Now that Welcome to the Fishbowl is something of a reality, I’ve started the task of bringing it together.  The world is so-so there–and by that I mean I have a majority of the basics down, it’s the little things that remain that will bring things into sharp clarity.  Yesterday I show the hospital wing from the main hall of my school, and after the post went up I spent some more time putting things together.  By the afternoon I’d arrived at the following conclusions:  one, because I was moving my story from a universe that wasn’t really of my making (yes, these things happen), and into my own private universe, there were things that were never in the building that I was now needing to add–like, say, an office for the head of school security, and a place from which to monitor everything.  And two . . . this damn place is huge.

Let us gander upon what I have so far.  As you can see, I’ve maybe half the second floor in place, and I’ve started putting in the library, which is going to be beyond that wall in the back of the building.  From the doors in the lower right hand corner, to the wall all the way towards the top, the building is one hundred and sixty meters long.  If you don’t do metric, that’s about five hundred and twenty-five feet.  To put that into some kind of perspective, I could fit this building inside Indiana’s own Lucas Oil Stadium, which is about two hundred and seventy meters long by my careful Google Map measuring.  Except my Great Hall will never seat sixty thousand people, nor require a tax on food so millionaire owners can keep the lights on.  It’s a world all unto itself.

My characters are developing as well.  The story has a huge cast, though maybe a half-dozen of them will get any sort of face time.  Still, when I think about the characters that do have a spoken part, and who end up becoming important to the main characters–I’m looking at over a dozen.  Easy.

Where do I get names?  Scrivener has a name generator that allows you to randomly generate first and last names based upon gender, nationality, and even letters of the alphabet, so when you need the name of a German woman whose last name starts with an E, no problems.  Then once you see something you like, move the name to your short list and copy it off for later use.

Or do as I did this morning.  I needed the names of three people who are part of the Foundation, and whom play a part in the story.  In the process of setting up their cards in Scrivener, I came up with Mr. Mayhew, Ms. Rutherford, and Mr. Gabriel.  If you know me, you know where those names came from.

The gates of the story are ahead, and I’m approaching slowly.  Won’t be long before I enter the city proper.

Or the school for that matter.

I’ve done more with less, trust me.

As I pointed out to a few people I’m into the world building phase.  The good news is that I have a lot of the world already built.  The bad news is I have a lot of the world to build.  Reason?  I originally built much of the story within the framework of another world, and now I have to reverse engineer everything so it fits inside another world.  Does that make sense?  It does to me.

One of the things I use within my story are maps and floor plans.  I’ve always used maps to figure out where things should be within the framework of a story.  When I wrote Couples Dance I knew where the main house was located, and I used Google Maps to see how I’d get from one place in my world to another.  With Her Demonic Majesty I had drawings of what Chicago might have looked like had city plans been allowed to progress, and in my world that’s exactly what happened.

And in The Foundation Chronicles, I’ve a pretty big school to design.  Actually, it’s designed for the most part.  There are things to put into place, but I have buildings up, and names assigned to buildings and places.  Now all I have to do is write the story.

Though there’s something else here as well . . .

I may have mentioned that I have designed buildings that I use in my stories because I like to have a visual reference for what my characters are seeing.  This was actually forced upon me, more or less, by someone I know, because when I’d start talking about these buildings that these characters were visiting, she was like, “I can’t really see it.  Can you draw it out?”  Most of the time I’d say, “No,” but I have a hard time saying no to this person . . .

What we have here is the hospital of the Main Hall for my school in The Foundation Chronicles.  It’s a big part of an even bigger building, and as there are three main floors to this place, it’s taken some time getting things in place.  My two main characters end up going here after they arrive at the school, and it’s here that they not only meet someone who’ll be a part of their lives for many years to come, but it’s where one character learns some rather unusual news–

Actually, they learn a few things in this area.  There’s even a joke that comes out of the story where one of the beds is named for one of the main characters.

