them do, and that means thinking about their actions.  They aren’t looking up from the Scrivener file going, “No, I’m not wearing that!” or “Are you kidding?  I’m not going to make her suck my toes!”  No, it’s all in my head, and I’m working hard, though a haze of semi-exhaustion, to drag it out of my brain and kicking it out through the tips of my fingers.

As I’ve said, it’s a lot of work, because writing is work.  If you want to do it right, you have to do it right.  I spoke with a friend today, another writer, who said she’s going through a number of calculus calculations because there’s something she needs to do that she wants to do correctly.  I know that eventually she’ll get it all right, but there’s another example of someone doing the work needed to do it the way that is best.

Maybe I shouldn’t be hard on myself.  Maybe I’m doing the best I can with a head full of stuffing after getting up at five AM and spending two hours on the road to go from home to hole and back.

That doesn’t mean I won’t do the work.

Nor feel bad when I don’t do as well as I feel I should.

 

Actors to Watch: New Orleans

Reblogged from Sonuvabitch: A Short Stack Series Film:

We held casting for Sonuvabitch in late January and early February of this year and then I sat on the decision-making for a bit. We're only a third of the way through pre-production and already this film has held a steep learning curve for me as a writer, as a director, and as a producer. The most important takeaway from the process is that as I give more specific character descriptions to the actors, the better the audition will be -- monologue included.

Read more… 813 more words

Supporting my film making bud (is she my bud?) down New Orleans way, here's an update on Jo's next movie:

The Thin Ice of the Old Nights

This last weekend was not the best I’ve suffered through in a long time–and I do mean suffer.  Sure, this is going to come off sounding like a first-world problem, and it is, because I wasn’t starving, I wasn’t living in fear of being raped or murdered because I wanted to get an education, and I wasn’t living with the possibilities of dying at any moment from any number of aliments that can strike you down without warning.

No, I was only having a run-of-the-mill crappy weekend, which was capped off by a panic attack on Sunday night that put me on edge so much that I finally stepped away from the computer and went off to watch some television.  It wasn’t the relaxing moment that I thought it would be, but I did get to see someone find a frozen beaver, which lead to scenes of a couple of guys munching on semi-frozen beaver tail . . . ah, the wonders of television.  Remember when it was just hours of mindless entertainment?

This panic attack was messing up my writing something bad.  I was trying to write, to continued my chapter–which I’d hoped to finish last night–but I couldn’t concentrate beyond writing a sentence then looking around for something:  a word, a picture, some news, anything that I thought might relate to what I was doing.

It was hectic, but also a little hellish, because I could feel something coming on all day yesterday.  Maybe it was all the writing the day before about how my character Keith was feeling panicky because of what was happening to him in the chapter, and it was rubbing off on me.  I doubt that, but who knows?  Maybe my characters are talking to me!  Bwahahahaha!

It died down, and so did my attempt to get something written.  Four hundred forty words got out, so between Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, I managed a little less than I would over two days of normal writing.  I’ll take it, because it gets me closer to the end.  And the end is very near, so keep pushing.

If there is any good to come out of this, it’s that I discovered how to access a thesaurus through Scrivener.  One of my great laments was that Scrivener–which I use to write all my stories–didn’t have the same access to a built-in thesaurus as MS Word has.  It wasn’t that big of a deal, but it gets to be a pain after a while to cut and paste a word onto a sight on the Internet to find synonyms and antonyms.

I start looking around in the program, and what do I find?  Writing Tools!  And what are some of the things you can do with writing tools?  Look up words on Wikipedia.  Get a translation.  And . . . look up a word on thesaurus.com.  All you do is highlight, select, and away you go:  it plugs in the words and brings up your selections.  Then you just go back to your story and type in what you’ve found.

Another hurdle overcome.  I like it when a plan comes together . . .

The Realities of the Fictional

Lets get this out of the way now:  I like most of the characters I’ve created.  Some have been with me for years, and I know the ins and outs of their lives, I know what they want to do, what they will do, and what awaits them at the ends of their lives.  I know their desires and their fears, their hates and their loves.  I know what makes them tick.

