Yesterday was busy; today is likely to be a bit of a madhouse. Yesterday was taxes and medication, along with a little work that I didn’t want to do, but more or less was pushed into doing; today is going to be getting my car tested and shopping with other people. The only thing that makes today a little bearable is that Doctor Who starts tonight, giving me something else to watch for the next seven weeks.
Oh, there’ll be writing as well. What else?
I’ve the clock on me this morning, because I’d like to finished this post in another twenty-eight minutes so I can put my vehicle through some emissions testing. So much fun, because you feel as if you have less and less of you own time due to these other obligations. You have so many things throughout the day you wonder if you’ll get to the things you want, to be able to engage in the things that are important to you.
I do my best.
I’ve finished the edit on Chapter Three of Replacements, and things are going smoothly. Last night was a real good edit, because I was seeing things that shouldn’t have been there, and a couple of clumsy passages that made me cringe a little on the inside. How the hell did I write that and think it was good? Well, it was a first draft of things that were written for another site, and at best I gave those chapters a good looking over before posting them online.
Its wasn’t a disaster, however. I’t wasn’t as if I was embarrassed by what I’d written: it’s that these days I know how to look at something and know it doesn’t look right. When other writers say, “Get good at your editing skills,” they know of what they speak, because there is so much more going on in these phases than I’d ever imaged before getting serious about my writing. There were many times in the past when I believed my first drafts were so good that I didn’t need no stinkin’ editing–how wrong is that? If anything, I can look at something I wrote five, six, ten years ago, and know it’s a bit defective, and that it needs a good rub down. (You know, a polish? What were you thinking? Naughty people.)
Tonight I’ll polish up Chapter Four, then tomorrow I’ll get into writing a new chapter? What’s that, you say? New chapter? Yep. Figured the story needed it, and I have an interesting idea that I want to put in that shows the developing relationship between my two main characters. Shouldn’t be more than a couple of thousand words, then I can let it sit, I can do something else for a while, then go back and give it a major edit.
Mean and clean: that’s how I like my chapters.
At this rate I’ll finish the edit next weekend. Do I edit something else? You know, there are a couple of stories that need a good edit, and I should get into them if I’m serious about getting stuff published this year.
Since getting into the development of Elektra’s life within Chapter Thirteen of Suggestive Amusements, I feel like I’m learning more about the state of New Mexico than I’d ever imagined I would. When I put her together I created her home town on the fly, making her a Southwest Desert Girl from the go, so living in Las Vegas wasn’t going to be a huge climate change for her.
Culturally, though, I’ve got her growing in ways I wouldn’t imagine the rest of us would ever experience. Then again, we don’t live in novels. Or do we?
It seemed to take hours to write my eleven hundred words last night, mostly because I not only did my research, but I was doing my nails, too. Hey, nothing wrong with a little base coat drying as you type away, right? But for an hour or so I did a lot of set up, and then, when I was down to the last six hundred words, I imagined her visiting these different areas of the state, and before you knew it I had her hooking up with . . . Izzy.
Don’t laugh, but that’s her nickname for another person in her past who led her onto the Road of Kink. Believe it or not, I took the name from a character that grew up in New Mexico, and I even mention that other character by name. (I don’t need to tell any of you who it is, because I have very bright readers.) So she and Elektra meet, get to know each other, have dinner, get to know each other better, and before you know it, they’re meeting on a regular basis.
That’s how good relationships should begin. Find your interests, get to know each other, and eventually end up on a side road near Roswell laying on the hood of a Jeep, staring up at the sky and holding hands while looking for UFOs. That was how I left Elektra and Izzy last night, thinking it was a good place to jump out and gather my thoughts–and get ready for bed–because I needed the time to see where I’m taking this . . .
If you asked, “Straight into the gutter?” you’d likely be correct.
I like this chapter, and I like what I’m doing with Elektra. All this, “What I did before I met you” stuff is giving her dimensionality, it’s turning her into a real–albeit kinky–person. This is what we, as writers, strive to do with every character: we want them fleshed out so when they turn sideways to us, we don’t watch them vanish. Sometimes a writer doesn’t care if their character is two-dimensional, because the story is driving the character, not the other way around, but for this story, I’d like the characters to have a bit of thickness to them.