I have stairs and a lift to the floor above.  I have bathrooms.  I have a place for patients to sit and eat if they can.  I have beds for quick examinations, and beds for overnight–and longer–stays.  I have the doctor’s officer, storage, and . . . the waiting room where one of my characters gets the news, and they have a bit of a freak-out moment.  Oh, get me a fainting couch!

Then again, if you look hard, you’ll see I already have one . . .

Camp NaNo put me in the position of thinking about a project.  I had an idea; I had characters; I even had the story.  What I lacked was a title.  I know this sounds strange, but I almost never start writing until I have a title.  This is a habit I got into a long time ago, picked up from a couple of writers that I read quite often in my early years.

That’s where I was last night, up until about seven PM.  That was when inspiration hit me, and the “Putting the Project Together Rag” began playing.  And when I was through, maybe around nine-thirty, I’d created what you see to your right.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the Fishbowl.

I know what you’re thinking:  Fishbowl?  And what is this thing at the top:  The Foundation Chronicles?  There’s a reason for this, so sit back and listen up.

The Foundation (yeah, I know, it’s original, move along) is something I started playing with months ago:  an organization that sorts of started out as a club for super scientist, and eventually evolved into something else more . . . paranormally.  Is that a real word?  It is now.

So I have my organization that looks for strange young minds to bring into their fold, and once I knew who they were, then it became a matter of figuring out what to do with them.  And then I remembered something from real life . . .

When my daughter started 6^th Grade–or middle school, take your pick–the administration, and the kids, refereed to the experience as “being in the fishbowl”.  While they were in the same school as 7^th and 8^th graders, they were kept as segregated from them as possible.  The idea was to get them as used to middle school, and the transition of going from class to class, as easily as possible, without having to deal with a lot of interaction from the other grades.

When I applied that idea to my new student, it made sense.  In my story you have thirty-two kids out of thirty-three coming into a school not knowing anything about the world they’re entering, and the transition will be hard enough without upper class kids getting in their way.  Ergo . . . they get fishbowled.

This is my project, this is my story.  My goal is thirty-five thousand words for July, and then I’ll shut the story down, work on something else–at this moment I think I’m going to edit Couples Dance and get it ready for publishing–then when the Big NaNo Dance starts up in November, I’ll pull The Foundation Chronicles out again and add my fifty thousand plus words to finish the story.

Oh, and did you notice the folder “Book Two”?

Yeah, I love Scrivener.

The other day I posted a link to the blog of Chuck Wendig, Terrible Minds.  Chuck is a writer, and a damn good one.  He is famous for his, “25 Things–” posts where he’ll give you twenty-five reasons why . . . well, fill in the blanks.  As I said, Chuck is a writer, a damn good one, but in the course of his writing, Chuck can get a little profane.  It’s his style.  I’m used to it, as I grew into my teens reading New Wave science fiction, and you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a f-bomb or a sex scene.

That’s not always the case with everyone, and there was one person who posted in the Facebook comment, “I’d love to share this, but there’s too much swearing.  A true wordsmith doesn’t need to talk like that; it’s lazy writing.”  Yes, I’ve heard this one before; I even had the same rap laid on me after my 4 May, 2011, blog post, simple because I said something along the lines of “Shit got real,” and a few other things.

First off, lets look at the definition of the word, “wordsmith”.  Here you go:  1.  A fluent and prolific writer, especially one who writes professionally.  2.  An expert on words.  3.  (Literary & Literary Critical Terms) A person skilled in using words.  4.  An expert in the use of words, esp. a professional writer.  Okay, then.  That’s pretty much Chuck to a “T”.  Professional writer; expert on words; person skilled in using words, especially a professional writer.

So where does it say they can’t swear?

One of the writers I’ve followed most of my life–one of the writers whose words I grew up admiring–is Harlan Ellison.  While opinions vary wildly about his personal life, as a writer there were few who could match him story for story.  He used to write about writing, and I tried to take to heart the things he said.  He also swore a lot, but there was a reason for that.