I know this because I created them.  They are figments of my imagination made about as whole as they can get.

Lately I’ve seen people going on about their characters, and how they “talk to them”.  This is nothing new:  it seems like a lot of people who write, or have written, feel their characters speak to them.  No, wait:  that’s not exactly right.  They feel the characters are telling them what to write.  They feel that the characters are pushing them in the direction they want to go.  They feel the characters are the ones writing the goddamn story, and that all they’re doing is acting as the typist.

To put it in plain and simple language, that’s delusional bullshit.

Your characters are something you create, and not the other way around.  While we can feel for our characters, live through out characters, suffer with them when we put them in incredibly difficult situations, it’s you who is doing all the leg work, not the character.  The character lives and loves and suffers because you are the one writing the story.  And when a character bites the big one, you can rest assured that when Ebola finally claims their ass and kicks that mortal coil off their shoulders, it happened because of the writer–not because the character said, “Hey, know what?  I gotta hankerin ‘ to head to Africa and have sex with a disease-ridden native because I wanna know what it’s like to have my organs liquefy.”

That shit happened because of you.  You killed them–and they didn’t jump in front of a bus on their one, you know?

I have spoken in my characters “voices”, tried to imaging scenes where they are all interacting with one another.  I’ve said the dialog out loud, and figured out how things would progress from that point.  At no time did I ever imagine that my characters were taking over my body and telling me, “No, what I want here is a fantastic lesbian sex scene with the head nurse, because . . . have you see her breasts?  Oh, my!”  Nope, never happened–and never will.

When I ran role playing games all the time, I used to tell my players, “Remember:  I’m God.  This game is my world, and your characters are my playthings.”  Writing is the same thing:  you own the world, and the characters as well.  Characters don’t argue with gods, ’cause when they do, they get squashed.  They get fed into wood chippers and turned into a mist.  They have alien zygotes explode from their anuses.  They meet the girl of their dreams and then get mutilated because they remind said girl of a Barbie doll they once owned.

Characters are a writer’s plaything.  They are their monkey, and they dance when we clap.

Though there are some writers who have said–and I’m not making this up–that they have gotten into arguments with their characters over how their lives are going in a story . . . and that they’ve lost the argument.  A person is saying they’ve lost an argument with a fiction character of their own creation, and then they want to be taken seriously as a writer.  The last person to lose an argument to a fictional character was John Nash, and that was because he was a fucking schizophrenic who wasn’t in touch with reality.

You know who never talks about their characters controlling them?  Professional writers.  The people who do this for a living.  They talk about character creation, and how to develop a point of view for your characters, but you never hear them say, “My characters tell me what to do!”  I saw a vlog post last year with a few writers who answered questions about the craft, and when this subject came up it was smacked down faster than a punk telling John Cena he’s not that tough.  They laughed at this mindset because they know it’s total bullshit.  They know fictional characters aren’t telling the writer what to do, and as one writer said, if they are, “You need to up your meds.”

It really doesn’t matter what I think, however.  Even though I’m a bit crazy, I know the difference between fiction and reality, and I deal in both rather well.  Since I do, it’s easy to look at people who say, for them, that writing fiction is the same as writing a biography for their characters, which gives me the chance to sit off to the side and laugh like a loon and remake about how your fucking nuts.

Which is sort of what I’m here, aren’t I?

Oh, well . . . I can always blame this on one of my characters . . .

The Snows of Saint James

Getting on late Friday night as I write this, because I’m judging a grade school science fair early Saturday morning, the third in as many years.  If there’s one thing I like to do, it go out and encourage young people to do something different, and if that means getting into science, then so be it.  At the same time, my daughter will participate in our regional Science Olympiad, so I hope I’m doing something good.

Tonight was night a writing night.  Still coughing like made, and after putting a few hundred records into a data base today, I felt pretty brain dead.  After I return from my science fair I’ll get my writing in, then maybe write a little more tomorrow night.  I know I can get three thousand words in this weekend, not a problem, and that should get me set up around forty-seven thousand words before I call it a Sunday night and head for bed.