The question I have now is: does Elektra think about some of the experiences she had with Izzy, and do I get into the fantasies she never got to experience with her? I know the answer to both side, so it’s a no-brainer for me. I believe the second part of that question should be shown in Chapter Fourteen, because that’s what we’re always being told: ”Show, don’t tell.”
Okay, I’ll do that. I wouldn’t want to upset any writing instructors . . .
My friend Amber, she of The Amber Light’s Blog, will appear tomorrow on “Indy Style”, which is broadcast on WISH-TV, Channel 8, Indianapolis, between nine and ten AM Eastern Standard Time. She is a writer, a life coach, and an innovator of her own form of Feng-Shui. She’s also someone I’ve shared a lunch with at the Weber Grill in downtown Indy, and I hope to be able to do this again in the summer.
If you’re down Indy way tomorrow, or you’re hacking signals out of the Circle City, check her out!
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.
Much better today, thank you for asking. I didn’t know if you were going to ask or not, so I figured I’d tell you anyway. After all, if you’re coming here, you know I’m likely to sling something of a personal nature at you, and since I’ve been going on about my sniffles and sneezes, and shivers and shakes, then I have to tell you I’m getting better. Almost good enough to head back to the office tomorrow. Oh, joy.
Forward progression on Suggestive Amusements continues. I had a short chat with someone last night, and mentioned that I had very little motivation to start writing. She said that even when I say that, I eventually find my way into my story, then churn out a thousand words like a machine. There are certain truths there, because after I’d opened Scrivener and brought up the story, I let it set for maybe fifteen minutes, then I was in the chapter and off, as they say, to the races.
The more I get into Erin’s story–which means, as it comes to me as I’m typing away at the keyboard–I’m struck by the sadness of her life. Yes, she has her happy moments; she’s ever recounted a couple of them to Keith as they linger in bed together. (Oh, wait: did I just give something away? I think I did.) But she’s also recounting some hard reality that she knows, that her sister Talia knows, and the memory of one such reality left her with tears streaming down her cheeks.
Yes, I’m a total bitch: I don’t cut my muse a break, and find her life full of pain.
It’s not fair, I know. If you’re an immortal creature, you should live with joy and contentment. Why get involved in tons of dramatic shit that’s going to bring you down? There’s a simple explanation: Erin is the embodiment of creativity. That’s what a muse does: she bring something to the table that’s going to help you find a way to drag those words out of your skin and put them on whatever writing medium one uses.
If you’ve never been creative, then you have no idea how much this act can hurt. There’s a couple of lines in the U2 song The Fly that sums this up well:
Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief All kill their inspiration and sing about their grief
Like it or not, we creative types suffer to make our creations sing. In the process, we find a number of happy moments in our lives to write about, but at the same time, we dig deep into the crap heaps of sorrow that we’ve left behind, and a lot of that also ends up on the pages of our work.
Erin is almost always hurt by the time her charge has created their work, because they need to dig deep to find those moments that make up their story. She is the inspiration, so it is she that must suffer for us to enjoy whatever is produced in the end. Good or bad, she goes down at the end, even if her parting is a happy one.
Multiply that by a few thousand charges over the course of eight thousand years, and you have a muse with a history that would send most of us leaping off the nearest cliff without a second thought.
Maybe it’s not like that, however. Maybe this is me finding something to pull out from whatever pits of fresh hell I’ve created over the last few years. I know there are parts of Keith’s life–in particular a chapter that is coming up–that I can say come right from certain experiences I’ve had recently.
But am I Keith? Well, yes, I am. And I’m also Erin. And her sister Talia.
I’m a writer, and I am many.
It’s only natural that I’m going to suffer with all my characters.
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.
Here we are: sixteen hours and thirty-eight minutes, and we get the NaNo Party started. I went to my kick off party last night, said hello, got my goody bag, spoke with some of the people who are going to try this. Everyone there was new: I was the only hold over, save for our area leader, from last year. Is this good or bad? Yes. Go with it.