One of the things he stated was, and I’m paraphrasing, “I’m a fan of the King’s English, and one must adhere to those rules when writing.  I’m also a fan of the People’s English, and if you want to make your characters believable, you must capture they way they speak perfectly.”  In other words, if you want your characters to sound like, you know, real people, you need to have them speak the way a real person speak.  If they are a “good” person, then they’ll probably be somewhat circumspect in their dictation.  If not, there may be a good chance they’re gonna swear like a son of a bitch.

It’s hardly lazy writer, either.  Seriously.  Try to write a story where you have a character who swears, who throws around “fuck you” like they’re picking lint from their jacket, and construct their dialog in a way that they don’t sound like a six-year old who’s just discovered the word “shit”.  If you’re not a person who’s been exposed to this manor of speakings–or you don’t have a potty mouth like me–then you’re going to find writing believable dialog for someone like that difficult.  And before you say, “I’d never write anything like that,” sit down a make a list of, say, twenty-five professions that your characters might possess at some point in a story.  I can tell you, without looking at your list, there’ll probably be a third of the jobs on that list that’ll have characters who find themselves clutching the foreheads at some point and mumbling, “Fuck this job.”  Trust me; I’ve probably had that job.

Watch Glengarry Glen Ross and marvel at the construction of Mamet’s dialog.  Watch the “Coffee is for closers” monologue, and listen not to the words, but the emotion and feelings behind the words.  When Blake turns on Dave Moss and yells, “Fuck you!  That’s my name!”, his disdain for Moss couldn’t be more evident, and it becomes the set up for him to really put Moss in his place.  Then take Trainspotting, and watch how the foul-mouthed Scottish junkies and roughens (who are played by Obi-Wan Kenobi, Dr. Nicholas Rush, Moaning Myrtle, and the voice of Merida) are able to express themselves so eloquently.  I mean, “The Scottish are shite!” is pure bloody poetry.

Then go watch any movie where someone say fuck and shit every minute, where the thought is, “Ooooh, edgy!”, and you’re right back to the six-year old who’s now discovered “bastard” and is going to use it every thirty seconds.

Think it’s lazy writing?  Go ahead:  write up some paragraphs with people swearing.  You can send them to me.  I’ll tell you what I think.

And I won’t even swear back at you.

This was going to be a very different post today, because as I was powering up the computer something struck my mind, a sliver of memory that had been hanging around for a few days.  When people say, “Where do you get your ideas?” the answer is they just come to me.  My blog posts are like that.  A few times it seems as if all I’m doing is detailing things that happen day to day, and there are times, weeks even, when I do just that.

But every morning I have to come up with something.  Now, you might say, “You don’t have to come up with something,” and that’s true.  I don’t have to do anything.  I don’t have to write the blog every day.  I could just take a day off and–I don’t know?  Shop for hand bags?  Shave my legs?  Strike out on a massive road trip to find every Facebook friend who I want to share a dinner, a cuddle, and a warm bed with?  (Actually, that last could make for a great story, and I have some ideas where I’d start.)

The idea that hit me first thing is different from the words you’re seeing on your screen right now.  I’m not going to throw that idea away, because it’s a good idea, and it’s very possible when I’m sitting down tomorrow morning in my local Panara (which you can see to your right–unless you’re reading this upside down, in which case it’s to your left), and I only have one hour to crank out my post, I’ll write it up.  Yes, that is very possible.

Instead I have a project to start.  Camp NaNo is getting closer, and I can smell the stale air in the cabin now.  I know we’ll need to air this sucker out, and with the nice weather of late, I’m hoping it stays cool enough to get some warm summer breezes through the windows and make this place smell like a field in the early summer morning.

It’s time to get into Scrivener and get a project started.  It’s time to do up the character sketches, which I’ve got in my mind but not on note cards.  I was up late speaking about the story with . . . let us say a collaborator, who will probably do her damnedest to keep me honest and not to stray from the straight and narrow of the story.  While she won’t be helping me write this story, you can bet I’ll feel her behind me, because she certainly helped develop it in such a way that I can get it out of my head.

I need a title.  I’ll have a title.  And then . . . well, we know where then is going.

At least I do.