I’m already thinking about what’s coming next, which is a bit of a fantasy thing:  not fantasy as in “I have a muse looking over my shoulder as I write,” more like, “Oh, I didn’t know you were into wearing PVC school girl uniforms.”  Something strange is happening, and I’m just the person to bring it, because if there is one thing I know, it’s strange.

Like the dream I had last night–oh, did you see what I did there?  I know you did.

I was talking to someone tonight about it, because it was a dream that really comes out of an idea I had for my character Kerry, he of the young child learning magic at a school in the middle of Maine.  He and his bestest flying buddy, Emma, are on a three-day survival flight that they undertake during their third year of Flight School, and since Emma and he are so damn good at what they do, the instructor gave them the hardest flight of all:  fourteen hundred miles from a point near Churchill, Manitoba, back to the school.  All of this happening in the middle of January, so you know it’s a party.

One of the main events that happens, however, is that as they are coming into Ontario–after making a mad dash across James Bay–they run head-on into a brutal blizzard.  Instead of flying for a few hours after sundown while navigating by the star, they are forced down in the forest south of the Eastman River, where they have to set up camp and get inside before they freeze.

In my idea for at story they spend the night in zipped-together sleeping bags, huddled for warmth, because their heater is very low on fuel.  During the night, close as their are, Kerry is asked if he’s scared.  He admits he is, because at thirteen, he’d never had to deal with conditions like this.  Emma says she’s worried, too, and wonders if they’ll make it back.  Kerry tells her not to worry; they’re going to get back to the school come tomorrow, if for no other reason, as Kerry says, “Annie’s waiting for me, and she’ll be upset if I don’t come home.”

My dream was inside the tent, late at night, with the wind hollowing outside, and the cold all around the two kids.  Emma asks Kerry if he’s worried, only I’m the only saying yeah, but don’t worry, we’re getting home tomorrow, and I’m going to see Annie.  Only when Emma looks up at me, it’s not her, it’s Annie, and she tells me she’s not worried–

Which is the point when I realize it’s not really Annie, but someone else I know.  Someone who tells me, “If anything were to happen, I’m right where I want to be–here with you.  But we’ll get home, because I need you back where you belong.”

Fade to black as the wind dies out in the darkness . . .

I haven’t had a dream like that in a while.  For a long time I was having some extremely vivid dreams, but my time at The Undisclosed Location put a serious kibosh on that for some reason.  I’ve been home a few months now, and it seems like the dreams are returning, they are starting to grow strong once more, and they’re telling me something.  Maybe something good, something bad, or something I haven’t heard in a while.  (I’m trying not to hear that in Phil Collin’s voice–I believe I succeeded.)

My story of the Polar Express was one that keep me intrigued for some time, because it not only helped my character grow, but it gave me a chance to grow as well, and not just as a writer.  I learned something while imagining all those things happening, all the way back in December of 2011.  I’ve kept it close to my heart the whole time since, even when I was sinking into one of my darkest times last summer.

It’s still with me.  Maybe I’ll even see it tonight, when the wind picks up and the snow begins to fall.

And once more I hear Annie call my name, and she tells me the thing she tells me every day.

Little Miss Hellspawn

So ya, thought ya, might like to go to the show.  To feel that warm thrill of confusion, that space cadet glow.  I’ve got some bad news for you sunshine, Cass isn’t well, she stayed back at the hotel, and they sent me along as a surrogate hack, I’ll find all the jerks and toss them out on their cans!

Okay, so I’m not gonna go all In the Flesh on you today; I couldn’t do that because I’m too nice a person.  But I’ve found instances, in my life, when I should turn around and become the raging bitch that some people think I am.  Which I’m not–you gotta trust me on this one.

There was one incident where I discovered someone had entered my author’s page and decided to spam it with a link about weight loss.  Yeah, that’s going to make me happy, she sarcastically said, referring to the spam, not link to some hoodoo weight loss scam.  For the first time since the author’s page went up, I had to pull out the Ban Hammer of the Gods, and smite his butt back to the woodwork.  I don’t stand for one to try and foster their crap upon myself and others, and I deal with it swiftly.

