Entanglement

The difference in a day or two does wonders for a person.  Because?  Well, sit tight, ’cause I’m going to tell you.

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 . . .

Without You

Some days I feel just like poor old Psylocke here:  no matter how bad assed I am, no matter how mad my skills are, I gotta get into the vacuum-sealed latex uniform and spend all my time hyper-extending my knees and breaking my spine for the entertainment of others.  At least she’s not in heels–this 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.

Sense of Doubt

Some days it is difficult, if not impossible, to stay positive about the work one does.  Try as one might, there are a multitude of things throughout one’s life that keep the daily struggle fresh.

Writers suffer from doubts–well, most do.  There are probably a few who sit at the computer and crank out a few hundred words, then sit back and go, “Yeah, fantastic work, I’ve got a best sell a-brewin’.”  For the rest of us who craft words into sentences, and then into stories, there have been more than a few moments where we look at a computer screen, or a piece of paper, and think, “Damn, this is total shit.  Why am I doing this again?”

I get this a lot, and I’ve talked about it more than a few times.  I’ve spoken with other writers I know, and they get into the same funks as well.  I even had one person tell me the other night they were looking at a story and the thoughts they had were, “This is shit.  I should give up.”

For the last month or so, during the lead up of the self-publication of Her Demonic Majesty, I was hit with all sorts of doubts.  Am I doing this right?  Am I doing that right?  Should I even put this sucker out?  There was a point where I was going to give up and just keep the story in the bin and submit it to a few more houses just to see if I’d get a nibble or two.

This morning, as I was laying in bed thinking about the bad dreams I’d had, I also wondered about my sense of doubt as a writer.  I thought about my current story, Fantasies in Harmonie, and Her Demonic Majesty, and wondered why I bother to write.  Then I got out of bed, my head fuzzy from the medication I took last night.  It was while I was walking from the bedroom to the computer room that I understood something:

It’s okay to think you suck.  Because that is the natural order of things for those who care.

There are all sorts of reasons why I get down on myself about my work.  It’s a struggle to get noticed, and I want so much so fast these days.  The struggle is getting old, as am I, and I want to move on.  Hell, that’s my life these days:  keep moving forward and build a new life for yourself, girl.  Story of my life, let me tell you.

But without the struggle, there isn’t a need to grow.  I’ve been there as well.  I spent thirteen years with one company and fell into the trap of not wanting to move on and do other things because the place was comfortable, it was, as I thought then, secure.  So I didn’t need to feel differently, I didn’t need to learn anything, I didn’t need to write.

In the end it was, as we say in the software biz, vaporware.  A lot of things were promised, and nothing was delivered.

It’s okay to doubt, because if you know you’re good, you’re going to doubt your skills.  You’re going to agonize over what you created.  You’re going to find yourself thinking, “This isn’t worth my time, I could be making blue glass like Mr. Heisenberg”–only you won’t because Mr. Heisenberg is a fictional character, your chemistry skills suck, and in the end you’ll blow up that fancy Jasper Country double-wide you use as a crash pad and meth lab.

Then again, at least you know your customers, which is more than I can say . . .

Moonage Daydream

The weather has cooled and isn’t as muggy as it was yesterday.  I know that sounds a ridiculous thing to say, given the way weather has lost it’s mind of late–though it’s not something I haven’t seen coming for a while.  But that’s a discussion for another time.  Right now it’s cool outside, and it’s going to say this way for a few days.  Cloudy, cool, rainy.

Perfect weather for writing.

I’m well into novelette territory now with Fantasies in Harmonie.  After watching Iron Man 2 with my daughter last night, I hit the Scrivener bricks about ten PM and wrote for an hour.  A thousand words later I found a good point to leave off until today, stared at the final word count, and proclaimed myself the worst smut writer in the world.

Lets define that, shall we?  I don’t mean “worse” as in I can’t write.  I can.  I write good, as some might say.  What I mean by “worse” is that this story is double the size of other stories I’ve seen, like The Boss, My Slut or Daddy’s Horny Step Daughter.  Then again, I’m not writing those stories:  I’m writing mine.