Flight and building homes–that’s my activities the last twenty-four hours.  But it’s fun, let me tell you!  I mean, look to my right:  can’t you see I’m having fun?

I’m off into the building mode for the next story, and damn but if I don’t get weird at times.  In thinking through one of the scenes in my soon-to-be story, I have two of my characters jetting along to the U.S., talking about planes and flights.  One of my characters asks the other if they’ve ever flown before.  They say something like, “Oh, yeah.  When I was eight we flew from San Francisco to London . . .”.

And there were are.  Just because I did that one line, I now gotta look up flights from San Fran to London.  I should have done this last night, but hey, while I got you here, I’ll bring up the Travelocity site and plug in SFO to LHR . . . and here we have it!

Just what I wanted:  a non-stop flight, because the character in question was telling his friend about how he flew on a 747, so he knew the layout of the plane pretty well.  I also have the flight number, and with this I can roll over to Seat Guru, pull up the flight, and find the layout of the interior.  Which, I may say, is pretty nice on the inside.

That level of information tells me what I need to know about the character, and what they know about that particular type of aircraft.  And that just comes from one simple question about what one character knows about 747s.

Such is life when you’re finding things to put into your stories.  It’s not just writing, it’s how you build your world.  And if you want to build it right, you have to do this crazy leg work.  Even if it is for just one line in one paragraph.

But that’s not even the best.  Oh, I’m just gettin’ warmed up . . .

One of the things I’ve been doing of late is building layouts of places I have in my stories.  I will build maps so I can get a visual reference of a place, and of late I’ve been using some open source software to lay out homes and buildings so I can get a feel for a place that I’m trying to describe.

The one to the right is a perfect example of finally seeing something that I’ve written about.  This is a home I built for my novel Transporting.  This is the domicile of one Duchess Scoth, and while it might not look like a lot here–and it’s just here and an AI servant, so it’s not–it’s location is seventeen hundred meters up the side of a twenty-three hundred meter cliff.  That means when you’re walking from the upper to lower levels . . . that that big window on the right, where the stairs take a sharp turn to the right?  Yep:  nothing but a sheer rock wall and open air for a mile straight down.

I’ve always wondered if my idea for the home was right, if my vision was correct.  After a day of playing around I can say, yes:  my mind’s eye is as good as my regular eyes.

Now, what other insanity can I come up with in the glow of the night?

Not really.  But it certainly feels that way.

I’m in the next phase of writing, which is doing a lot of thinking about what I want to write.  Camp NaNo is looming, and I’m working out the plot in my head.  It’s not easy, ’cause even if I do have a good start, I’m nowhere near where I need to be to start on a story.  But give me a few more days and I’ll have something.  I know I will–

Maybe I’ll even have a title.  Damn you, creativity.  Damn you.

So yesterday was a lot of thinking and playing.  I’m going over 747 designs, because I love doing that stuff, and I never realize just how many different layouts there are–and how few airlines actually use them these days.  But an Airbus 380–oh, jeez, those things are incredible!  Too bad I can’t use one, because . . . oh, I totally could, since they were around before 2011.  But I don’t want to go there, because I have my big airplane, and I’m going to stick with that.  Don’t get greedy just because you want something that’s going to look fantastic.

Then again . . .

(There’s a simple reason for using a 747 and not something like an A340-600.  It’s called, “Having a dramatic scene,” and there is only one way to pull it off.  Though . . . never mind.  I’ll figure it out.)

No matter:  I’m in design phase.  I’ve got my brain cooking and I’m coming up with things.  Next comes the writing down of things, and that will probably take a full two weeks of my times.

Then comes the writing.  Oi.

I’ve set my goal as twenty-five thousand words this time.  I’m thinking to do this as a start, then maybe finish things off come November, cause adding fifty thousand words and bringing my novel to seventy-five or eighty thousand words would be a good novel.  Yes, I know:  NaNoWriMo is suppose to be for “new work”, but in the words of one crazy person I used to know, “I make my own rules, NaNo!  You can’t tell me what to do!”  At least I write . . .