Then there was there other, more puzzling incident . . . needless to say, someone took umbrage with something I said, freaked out like a mofo, severed all links with me, and left me a semi-nasty message in the wake of their departure.  Oh, goodie!  Another dissatisfied customer who gives me no explanation for why they’re upset–they just wanna scream, “You’re an ass!” and leave it at that.

I had something like happen about eight, nine months back.  Someone from one of my writer groups started following this blog, and after a week they left a message:  ”This isn’t just about writing?”  Sorry about that, Tex, but I’ve been known to roll off and start rambling about things that are non-writing related, like now.  Some of it is entertaining, and some . . . well, probably not so much, but I always set out to make it entertaining.

A few days later the person left a very nasty comment, something along the lines of, “I’ve try to help you, but you’re decided to hang with the kids at the cool table in the lunch room!” which was about as nutty as it gets.  I didn’t think anything about it until he posted nearly the same message in a writer’s group on Facebook, and at that point I sicced Mjolnir on his ass and put an end to intrusion into my life.  (As a side note I was told that he likewise pissed off other people in the same group with the same, “I’m trying to help you, don’t you get it, you idiot?”  Apparently they didn’t, and he eventually went away.)

I’m not above criticism; being that I’m in this writing game, it’s going to come, and some of it won’t be pretty.  Sometimes it’s going to take a personal turn, because for many people it’s easier to go for the ad hominem than to get into a well-constructed argument that might find them having large chunks of their ass being handed back to them.

But to throw out a, “I’m not going to read you anymore ’cause you’re a bastard!” without specifying the extent of my bastardy–please, show me the courtesy of at least telling me why I’m such a bitch before you call me one and slam the door.

I promise, this hellspawn will listen to you.

I might even write about it later . . .

Coffee and Muses

Yesterday I said I was going to get a lot done, and I didn’t fib.  I did two blog posts, started looking into doing a three dimensional ball of yarn in Blender (hint:  it won’t be easy), and finished Chapter Eight of Suggestive Amusements with a fifteen hundred word dash.  It was productive as hell, and I felt like I actually accomplished something for the first time in a while.

Chapter Eight was, I will admit, a bit of fantasy revenge–or so I told my Muse when I was speaking with them last night.  Yes, I have a Muse, and they help me a lot.  I told them that a lot of my feelings about work, past and present, came out in that chapter, and there are probably a few people who, if they were to read the chapter, would know I was sort of drawing off of a hidden reserve of angst I’ve been hanging onto since leaving The Job From Hell.

While I can say I never had the same conversation my main male character has with his manager, some of the same thoughts he voices I’ve had more than a few times.  There’s nothing like being a cog in an organization where every job that comes your way should have a priority of “Immediate” or “High”.  I’ve been in IT for almost thirty years:  every job is important–save the ones I need done.  Then it’s, “Queue up, loser, don’t you see I’m busy?”  Which, come to think of it, was something I told to a manager once, though not in those same words.

What comes next, in Chapter Nine?  What I hope is going to be one of my favorite conversations.  My main muse gets together with her sister muse, and they sit and chat over coffee, talking about their charges, and . . . well, lets say Erin’s sister is always worried about her.  It’s not a big sister/little sister thing, because they’re identical in age.  It’s just that Erin’s an emotional muse, and her more musical sister always fears that she’s digging herself into a hole with each new charge.

I mean, think about the life of a classical muse.  They’re immortal, they go around casting their magic upon someone to bring forth the best inspiration they can muster, and–at least in my world–they are attracted to intelligence and imagination.  They aren’t there to make you a sandwich, though Erin does make breakfast at one point; they are there to light up your bulbs and make your fingers go clickty-clack upon the keyboard.  They are the box outside of which you are suppose to think, and if you want to make them happy, you best start creating.

In a way, their lives would be somewhat miserable.  They don’t just live for their job, they are their job.  Their excitement comes from what you produce, and then . . . they’re gone.  Erin helps you find that one true store hidden somewhere deep inside that bag of mostly water that is you, and once she yanks it out of you, what else is there for her to do?  Where is her relaxation, her fun, her down time?