The time to write is approaching, as are The Witching Hours. Time to run the kidlettes around for trick-or-treat, then find something to play at 12:01 AM, when NaNo kicks in and makes life crazy for the next thirty days.
This post isn’t so much about NaNoWriMo as it is about the person writing the NaNo Novel for 2012. Or what they’ve learned from their writing. Because we do learn from writing, and from the experiences it brings us.
I’ve got to go back about a year, however–back to the days when I was role playing, back when I was writing about Kerry and his lovely Annie.
Back when I was sick from work–as opposed of being sick of work, but that’s another story–I told people about the issues Kerry had with being himself. Or should that be, herself? ’Cause Kerry exists in one world with two genders, and has the ability to switch from one to the other when he feels like it–
Only, come October, 2015, his better half ends up having to deal with menstruation, and that means having to spend time really being a girl, not just flipping over into girldom when the mood strikes, or he’s getting a full physical. So it’s during this first time of dealing with the Dim Red Tides that Kerry stays his girly self for almost a week, and–at the suggestion of one of the instructors he respects a great deal–she gets renamed Cassidy, which is Gaelic for “Clever Girl”.
The school that Kerry and Annie attend have a Samhain celebration every year, which includes a dance where one can, if they are in the mood, come dressed in costume. It’s always held on the Friday or Saturday closest to Samhain Eve–or Halloween, as most people know it–but this October, in 2015, Halloween falls on a Saturday. This means that the dance–which is just a bit of secular fun for the kids to enjoy–coincides with the true festivals that begin at sundown, on Samhain Eve, and continue through the next day, 1 November, the actual day of Samhain.
This also means that Kerry is dealing with another period, and he’s flipped over to Cassidy. This means she’s attending the dance with Annie, and they’ve both decided to show up in costume. Since Cassidy is a bit of a geek, and because she wants to have fun and not give a shit about the fact that a lot of people will be looking at her anyway, decided to show up as an Amy Pond Kiss-o-Gram, and Annie shows up in her River Song finest.
They talk, they dance, they enjoy themselves. Cassidy has a couple of people give her shit, but she blows them off well and good. In the end, they sneak out of the dance for a bit, talk some more, and steal a kiss in the same spot where Annie and Kerry first kissed the same night they came to the school, and where placed in their coven.
Then Annie tells Cassidy they need to walk between the bonfires . . .
Bonfires are a tradition during Samhain. People would toss things in, old clothes, food, the bones of slaughtered animals, and watch them burn. It was all about cleansing, getting rid of the old and greeting the new. Some places have bonfires side by side, with enough space to walk between, so that one is purified and cleansed, leaving behind the ashes of their old life, and ready to face the new.
This is what Annie and Cassidy have at their school. In a large field, there are two bonfires, and students are encouraged to dance about them and walk between, a symbol that they are leaving behind one more year, and facing the new, clean and untarnished.
I hear you going, “Yeah, but where is this leading, oh Scribbler of Words?”
Here you go: characters teach you things, not only about your stories, but sometimes about you. Cassidy was a character that came to me very easy, because she’s a cute, smart, geeky girl who accepts that there’s really nothing different about her, and that those who see her as a “freak” or “strange” are people who just can’t deal with this thing known as reality.
But then a lot of my female characters came to me easily. Audrey Dahl was the first, she of psychic ability and fireball throwing. The same with Jennette Hagart, the Nerd Girl Who Became an Ass-kicking Sorceress. But Cassidy spoke loudly to me, because she touches me like few others.
Because I am Cassidy.
A few people have asked about the name change that came to my blog, which was the same name change that happened on my Facebook Page. Some even noticed that the changes came about on or about 10/11/12, which was Coming Out Day. There is a reason behind this: it was time to come out.
I’m transgendered. I’ve been this way my entire life. But this year, in a year of much change and, in some cases, great hardship and insanity, I needed to get real with myself. I started seeing a therapist, and I began the journey toward becoming the person I actually am.
I’ve begun taking steps towards being Cassidy, the woman I actually am. It’s happening slowly, and it’s going gradually, but it’s happening. In a few years time, the old me will be a memory, and Cassidy Grace Frazee will be a fact of daily life.
Oh, and she writes, too. She’s very good as well–as good as me, I might point out.