I have a condo to design today as well, and maybe work on another building.  I’m finding it easy to figure out how to write scenes if I can actually see something on my screen, and not necessarily just in my head.  I have Annie to blame for that, because she made me do that!

Speaking of Annie . . . last night my dreams were insane.  I was wandering about Paris looking to assassinate someone–no, really, I Was a Teenage Hitgirl.  Wearing Gothic Lolita outfits, too, which didn’t make me stand out too much, but apparently no one seemed to care, because I wandered the street and looked cute as hell–and ended up smoking someone, not sure who, but I totally did.

What was different about all this was at the start of my adventure I sent off a message to someone, and when I got back to my computer they replied to me, not in the handled I’d sent my message to, but with their real name.

The reply?  ”Our love must be unbound.”

Sometimes my dreams surprise the hell out of me.

It was a good afternoon of writing, and since I said I was gonna finish that story, I was for sure gonna finish the sucker.  Two thousand, six hundred words later I was finished, and it was a good thing.  Not because it was finished, but because my mindset had changed drastically over the last week, and where I had been pretty down on both myself and the story, as I wrote the final chapter I returned to the conclusion that while the story might not be down and dirty, smoking hot dirty porn, it was pretty good fantasy erotica, and I could give myself a pat on the back for completing another story.

‘Cause if you don’t know, completing a story is pretty much as important–if not more–than starting one.  And if you’re gonna start one, you better finish it, love.

Fantasies in Harmonie is not only finished, but I’ve got it out to a couple of beta readers already.  Yes, Cassie is quick on this one, because it’s a pretty clean story–you know what I mean–and after a couple of edits and a cover, I can work the world of smut with this beauty.  Maybe it’s not as good as a story about programming the girl next door to be your perfect sex slave, but it’ll be good.

With that out of the way, it means I got–let me check the big clock . . . a little more than nineteen days before Camp NaNo is in session.  Which means I need do to research.  It means I need to build my world.

I means I need a title.

That’s the thing that’s bugging me right now.  Not that I need to spec out the school, or the teachers, or the students, or the curriculum, or . . . well, any number of things.  No, the thing that bothers me now is that I don’t have a title.  I have an idea and the bare bones of a plot, but I don’t have a title, and just like Harlan, I’m strange about starting without a title.  I did that with Kuntilanak, because I really had no idea what to call it before I got all original and named it after a creature in the story.  Since then I always have a title so I don’t have to go and rename the Scrivener file once I’m about ten thousand words into this thing.

However!  Part of the story takes place aboard a 747-400, and while doing one of those magical things called a “Google Search”, I found the Seat Guru site.  While my plane will be a charter flight, I have an idea of what a current 747-400 looks like, and I can–what’s that word again?  Oh, yeah:  Imagine.  I can imagine what the inside of my place will look like.

If I get too crazy I may just model my plane in 3D–

I’ve done worse.

For one, there was a birthday in the family that required some attention on my part.  Between getting things set up on line, and having to deal with someone on a freelance writing site who wanted me to show him a concept I would develop for him before there’d be any exchange of money (hint:  I recognize when someone trying to get something from me for nothing), and a late birthday dinner, there were two other events that needed to be addressed:

First, on the trip home, I encountered an RV burning on the side of the road.  I’m not going to say how said RV came to be burning on the side of the highway, but given the demeanor of the folks who’d bailed out and were standing around looked panicky, and the location of said torched vehicle, I’m going to opine that there was some cooking in progress, the RV came around a couple of sharp corners, there was a spillage of something hot, and–WHAM!  Time to bail!

Since none of the people standing around the RV were bald, I’m guessing the cooking of meth wasn’t involved.

Then I was not in the house more than ten minutes when the power went out.  Not just in the house, but around the entire neighborhood.  Pitch darkness everywhere, or as dark as it gets on a cloudy Sunday at 7:36 PM.  I remarked that the longest the power every stayed out where I live is about two and a half hours, and right around nine-thirty the utilities trucks rolled into the area.  At 10:05 PM the power was restored, showing that when it comes to calling the lengths of power outages, I nail them.