Oh, you don’t think I’ve figured this out?

You don’t know me very well, do you?

Transitional Positions at Night

This is coming to you after a somewhat late night, and a very early morning.  It was a long day yesterday, driving in snow and cold, entering data that was way too boring, then making my way back home.

I settled in to write, and I knew what I wanted to say–

But the body just wasn’t willing.

This week played hell with my schedule.  Today will also play a little hell as well, since I find myself having to run all over again.  But I have tonight to myself, no pizza or television or idiots wanting to argue things of which they know nothing.  Just writing.

Maybe I can finished the chapter.

I left my character together, still in bed, but this time sort of arguing about something that will eventually become the main plot of Keith’s soon-to-be novel.  Yes, the muse gave him something to work with; they are mysterious creatures, and to get your ideas you just might have to sleep with someone.  I know:  it’s a hard thing to do, but sometime you have to make sacrifices for the sake of creativity.

Even though I feel as if I don’t know what to say in my writing, when I’m saying the things that are now being written in Suggestive Amusements, the final product seems right.  Sure, I may need to go back ad polish a statement after I write it, only because the first time I lay it down I’m kicking it out of my head and forcing to lay shivering upon the ground, so when I have a moment to look it over and decide if it’s worth while, if it is, then I clean it up and give it a little polish, and maybe even a hug or two, just because I’m that sort of person.

That’s one of the reasons I don’t do huge rewrites when I’ve finished with my first draft.  I have the plot and most everything else down, so why start mixing things up?  I’m certain things will change one day for some story; I can’t be like this all the time.  For now, however, it works great.

I won’t say this is the best thing I’ve written, but it gives me a good feeling.  It’s from an idea I had years ago, an idea that I wrote a piece of fetish fiction around, and who know if there will be any more stories centered around this idea.  It’s the way ideas are:  you never really lose them: rather, they sort of hang around waiting for the time to come forth and allow you to use them for something good, great, even fantastic.

I was even thinking of another idea last night, between trying to write scenes for the current work in progress.  That’s me; can’t ever stop thinking about fiction.  One of the reasons I was awake so early this morning, when I so wanted to sleep in, was because something came to me about Elektra, one of my main female characters.  Something she likes; something that sort of drives her fantasies.

Yeah, I hate getting woke up like that.

At least it might end up in the story.

Charting the Personal Timeline

Today is a busy day.  Not it’s going to be a busy day, but it’s busy.  I heard there is snow and ice on my route home, so tonight could be a little trick as I return to the wilds of northwest Indiana.  No big deal.  I’ll get home.

I’ll also be on the web speaking to my therapist, because I miss her and we have things to say to each other.  It’s been three months since I was on the couch, and our time together was some good stuff, and I’m looking to get back into a routine because, why not?  We all need a little routine in our lives.

Writing is a routine.  I didn’t get much done on Saturday, but Sunday I finished Chapter Five, got two of my main characters, Keith and Elektra (yeah, that’s really her name) together, and saw my muse vanish for the time being.  I ended up writing about twelve hundred and fifty words, and I have officially passed into the Country of Novella, where all the officials are corrupt, and are just looking for the right moment to throw your ass under the jail—usually after you don’t make your word count.

So all my players are upon the stage, with only a couple of bit players remaining to show up now and then to move the story along.  I’m happy with the progression, even if I’m seeing a fifty day time line for writing the first draft, with fourteen days behind me.  It’s better than saying it’s going to take sixty days to write it, which may have been more real at the beginning when I had no idea how big the story would become—and with my counts down and analyzed, right now I’m on the cusp of a sixty-three thousand word story that could, realistically, end up being sixty-five to seventy thousand words.

I almost always set goals for myself when I’m writing.  A thousand words a day; sixty-five thousand words for a novel; four stories published in 2013.  I do the same thing in stories; there are always things that are going to happen, and they will happen when they happen, so I never worry if something doesn’t happen, because it happens in its own good time.