As one person told me, it’s gonna be a real story, not just get off sex.  Though there’s nothing wrong with that.

What’s strange for me is my sleeping patterns these days.  When I go to bed I’m usually thinking of some story that I want to write, and when I wake up I find myself going over a scene from the current work in progress–usually as I lay there gathering my strength and wits.

That happened this morning.  I started coming awake in the dim light of this cloudy, gray morning, and here I have something bouncing around my head concerning one of my characters.  Now, I don’t know if it’s something that would fit her for this current story, but it’s damn sure something that could work for her in another story.  Yes, I think that way:  I’m always figuring in another story angle for characters even when I’m working on their current story.  (About the only one I haven’t done that with is Couples Dance because, damn . . .)

The images that assault me during that time–oh, my.  It’s an interesting time, since I have these ideas and scenes and feelings that enrapture me while I lay there, eyes half-closed, taking it all in.  Sometimes I feel like this is the best time for me to get my ideas in order, because things are coming at me fast and furiously, and I’ve had some of my best scenes hit me during the waking hours.

They can also be a little overwhelming at times, because my mind is wide open, and just about anything can happen during these moments.  These things wash over me and I lay there and take it in and take it apart.  I see what works and what doesn’t.  I think about what I want to keep and use and what I want to discard–

Sometimes I even get a story idea.

If only my day was this productive.

Wild is the Wind

For a moment I wondered if my computer was coming up this morning.  You start having these fears when your machine is looking at its seventh birthday, and all your friends have gone through three or four machines by this time.  If I’m lucky I’ll hang on this sucker for another year, then maybe get that super-tablet that I’ve had my eye on for years.

But I’m here, I’m up, and I have plans for the day.  Writing, of course:  I need to get back into my story, and there’s something special I want to work on as well.  What is it?  I’m not telling, at least not yet.  Give it a day or two, but you’ll see it.  Maybe you’ll even like it.

Speaking of the story . . . yeah, over the ten thousand mark.  That’s me, Ms. Wordy Smut.  It should just be sex and sex and sex, and kept it short and simple, but no:  I gotta tell a story.  Well, people liked my other long smut, so maybe I can get people to like this smutty smut, too.  They might even want to give me a couple a bucks in the process.

I have a guy watching me because writing and swaying back and forth as I listen to David Bowie Live From the BBC, from back in 2000.  Hope you enjoy the show, sucker, because maybe it gets better.  Enjoy your yogurt and quit staring a hole in me, ‘kay?  People, I swear.

I think I’ve finally reached some sort of point with Fantasies in Harmonie, where I feel like I have to write this now.  I go through the strangest feelings about my works at time, and this has been one of them.  Maybe it’s the writing late at night, maybe it’s finally using Scrivener in full screen mode–which I highly recommend–maybe it’s I’m finally kicking through this depression I’ve been in for the last month.  Whatever it has been, when I’m writing I love writing.  The distractions are becoming fewer, and I’m really getting into the scenes I’m creating.  It could be due to the story finally taking off, so I crank through another ten thousand words, get to the end, and get a cover while I’m editing this sucker.  Push it out, put it up, have it ready for the end of July so people can have a little excitement as they flow into fall.  I aims to please.

There remains what comes next.  It’s always about what comes next these days.  Get into the wind and go with it, and don’t stop flying just because you found a place where you can relax for a bit and enjoy the sights.  Somewhere down the jet stream you’re going to find something new and exciting, so finish up your thing and get wild with the wind, because if you’re good, if you’re right, you can keep flying the wind forever.  Or at least until you get too old to fly.

Then what do you do?

Screw it.  You keep flying.  And tell the stories of when you touch down.

 

Can’t Get It Out of My Head

I am deliberately ripping off a song title today because I’ve been listening to Electric Light Orchestra for a couple of days, and I’m currently listening to a concert they performed in Osaka in 1978, and that particular song just finished.  Which gave me the idea for what to write today, as well as the title.  See?  Inspiration comes from all sources.  You just have to know when to grab it when it pops up.