The downside to all this was being unable to start writing until almost ten-thirty.  The power on, the A/C going, the computer finally up because I can only run mine for about forty-five minutes on the battery.  Otherwise I’d have been typing away in the darkness.  I gotta get me a new system

The upside to this is I managed a thousand words before heading off to bed, and I’m about to cap that with another thousand or so words after I finish this post.  Then . . . well, what comes next, you ask?  I know what comes next.

I gotta come up with a title.

That’s the way I start every new story, with a title, as taught by a lot of writers who I grew up reading.  First you have a concept, then you have a title, then you do your research, then you work things out–

And then you start writing.

The countdown clock for Camp NaNo says I have twenty days and change before I have to write.  I’m going to write what should be an opening to a new novel; I’m not going to tackle a novel just yet.  At least I don’t think I will.

But I’ve been wrong before.

But I’m here now.  All Hail the Great One!

When I crawled out of bed today I had Fantasies in Harmonie on my mind, because my life is pretty much like that.  No one else in bed with me, so wake up with my story.  Last night I finished all the sexy encounters that happened in the aftermath of one big event, so all that is left is to have the girls say goodbye and close it out, just as a story should.

While putting the story together in Scrivener I set up the chapters and gave each a little tag, as I always do.  For my last part, Part Four, where I am now, I had two chapters:  one of goodbyes, and one of followups.  And while getting up today, I thought about the writing I had ahead of me and went, “I don’t need that last chapter.  It’s going to take away from the story and and end up becoming superfluous.”

Which means the last chapter is dead.  Something I was going to do in the old last chapter gets done in the new last chapter, and that’s that.  End of story, write “The End”, move onto the next project, my Fantasies are over.  Sit on my twenty thousand words of erotica, it it later, and submit it to the big smut stand on the Internet.

Speaking of what’s next . . .

I’m off to camp again:  Camp NaNo July, that is.  I’ve already sent out my notices about who I want in my cabin, and I’m getting stuff ready for smores for those moments at night when we’re not writing.  It’s going to be fun, I tell ya–fun!

Then again, I have to come up with something to write in the next few weeks, don’t I?

I’ve a few ideas that I could do, all of which sound like–here it comes, I’m going to say it . . . novels.  I have lots of ideas that could be turned into novels, but if I write a novel now, does that mean I’ll be able to write another novel come November and the Big Party?  I even had another one pop up this morning and I need to get it written down before my mind completely spaces away.

I also have one particular story I could do that would make this a great Camp NaNo.  I’ve even been nudged in that direction by someone who knows me well, and knows the sort of stuff I write.  They even had a couple of words of inspiration for me:  ”Two witches”.

Hot lesbian witches . . . wait, sorry:  I’m not Charlie Sheen.

I need to get this erotica behind me today.  Then I can get my witch’s hat on and start thinking right.

After yesterday’s post my mind was in, what I felt, the right place.  It’s been lovely here in the nether-lands of Chicago, and the windows are open, the sun is shinning, the breeze is lovely, and I got to call the cops on some smart ass kids who think when they tell you, “Go ahead, call the cops,” you won’t act upon their request.  Threat + Internet lookup + mobile phone = cops telling you to drag your crap out of the street, punk.

But that’s beside the point . . . I was writing again yesterday.  Yes, it came slowly, in fifty to one hundred word bursts.  Something I never realized until now, but finding the right words to describe emotions and sensation related to sex is hard work–it’s hard!  It’s one of the things that helps bring my writing to a crawl, because I don’t want to go back over my stuff later and rewrite everything.  I try to get it all right the first time.  Arthur Hailey, the author of Hotel and Airport, used to write five hundred words in an eight hour day, but that was his first, second, final, and polished draft, because he’d go over and over what he wrote until he got it right.  I don’t claim to be him, but I do enjoy getting it as right as possible before I start editing.