What a surprise.
This is my life. A few people close to me have known this for a few months, and they’ve supported me, which is a great thing. I don’t expect things to become easy, but then, I’ve not known a lot of easy stuff for the last fifty years. Why should the remaining ones be any different?
Annie and Cassidy walked between the bonfires that Samhain Eve night. They felt the fire wash over them, felt the heat upon their skin, and when they emerge out the other side, they were clean and new. They were different people, and they’d never look back from that moment. One day I’m going to write this story–
But there is another I have to concentrate upon at the moment.
NaNo is a crazy time. Halloween is a crazy time.
But a certain ginger girl reminds me that life is crazy, and you gotta deal with what comes your way. Follow your instincts and you’ll find your way through the fire. I know, however, I’m never going to get burned. I’m always going to come out the other side shiny and new.
This is a strange thing to say, but I once had an idea for a story . . .
It was a very simple story, about a writer and his muse, which is nothing like that movie, The Muse, which was something of a Hollywood insider movie, and the muse in question may or may not have been a crazy person. Mine is different, naturally. And it’s not about a guy who was successful–it’s about a guy trying to find that success.
The gist of it is this: the guy goes to bed one night, and he’s shaken awake by someone, a very pretty girl–think Manic Pixie Dream Girl type–who’s telling him that he’s got a great idea, and he needs to write it down now. Of course, he does have one, and he writes it down, and when he goes back to bed, the girl is gone, vanished, totally ghosted.
But not for long.
She starts coming into his life when he least expects it. She just shows up: at home, at work, while he’s shopping. She brings him ideas, and she won’t leave him alone until he starts writing. The more he writes, the more she’s around, and eventually, as he works upon this epic novel, she’s living with him pretty much all the time. He and she both know what she is, and they’re happy with that–
Or are they?
That was really as far as I ever got with the idea. There was so much going on in my life at the time that I was lucky to find the time to even consider the idea, much less flesh it out. But I’ve just added it to my idea file, so there!
I talk about my Muse a lot. To me, she is a real person, with real feelings, real needs, real ambitions. She doesn’t exist merely to get me off my ass and into writing–though, in order to write, I have to be on my ass, if you know what I mean. She’s there to do her own thing as well. It’s just that one of the things she does is inspire me to do great things.
I haven’t done those things yet, but I keep working at them.
There was a time when my Muse was the only thing that kept me writing. She was the only one who believed in me, who encouraged me to push myself, who said, “Keep going.” I listened to them, and even when things were so very dark for me that I didn’t know if I could continue, I kept going. Because my Muse would be unhappy if I ever quit.
In my unpublished story Echoes, Albert recollects a dream he had about someone he once knew, a woman named Marissa. There is a line in the story:
But Albert was in the mood to talk—or, if nothing else, to finish describing his dream. “She said, ‘I hope you are touching others as you touched me’.”
“You touched me.” I have heard my Muse say that to me from time to time. At least, I think that’s what she’s said. You know how it is with Muses; one moment they’re very happy, and the next they’re pulling a knife on you.
Like the character in my idea, I would love to be able to sit and talk to my Muse. To enjoy lunch with her. Or dinner. Or to wander a book store. Connect with her in a way beyond the, “Me Muse, You Writer!” relationship.
It’s not possible, though, because my Muse is real only in my mind. But . . . She’s there every day.
Today is Museday, her special day. How will I please her?
Travel Day today, and this is my first Friday in The Undisclosed Location in a few weeks. The last couple I’ve been at The Real Home, seeing doctors and dealing with lab work, and a tree, lets not forget a tree. So this will be my first drive home on a Friday in a while, and I’m hoping all the idiots are off the roads.
I was almost in three near collisions in the course of ten minutes yesterday, the best one happening because the one interstate we were one begins to split into two, and a guy in front of me, he decides, “Oh, I want to be in the lane to my left–the one that’s all backed up. I think now is a good time to come to a complete stop!” Which he almost did. He forces his way into the other lane, and as I drive by–he’d on a mobile the whole time. Yes, I wanted to stop, drag him out of his car, and beat him like an old rug.