The little story that I’ve been working on, Fantasies in Harmonie, isn’t so little any more.  It was suppose to be quick and smutty, a nice piece of naughty erotica that would sell quickly and overtake all that other stuff on Smashwords and Amazon that pass for hot writing.

Alas, it’s no longer little.  Two night ago I wrote a bit over twelve hundred words; last night I wrote just under twelve hundred words.  That’s like a third of a short story right there, and it only covers one transformation and one scene of one of my characters sorta, kinda, actually playing with her lady bits.  Twenty-four hundred words of fantasy and sexiness, for one person.

Oi.  They should all be in bed together right now, and I’m sitting at ninety-seven hundred words with maybe another ten thousand to go?  Some smut writer I am.  I think Gore Vidal had the same problem, so I got that going for me.

The story continues, and I’m at least getting into the stuff that’s suppose to be in erotica, which is the sex.  Then I push through that, then I finish up the story, and then . . .

Yeah, what then?

See, here’s the problem:  I’m working on this story, and I’ve got like half a dozen things rolling about in my head at the same time.  It’s likely one of the big distractions I’m having with Fantasies, because when I should be thinking about this story that was going to be written more as a lark than anything else, I’m thinking about what story I should edit next to prep for publication; I’m looking at Create Space so I can offer physical copies of my new novel, Her Demonic Majesty (available in fine ebook versions everywhere); I’m thinking about stories that haven’t moved out of the world building stage–

It’s this last that’s really driving me nuts, because the characters are there, wanting to come out and be made whole, and I’m busy getting Dagny, Brittany, and Skyller all heated up so they can do some nasties and write about it later.  (Writers: they’re all so damn kinky, doncha know?)  Then when I have a break in the action–which is most of the day, actually–my mind wanders back to a place I’m calling Sigle, and before you know it I’m thinking about what I should do with certain characters, and what events will shape their lives–

I should really be thinking about mecha battles and the such, because that’s also a story I want to write.

What’s a girl to do?  Well, writing would be a start . . .

Onward to the Lost Planet

Yesterday I wasn’t in the mood to write.  Yes, I know:  it always seems as if I’m in the mood to write, but that’s not always true.  Yesterday was one of those days when the words were stuck in the back of my mind, and the urge to get them out on a page was ranking somewhere below scrubbing the sleep from my eyes.

It happens.  You get off somewhere in the ether, you find your mind wandering to other things, other stories, and the urge to write sort of vanishes.  With the things that have been happening to me the last couple of weeks I don’t find it all that unusual that getting back into my stories has been a bit difficult.

I sort of found myself putting around, therefore, and when I came time to get into Fantasies in Harmonie, it was a tough slog.  Write a little, then a distraction.  Write a little, then I’d see something shiny.  Write a little, then think of another story to work on.

On and on, into the night it went.

Here’s the thing, thought:  I kept writing.  Though I didn’t feel like writing, I kept at the story.  I’d do a paragraph, then something else for a few minutes, then back in to do two or three paragraphs.  Though there wasn’t any grand “Write Like a Madwoman for Hours” feel, it kept going–

Until I finally reached a point where I said, “It’s late, and this seems like a good place to stop the story.”  Once I checked out what I’d written for the night, the final word count was almost twelve hundred words.  As I told some people later, it wasn’t bad for someone who wasn’t in the mood to write.

I want to get back into the swing of writing like I mean it.  Sure, it sounds like I’m working hard, but the last year has seen me struggling through my writing.  A year of steady writing, and it seems like I have to kick myself in the butt to get it going.  I could point to several things happening in my life that make it that way, but a big part is that I’m wanting a lot, and I’m not getting there the way I want to get there.  I want it all, and I want it now.

I’m being impatient.