I kept at it, though, and by the time I’d reached my just over nine hundred word limit before heading to bed, I had a pretty good scene going.  So good that I’ll finish it up today and make sure I get started on the penultimate section today.  I stopped just short of the border of Novella, so I’ll get my passport ready and head on into the country today.

But something else happened.  Something . . . well, not wonderful, but it made me feel good.

My current Work in Progress, Fantasies in Harmonie, was going to be a Camp NaNo story.  The tale is actually taking place during Camp NaNo July, and I’d taken the idea of writing in virtual cabins into real life, and having a group of lady writers getting together for a week of pajama time fun as only writers can have fun.  Obviously that didn’t happen, because here it is the end of the first week in June, and I’m close to closing this particular cabin.  My intention, therefore, was to pass on the Camp this year.  I’ve never done one, and I figured I’d save my time and energy for the Big One in November.

That was before I ran into someone I know and love–

I was hanging out on Facebook yesterday, and I spied a message from a friend–one who pretty much got me crazy on writing.  She was the one who helped me edit Kuntilanak, she was the one who more or less talked me into doing my first NaNo, which produced Her Demonic Majesty . . . we’re talkin’ Trusty Editor^tm.  And her message:  ”I’m doing Camp NaNo, wish me luck!”

Hold on there.  You’re going to camp and you’re going without . . . me?  I felt great for her, but at the same time my mind is flashing on sitting around in our shorts and take tops tapping away at our computers, and when the night comes we’re going over plot points while doing each other’s nails with mood polish.  (That exists:  I looked.  RESEARCH!)

Since I figured she need to hang out with at least one loser, I went and did it–I signed up for Camp.

What am I going to write?  I have no freakin’ idea.  Maybe I’m polish Couples Dance and get it ready for publication, because camp is looser and you can do that sort of thing.  Or maybe I’ll write something original.  Or maybe I’ll break into the cabin next to ours and do something naughty.

I don’t know.  I’ve never been to camp in my life.

I hear you’re suppose to have a good time . . .

Today isn’t so bad.  I slept well, got up at 6 AM, had to deal with a cranky computer but managed to whip it into proper form, and I’m finally getting my butt in gear here at somewhere close to nine-thirty.  I have my plan in place for today, and it doesn’t involve playing games or suffering for strange things, though the later isn’t completely out of the question.

No, what I have to do is get some writing done.  I need to get this Fantasy story finished, because I want to move onto something else.  What, I’m not sure yet, but I do want to get onto something else.  It’s been a while since I wrote an erotic fantasy that jumped into this sort of word range, and I’ve felt strange about this development.  There’s that little trip hammer of doubt tapping away in the back of my mind that’s saying, “Nope, you shouldn’t be writing this, it’s going to suck, you’re going to find people laughing at this shit.”

I’ll admit, I’m sensitive to this sort of stuff.  Sure, a few days ago I said it was okay to think you’re going to suck, because people with talent tend to fall into that trap.  Then I take my own advice and kick it to the curb because, hey, I suck, and this story sucks . . .

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Stop being so hard on yourself.  Why are you writing if you feel this way?

I came to a realization yesterday that I get way too wrapped up in my work, that I have a difficult time disconnecting myself from the story in the sense that when I’m given advice, I need to step back and look at it critically, and not get depressed because of something I don’t like.  It’s a sucky thing to start spinning because you start beating up on yourself over things that other people blow off.

Being critical is good, to a point.  You have to look at your work, all your work, with a critical eye.  If you didn’t, you’d churn out crap, which happens a lot:  that’s why we have Sturgeon’s Revelation.   When you eye turns into a frickin’ shark with a laser, however, it can kill your creativity faster than said fictitious shark.

This is what’s been happening with me that last month or so.  The Doubt Wagon pulled into town and won’t leave my driveway.  It feels like every time I touch something, it turns into fail.  It’s easy to be ripped apart by that–

What you need is someone who’ll give you honesty.  Who’ll point out some things that need correcting, but at the same time tell you, “Your story is amazing.”

Writers are their own worse enemies.  Stick to killing your characters–

It’s so much more fun to watch your readers suffer.