If I can get out of work even ten minutes early, that’s ten minutes I don’t have to deal with people on the roads. Crossing my fingers the trip home is good.
I managed a bit of writing: just over thirteen hundred words. Meredith and Albert, sitting by a pond, reminding each other why they’re so friendless. Even though there were a lot of words, it wasn’t easy to write. I actually went back and added a paragraph at one point, because I forgot to say something, and it needed to be said at that point. That’s why we have computers with word processing programs; to allow us that luxury. Back in the day of typewriters, I’ve had had to write that on another page and insert it in the stack. No, I don’t miss those days.
Some of the dialog sounds bumbling, and it’s suppose to be. It’s not an easy scene to write, because both characters are, in reality, pretty lonely in their own ways. I can relate to that, believe me. So as I have them both sitting on a bench on the shore of a pond, staring out at something on the other side, speaking in low voices so they aren’t overheard, I can feel how alone they both are.
I was speaking with someone late last night, and I told her that this story has been whacking me pretty hard. There is a way too much of me in Albert, and so when he feels like a person in the wrong place and time, alone in the middle of a crowd, I know exactly what he’s feeling.
See, this is how writers are. They can become emotionally bound by their stories, and it pulls and tugs at them as much as it does their characters. I’ve never had a story take this long to write, because every turn feels like I’m tip-toeing through a minefield. What strange thing am I gonna have to make the characters say next?
Lets get home today, relax a little, then get back into the story tonight–
My characters lead such interesting lives. Far more interesting than me, that’s for sure. Then again, I’m not involved in something out of an anime . . .
I should feel lucky.
Saturdays become long writing days. I put up Scrivener, get into the chapter I’m going to do, then leave it so I can put in words little by little. Yesterday was blogging, then Part II of Removing the Tree, then a little bit of writing, then off for lunch at an Indian restaurant, then back for a little writing, then setting up guest blog posts, then outside to talk about the tree, then writing a guest blog post . . . and, finally, as the night wore on, really getting into Part Fourteen of my current work.
Part Fourteen is all Meredith, from her point of view. It’s not going to be a long chapter, not as long as the preceding four chapters, which were all about Cytheria and Albert. It was a bit tricky getting into Meredith’s head, because I’ve been out of it for so long, but she’s a good kid–a little seductress, to be sure, but when you see someone you want, go for it, right?
She does realize one thing, and that’s she can’t get Cytheria in trouble for . . . well, in an earlier chapter, they met for lunch, and one thing a person should never do is taunt the girlfriend/lover/partner of the guy you just had sex with if said girlfriend/lover/partner has the ability to kill you with her mind.
Which Cytheria came very close to doing.
Meredith could go to the agency that oversees Cytheria, or even go to the school and say, “Your professor of history tried to crush my body with her brain, I wanna file a complaint!” ’Cause now, they have to have a meeting about why the professor of history was crushing a student with her brain, and it all comes out that she was playing Ayeka to Cytheria’s Ryoko.
No, not a good place to be. At least Albert’s the one with Ryo-Ohki. You don’t want to give Cytheria her own spaceship, even if it is cute and eats a lot of carrots.
A thousand words in last night, making it a pretty good session. I have something else I have to start writing today as well–how does this work out that I’m doing all this writing now? I need to lay out a thousand or so words for an eight-part story, and I’m going to be flying by the seat of my pants on this one, as I only have a basic idea, and little else. Sounds like fun, huh?
And it’s going to be a romance of sorts. Okay, more like some semi-erotica. Okay, more like a fantasy with lots of sex. Maybe. I don’t know. Since I don’t have anything plotted out, it’s going to be interesting to see where this goes.
The long weekend is almost over. Later today it’s back to The Undisclosed Location, and getting back to the grind. Getting back into something like normal.
This is one of those moments where something strange happened, and I do something that is going to aggravate what’s happened, and I know it will, but I keep on going because–I don’t know, Space? Not just space, but Spaaaaaaccccce!
Anyway, my eyes are swollen. I mean, like they are red and there is stuff oozing from the corners. It really looks nasty, and it feels even nastier. Not to mention it can make seeing very difficult at times. Like now. I can see the screen okay, but it’s sort of irritating. Not to mention that I don’t know why this is happening. It started at work, and it’s driving me a little nuts.