When I was laying out my timelines on Saturday, the notion hit me that I probably have more to write than I can ever write.  If I write a novel every ninety days, and spend another ninety days editing it while working on another novel or novella, then I could publish two to three novels a year—assuming I did it all the self-publishing route.  I know that, for one series, I could likely do twenty stories, and when you do the math, that’s almost seven years of steady work to get those all published.  Which means I’d be in my early sixties before that work is finished—

If I start now.

Oh, this is what is known as job security, right?  The fact that I have a ton of work, and maybe twenty years to get it done.

The Windswept Silence

Late night for me, because I was out and about visiting, taking in pizza and movies, and staying up a lot later than I would normally.  In fact, when I realized the time, I hadn’t realized the time.  That’s how the evening went.

I was right about yesterday:  I didn’t get a lot of writing done.  About three hundred and sixty words, that was it, but it was the initial description of my other main female character for my novel, and that was what I needed to move on to the next part of Chapter Five.

But, once more, I got my motor running to go somewhere, and while going there and back, my mind was on a lot of things.  My Muse was on my mind; my story was on my mind; stories I haven’t written were on my mind.  It was all there, roaming about, getting down in my memories and making it known that I wasn’t going to forget anything.

Most of what I thought about were scenes from a story that hasn’t been written, but has been on my mind of late.  It has to do with having to do a duty that is both exciting and frightening, and once they’ve begun, the characters in question are presented with–call it an alternate reality of their lives.  Those the two characters have been together a long time, things happened in their past that pulled them away from people who they’d fallen for very hard.  And times and events and people being what they are, the characters were never able to reconcile these relationships, and therefore became somewhat haunted by the dreams of what could have been.

Each is given the opportunity to enjoy time with the “one who got away,” because, as one character is told, “You’ve always deserved to be happy.  Even if you are happy now, it is not the happiness you wanted.  You deserve to be with your one true soul mate; you deserve to be happy, even if for a little while.”  The character in question finds they are unable to disagree, because, deep down, they have always wanted that particular happiness–and even if they question how they are achieving the moment, they don’t care . . .

But, being me, you know they’ll end up in some kind of misery by the end of the story.  Actually they end up in some rather strange stuff at the end, but that’s also me . . .

I’ve thought a lot about happiness where it comes to my characters.  It’s easy to say that we all need to be happy, that we should have that one, great love that would make our lives complete.  It doesn’t always happen:  that’s pretty obvious when you look at the general human condition.  It’s not always possible, but we try.  And if we can’t try, we dream and fantasize.

Some of us take those dreams and fantasies and turn them into the stuff prose is made from, and then bleed upon our pages for the entertainment of others.

Because our silence is always the loudest.

Timing out of Mind

Last night wasn’t bad.  It was a bit tiring, but not bad.  I saw the story expand, but I was just a touch short of the nightly goal, only hitting about nine hundred words before saying the hell with it and heading off tot bed.  The mind wanted to work, but I was getting hung up on something, and I couldn’t seem to get the words out that I needed.  Not so much writer’s block as it was my brain saying, “You know you’re going to screw this up if you try to write it now, right?”  Right.  So I was happy with what I’d put down, and slinked off to bed.

Today will be one of those busy days where I’m doing a bit of running around, but I’m not actually getting anything done–at least none of the stuff I want to do.  I have writing to do, but I’m going to have to fit my thousand in wherever I can find it, ’cause I don’t think I’ll have many opportunities to write today.  Which is a shame, because my mind has been nagging at me since before I work up.

I was having a lot of strange dreams, one of which seemed to do with trying to pick someone to take over an open superhuman opening, hanging with Brad Pitt, and telling someone who I worked with that their manager was a ninja doucherocket, and had been ever since I’d worked with them at my last job.  Then I woke up, and The Muse was there, bugging me.  (Should note, my Muse is not the same as the muse I’m writing about.  The muse in my story is a real goddess; I’m the only one who thinks my Muse is a goddess.)  What was she bugging me about?

Time.