I’m looking for that lost planet, the one called Success, the one that says, “Okay, you can write, and you can even enjoy it, and you can spend the rest of your life doing it, and you won’t have to worry about editors and ISBNs and publication platforms.  We gotcha covered, chickie.”  And I get up in the morning and pull up my Scrivener files, and I drink my coffee and look over what it is I want to do for the day–

And I write.

That planet is out there; I just have to find the place.  It would help if my ship were ready to go–

Maybe I should write on up.

Frolic Through the Fantasic

This morning I realized something:  at times I have trouble remembering my dreams because I don’t know if I was dreaming, or if my ideas were intruding and becoming manifest.

Let me explain:

Yesterday was an all around good day to dream.  I started about laying out a new plan for a school grounds that would, should, could end up in a story, and it was a bit o’ work, because I’m working off an area that’s real, and I needed to try and get my measurements correct.  I’m nutty that way, needing to see what’s available in the real world, and then going to work so I can get the fantasy as real as possible.

Some people call it too much work; I call it part of the job.

I know there are adjustments in one of the buildings I created.  for one, the space is far too large, and I need to scale it down just a bit.  I’ll do that this morning, after I finish this post.  Maybe I’ll add a few buildings.  Maybe I’ll start giving them names, and start in on instructors . . .

Then it was off to Fantasies in Harmonie.  I didn’t get into the story until around nine-forty PM, which is late by anyone’s measure, but I was so enthralled by my grounds work that I didn’t notice the passage of time.  When you get into your groove and you’re overtaken by the world you’re creating, you can find yourself getting lost easily.

There was writing, though, and it went smoothly.  It was time to describe the various transformations, and though I’d done one and went part ways through another, there was room to discuss what had happened to my characters, and for one person, that involved a lot of self-discovery which, in turn, required a bit of wordage to show what she was doing.

I once again found myself in my groove, because I’d finish a paragraph, then think, “Keep going; you need to finish what she’s feeling.”  It’s late, I’m tired, my eyes are starting to hurt–but I needed to finish.  That’s a feeling I haven’t had in a while when it comes to my writing.  You take a couple of months off to edit your work, to get your stories ready for publishing, and you get out of that mood of writing because you need to get something said.

By the time I finished with the line that I’d been waiting to write for a while–lets just say it’s something Ariel should have said after she washed up on shore–I’d put eleven hundred words behind me, and I’d done that in one hour.  I was even impressed, because I haven’t cranked out something like that in a while.  But the fantasy was there, and it demanded I give it my energy–and I did.

I had to write.

This is why I have trouble remembering my dreams some mornings:  I don’t always know what’s a dream and what’s left over from my imagination.  They are both one and the same–and it’s my job to get them out for others to see.

 

Straight On Into the Magic

In a world where people like me are slaves to their imagination, I had some good moments yesterday.  Yes, the day wasn’t the best, and it was cold enough that I came very close to catching a cold, but when the time came to deal with Fantasies, I was back into my normal writing form.

While there have been plenty of distractions for me this week, once I’m writing, I’m back to writing.  I’ve been averaging around eight hundred a night–not a lot, not for me–but it’s been a fast eight hundred.  But last night, I started writing in the early evening, and I found myself knocking off eight hundred and fifty words to end the scene I was in.

Was I finished for the evening?  Well . . .

I said yesterday I was in a bit of a strange mind set, and part of that has been brought on by the contents of the story.  There’s normalcy at the start, then a set up, then comes the magic, then will come the sex–oh, didn’t I mention that before? Yeah, sex.  Lots of sex.  Remember, this whole idea came about as something to take its place next to the unicorn porn that gets self published now and then–though I’m not disappointed to find there is Minotaur breeding now.

I’ve run into this feeling before, where you start to feel as if maybe you’re working on something that’s just a wee bit too silly, and you should be working on something a bit more–serious.  Yeah, if you’re writing, you know this feeling.  It’s different from that other feeling you have, the one that says, “You suck, don’t you know?” but you try not to listen to that one.  This other one–you hear it, because it’s mocking you even more than the other feeling.