But, hey, when you can’t see very well, what do you do? Write!
It was a good writing session as well. For the first time in a while, I managed over a thousand words on a weeknight. That hasn’t been happening a lot of late, mostly because I have been so damn tired at night, once I hit my five hundred word limit, I just want to shut down. It’s one of the reasons Diners at the Memory’s End has taken so long to created.
But last night I was nearing the end of Part Twelve, and I grew closer, I didn’t want to stop. I knew the end was near, and when I was at seven hundred word, I want to keep going. Same at eight hundred and nine hundred. When I reached the end of the chapter, where the secrets of Meredith’s culture are to be exposed, the final count was very close to eleven hundred words, and I felt like, for the first time in a long time, I’d done something worthwhile.
It was a good session, because the setup had been Albert confessing his part in what Meredith and he had done while away at Telescope Camp. So the return was Cytheria getting ready to rip him a new one . . .
She is an understanding person, though. Not to mention there is no way she and Albert can split, because . . . hey, if you know anything about these characters, you’ll know why. (Maybe you need to read up on my characters a bit, huh?) Anyway, she loved the honesty, and since she knew Albert wasn’t trying to bullshit her on any parts of his story–this is where reading auras comes in handy, which Cytheria can do–she was ready to forgive him. With a warning, of course, one that I think I have to go back in an modify, since I don’t think it was really the warning I wanted to give.
The reason being, my eyes hurt, I was tired, and it was getting close to the time when I usually hop into bed. So I headed for the end, finished, and that was that.
Time for Part Thirteen, and the lowdown on Meredith . . . which is likely to get dicey, because this is a bit of history I need to work up. It might be a bit slow getting the words out at the beginning, but I’ll get them out.
Yesterday was sort of zombie day for me. Don’t know what it was, but I seemed to spend most of the day in a daze, fighting to stay awake. It’s like being on medication, but not. Some of it came from not being able to sleep, but some of it . . . well, the kind of work I do throughout the day is slumberous. It will put you right out if you’re not careful.
I wasn’t careful.
But I made it home. I spoke with some people, which woke me up a little, just enough to keep me from falling into the pit of slumber. It really made the day stretch out, let me tell you. By the time 9 PM rolled around, I thought it was time to make it to bed.
But I started writing. Because it was time.
This has been a big part of the problem of late. When I want to write, I’ve been so wracked out that the words don’t come easy. And when you have to force the words onto the paper, so to speak, then the story feels forced as well.
But there was a strange thing. Yes, I was writing while I was chatting with someone, so I was pretty much writing in fifty word busts. But they came out. It was as if, when I got to the part where I needed to say what happened between two of my characters, the words wanted to come out. They’d been waiting all night, and suddenly–there they were.
It was time for Albert and Cytheria to speak. Cytheria already knew what had happened between Albert and Meredith, and she who is able to float up the side of 40 meter towers and hover like she’s the Dark Phoenix–to which Albert made the comparison–wanted to see what Albert was going to say.
What she didn’t know was that Albert had already decided to come clean.
See, with Albert–he knows he screwed up, and he did it badly. There are reasons why Albert couldn’t walk away from Cytheria if he wanted to, but the bottom line is he never wants to walk away. She is everything to him, and he knows it. While he likes Meredith–and she is a nice person, regardless what one might think of her orbital boinking–he loves Cytheria. To him, she is the star by which he guides his ship, and he’s never wanted anything else.
So, right now, he’s confessing. He’s talking. He’s telling all. I was able to show his declarations without writing everything out, which wasn’t needed because–hey, I’m wordy enough, but the reader doesn’t need to hear every single detail of how he felt.
That’s actually coming later, so don’t worry, you’re going to get your history lesson.
So I managed to get out 615 words last night, and I was around 600 the night before, and 500 the night before that . . . it’s coming back slowly. Whatever it has been that was keeping me from moving froward has begun to vanish. Sure, I still have a lot of things going on around me, things that are distracting me, but I need some of those distractions right now, and I’m fitting them in around my writing.
Tonight I’ll try to 700 words. I know what needs to be said–