No, not the sort of time we all waste like crazy, but time like one would encounter if you were time traveling.  There’s a simple explanation for this.  During the week I was sick.  Monday I was out of it, but Tuesday I was so down that I had to stay home and crash and burn.  But since last Sunday, when I started coming down with this (now, I hope) dissipated cold, my mind has worked.  What else is it going to do?  I’d love to be able to shut it off, but I can’t.

So, in that time, I came up with two stories revolving around my Transporting series, which I’ve yet to public, but will.  It seems like a strange thing to come up with more stories for that series, because I’ve already written four novels and one novella for it, and I have–wait, let me bring up the document . . . eighteen more stories to write.  Two more would bring it to a very neat, round twenty stories, and it’s not like I have a lot to write already, but, really, do I need more?

To show you how caught up I am in this stuff, I pulled up the timeline I have for the stories–because they cover a lot of time–and realized I didn’t have the reign of one character down in my time line.  So there I go, having to fix things.  Now I have the character accounted for, I have my timeline fixed–

Save for these two stories the Muse is bugging the hell out of me over.

Since I have time to kill before I get out to do other things, I know I can add those stories to my time line, and get my descriptions down, indicate when they’re going to happen . . . yeah, I keep track of all the stuff.  Because I think I can actually get all this stuff written in the next twenty years.

I probably can–

If I get to work.

Ill-Well in Writerland

It would seem the sickness has come to Helltown, aka, my own little neck of the world.  And I don’t mean sick like what I had last year about this time, but sick as in I feel the fever coming on, and not in a Bruce Springsteen sort of way.

It was like this for most of yesterday; the chills, the stuffy nose, the warm ears that are always a precursor to coming down with a fever.  I medicated and even liquored up a bit last night, hoping to stop this sucker in it’s tracks.  And I thought I had it licked–

Ah, but these viruses, they are crafty, they are.  They will stick with you, and haunt your butt until you think they’re gone, that they’ve pulled up stakes and headed for the hinterlands.  And then, WHAM!  They have you, bwah hahahaha!

It plays hell with the writing gig, let me tell you.  It’s already hard to concentrate, and now you need medication to help hold it down, and if that doesn’t make you spacier, then if you decided to have a margarita, or two, hoping it will do something for you at the same time–ha! You foolish person, you’re going  to find yourself on the low spark of high heeled boys rather quickly.

Though I was doing this last night . . .

It was hard to type, and at one point I actually nodded off at the keyboard while thinking.  Still, I managed four hundred sixty-five words, which isn’t a great shake by any means, but it’s wordage.  And it’s almost five hundred words closer to the end than if I hadn’t written anything.

I know what you’re thinking:  why?  If you’re not feeling good, oh Little Cassie, why are you writing?  Why are you trying to think and work on a story?  Are you trying to impress us?

I’ll impress you when I put the stuff out there to read.  As for the rest . . .

Writing while sick is a pain, and a huge crap shoot.  When you’re falling asleep and feeling like you’ve been beaten half to death by Mjölnir, one could think that trying to do something worth while is a fool’s journey.  Nothing good will come of it.

Unless . . .

Maybe years ago I read something by Stephen King.  I know, that’s like saying, “One day I drove down this road,” but hang with me.  He mentioned that one day, in the early 1980′s, he’d come down with the flu, and he was in very bad shape; he may have mentioned that he felt as if he were hallucinating at times, and I know that feeling.  He has just picked up one of those new word processors (this is the early 1980′s, remember), and he starts playing with it, knowing he can’t write anything, but thinks he can get a feel for the machine.

So he’s typing some words, and then deleting them.  And typing strings of works, and reworking them, and deleting them.  In that moment it hits him:  What if I typed in my wife’s name and hit delete?  Would she vanish?

That story became The Word Processor, which was published in the January 1983 issue of Playboy (which I read, because I did read Playboy for the articles before I worked there), and was later published in one of his short story collections.

See?  A cold is no reason to stay away from your craft.  If nothing else, you can work on other things.

Though typing, “I so want Christina Hendricks’ body,” and hitting Enter doesn’t seem to be doing anything.  Maybe if I try it again . . .