I see where the story is going, however, and I’m not concerned.  I like the feel so far, and the fact that there’s going to be some strange things going on is beside the point.  I want to get into the magic now, I want to show what’s going to happen when you get some strange fantasies going, and the become even more real than when we put them on the page for others to see.

Something else pushed me today:  a meme I saw on Facebook.  It’s very simple in what it says–

 

Peter Dinklage:  Gives speech about masturbating.  Wins Emmy!

 

Damn right he did.  Why?  Well, he’s a hell of an actor, for one.  And two:  he had great words written for him.  Someone–more than likely George R. R. Martin–had the character Tyrion go on about the art of self pleasuring, and those word eventually made their way to HBO, along with lots of breasts and deaths.

Why feel silly about what you write when it’s what you want to write?  Yes, I’m probably not going to write about mastu–oops, too late.  Did it in one story already, and I’m probably going to do it again at some point soon.  I’ve passed that point, so why not keep on going?

Bring the magic, girly.  Stop thinking the world is going to chop to you pieces for writing good erotica.

Extended Tea Time

I am suffering from a rather dramatic drug hangover today.  I took some sleep aids to knock me out and give me a good night’s rest, and what time do I wake up?  The normal time, what else?  I swear, I’d give just about anything to sleep to about eight AM, and not crawl out of bed before six.

So the drugs are lingering with me, and it’s not a good feeling.  I sort of feel dizzy all the time, and if you’ve ever had vertigo, it’s not a pleasant feeling.  The mind feels like it should shut down and rest a while, but the body is like, “No, dude; we got things to do.”

And I’m stuck in the middle with these clowns.  This is where I wish I could download my mind into another body and just get on with the day.  Screw flying cars:  give me the Black Widow clone body, stat!

I only managed to get in seven hundred words on Fantasies in Harmonie last night, due in part to discussing matters of an article with someone last night.  By the time they vacated the Internet it was past nine my time, and I was starting to have a sleepy.  Still seven hundred words was pretty good, especially when I spent about fifteen minutes considering how I was going to get my lady writers together for a week in the woods.

The thing that’s coming out from this is that I’m getting wordy again.  I’m already twenty-two hundred words into the first part, and I’ve not even gotten to the magic.  Most of the stories like this have people stripping to their knickers at this point, and I’m rambling on about month-long writing camps and word counts.  This is why I’m not as good at erotica as, say, someone doing werewolf porn:  I gotta do the set up and make my characters look like read people in unreal situations.  The people writing the werewolf porn have psudo-wolves banging away by the fifteen hundredth word.

This is how I want to do it, though–it’s how I have to do it.  I try to do more than write characters who vanish when they turn sideways.  I’m sure I could write porn and, as one of my friends says, have them “bang at a thousand (words),” but if I did that, then one would never feel a connection to the girl who feels herself changing all over . . .

Naw, not gonna tell you.  You just have to wait for the story to show up on Amazon.

This made me think about the dream I wrote about yesterday.  After one friend read the post they said, “Sounds like a story there.”  Oh, does it now?  Actually, I’d sort of thought of the same thing, that maybe there’s a story in them there REM waves.  A sexy story?  Sure.  A kinky story?  You betcha.

The question becomes, do I write it?  And what is it about besides latex clad women with multiple limbs getting their freak on?

Wait–do I really need more than that?

All Hail the Spider Queen

Well, isn’t this an interesting start to the week?  Actually that happened last night when I was working on Fantasies in Harmonie, and I started working things out in the initial scene . . . then again, maybe it started with the dreams last night, which were very bizarre.

Lets get this in order, shall we?

First off, I didn’t think I was going to write a lot last night.  I thought, “Yeah, did five hundred words last night, maybe do the same tonight.”  Right.  So I started writing after I got some information out of my ideas file and put into the current project.  I looked at the layout of the cabin, and started in with a question asked and answered.

I had no real idea about what was going to be in the scene, what was going to happen, and yet, the moment I started writing I didn’t feel as if I was going to need to search for words.  I knew what would happen, and I didn’t need to go into a lot of discussions about the why of being in the cabin–that’s probably left for tonight–but rather I wanted to show the ladies together as a group.  It doesn’t get simpler than that.

So I have the set up, the witty banter, the insinuation that one of the women is into My Little Pony fan porn (we’ll call it “Fifty Shades of Flutershy”), the unsaid feeling that something isn’t right with one of the characters–it’s all there.  It’s getting things set up for the big bangs to come–no pun intended.

I know tonight the words might not come out as easily as they did last night, but it felt good to be creating again.  It’s a silly little story, but so what?  It’s my story, and I feel for my characters.  Maybe you’ll feel them, too, when you read this.

As for the dream–hey, lets spend some time with this madness now . . .

Of late my dreams haven’t been that important.  They’ve been there, but nothing that has stood out, nothing that made me wake up and think, “What the hell was that all about?”  That doesn’t mean I haven’t had my semi-waking moments, but it’s been nothing like the dreams I had last year.

This time, though–let me tell you.  First I was out shopping, and no big deal there.  I was in a modest skirt, sandals, tee shirt, the sort of thing one wears on a warm, sunny day.

That somehow transitioned to ending up in an adult clothing store, and I was trying on this black latex mini dress and boots combo, and the girl who was waiting on me was pretty much drooling as she watched me in the mirror.  She kept calling me “Spider Queen” for no reason that was then apparent–

Then I was back home, and I was with someone I know, and she was having trouble containing herself.  At one point she says, “Take me, Spider Queen,” and before you can say “Metebelis III,” I’ve got six arms and I’m doing some rather strange and kinky things to my friend, who is more or less mumbling “I love you” between moments of ecstasy.

I mean, what the hell?  Me, the latex clad Spider Queen?

Maybe there’s a story in there–

Camping on the Story

I hit my goals yesterday; yes, I did.  I blogged, I wrote an article that took up much of my afternoon, and then, after Doctor Who was over and done, I got down to working on my story, because these stories just sort of languish and do nothing on their own.  It’s like you have to write all the words for them.

The first part is sort of strange, because I was free forming as I went along.  I have a feeling that when I go back over this story, I’m going to end up rewriting a lot of this part.  But it’s a good set up; it gave me the feeling that something is different about this place in the woods, so when things happen, the reader shouldn’t be taken by surprise.

There was one big change that I had to do before heading off to bed, though.  I was looking something up–research, you know–and I just happened to take a closer look at the name of the place where my story takes place.  And that was when I discovered (let me say this in my Hermione voice), it’s not Harmony, it’s Harmonie.  Oops.

Hey, even the best research can be wonky when you’re looking at Google Maps at ten at night after being up for seventeen hours.

A was a bit bummed out, but not so much that I went into a mental tailspin from which I couldn’t recover.  No, I was level headed about the matter, since all I had to do was change the name of the story and rename the project.  Ergo, the story is now known as Fantasies in Harmonie, which gives it an even nicer ring than what had gone before, don’t you think?

there wasn’t a whole lot of writing last night; when I was finished with the scene I’d only written around five hundred words. I wasn’t looking to do a lot of writing last night because I was doing a set up and I knew it was going to take a little finagling to get the words right.

Also, I’m a bit more careful when I write these days.  I found myself writing then stopping so I could look over what I’d written.  If it looked good, I went on.  If I didn’t, I read the lines until I knew what I wanted to write, and then wrote that.  It’s sort of editing on the way, which slows you up, but ultimately helps me keep the text as clean as possible.

I checked my timelines, because if there’s one thing I am, it’s attentive to the time it takes to do anything.  From the time I finished Suggestive Amusements to the time I published Her Demonic Majesty, about seven weeks went by.  That time was spent in edits, getting covers made, and setting up my accounts on Smashwords and Amazon.  As I told a friend the other day, writing is work, and publishing things correctly takes even more work.

So the more I get right up front, the less I have to react to in order to finish my work correctly.

Slowing down now so I don’t have to rush latter is a great idea.  Just like finding a good cabin in the woods, you gotta take your time.