Bring Down the Sadness

Just as a week ago I’d finished the draft on Replacements, last night saw me finishing the draft on Echoes.  Last chapter, a few words added, a couple of things edited . . . ta-da!  Final Draft is in the bag.  Now all that’s required is one more pass, another good polish, a book cover, and it’s ready to take its place next to Banging the Cheer Squad, which is one of the tomes that appears on my Smashwords front page.  (There’s even an interesting first sentence:  ”Gretchen thought she was the only cheerleader who had been turned into a gangbang slut.”  Definitely not my high school.)

The last chapter has always made me cry–my story Echoes, that is, not the one about slutty cheerleaders.  I wrote it last year, starting it almost about this time, and it was a reflection of something that I was feeling at the time.  I wanted to get everything down inside words I’d remember, everything that I felt would convey how I felt then, and I think–I think–I got it right.  It was the first real story I wrote that touched my emotional side, and it’s really one of the first stories that isn’t just words, but possesses feelings as well.

Which is why the ending makes me sad, because the feelings are still there.  Probably will be forever.

The thing about Echoes, though, is that if I couldn’t have finished it, I’d have never been able to write the ending to Transporting.  The later was delving into some deep, emotional waters as well, and as I’ve stated in other, older posts, in order to finish the story, I needed to get into some feelings I couldn’t access.  I’d always been a touch unemotional, and it showed in my writing.  I could plot and do prose, but there was something missing.

It’s a fact of life that sometimes your writing is going to make you cry.  Can’t be helped, because when you, the writer, goes over a piece, no matter how long before it was written, you’re going to remember when that writing happen, where it happens, and maybe even what you were feeling when you wrote those particular words.  That’s assuming you aren’t Scriptomatic 3000, which was something I think Dan Aykroyd called himself when he was developing scripts.

If you’re just hammering away at your stories, getting the words down one after the other, and you’re not putting yourself into them, then maybe you won’t feeling anything when you’re editing them later.  I think that will show up in the story, however, because as many of you know, when you’re reading another author’s work, you see things in your head, see the characters a certain way, and the emotions that trickle out are pretty much a combination of yours mixed with those of the writer.  But if the writer didn’t put any of themselves into their work, the reads may just feel that.

There is one other thing about getting your feelings onto the page:  it means you’re will to open yourself up to things you may not like to remember, or feel, or even admit ever happened.  It’s not a pleasant thing to do–I know, I’ve done it.  There are a lot of things in my life that I wish hadn’t happened, and would like to forget completely.  But when you’re writing . . . damn it, those feelings just seem to pop up, you know?

All that remains are the covers, and a little polish . . .

I’m almost there with the new stories.  Here’s hoping people like them.

 

Ripples Upon the Pond

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–

I feel an admonishing coming on.  I truly do.

Twisting Perceptions

The last couple of days seem to have hit me in a particularly strange way.  Actually, this whole week has.  It has become one long, drawn out, seeming like a never ending ride on the Wonka Boat, with that maniac bastard spouting spoken word rhyme the entire way.

If you can’t tell, I want this week over in a very bad way.  Like . . . yesterday.

Part of it is this story.  Diners is hitting me a lot like Echoes did; it is resisting me in a lot of ways.  I don’t want to say, “Oh, I’ve got writer’s block!”, but it’s starting to feel like something along those lines–

Which isn’t actually true.  I’m rolling though this post pretty well, though it seems like, these days, I’m not able to go more than one or two words before I misspell something, and I have to stop, return, and fix it.  That is getting to be one annoying son of a bitch, and it’s one of the reasons I was never able to write until word processors came out.  Word processors with auto-correct that doesn’t replace “pattern” with “penis”.

All the nice things in life.

But for all the excitement I had for restarting Diners at the Memory’s End, it’s as if the moment I’m in it–bam!  It wants me to be somewhere else.  Now, Echoes I got:  there was a lot of emotion behind what I was writing, and it was tearing me up.  This?

Well, I think I know.

As I once said on the pages of the blog, most of my stories are about relationships.  Even the science fictiony ones are like that.  There’s a guy, there’s a girl–or there are two girls, or even three girls.  But anyway you look at it, there’s some kind of relationship there.

Diners is a bit about taking one of those relationships, and twisting it apart.  Just a little, but it’s there.  And it’s going to hurt one of the people in the story, and hurt them in a very bad way.

One of the curses of being a writer is that you have to show this to your readers.  So you have to think about it, and you have to figure out the words that are needed to convey those feelings into images.  In order to do that, I’ve got to spend a lot of time inside the heads of my characters, and after a while, even though they are pretty nice people, you get into some mind spaces you’d rather not go–

Like your own.

I think that’s why I’m finding myself distracted a lot these days.  My own head is a mass of spider webs any more, and while I’m driving my characters crazy with personal stuff, I’m doing the same thing to myself.  Not that I’m fooling around, or anything, but damn–there is a ton of shit that appears to be ready to reshape my life these days, and a couple of days ago I had a bit of a mini-meltdown because I was starting to feel “overwhelmed” by everything.  Maybe it’s time to go The Elvis Route, and fly out to Vegas to pick up a few thousand Quaaludes because I need to decompress, or perhaps some recreational Dilaudid is in order; just a quick skin pop and kick back with a few hours of Farscape to occupy the time.

Only a few days ago I said change was coming, and you can’t believe just how true that statement has become.  It only takes time to get there.

I wish the hell it would get here and stop driving me nuts.

The Power of a Single Tear

Sitting at the Y, trying to keep my head from spinning, writing, writing, writing.  I finally got something resembling a full night’s sleep last night–maybe six hours, but I feel better.  However, the cold is still with me, and it’s still kicking my ass hard.  Every time I cough, my sides feel like they’re going to collapse into a black hole, and I have to pause for a few seconds as the spots before my eyes pass . . . just like right before I wrote this sentence.

I’m suppose to go out this afternoon and join in a celebration.  Yes, I know it’s 5 May, and you’re probably thinking, “Time for Cinco de Mayo”.  Right day, wrong celebration.  For today is also, as it is sometimes called, Boys Day, and it’s a big deal in Japan.

There is a mini-festival at the college near where I live, and it’s Japanese, because 5 May is the end of Golden Week in Japan.  And so, if I go, I’ll get a change to re-immerse myself into some Nihon culture–which is something I used to do quite a lot of twenty years back.

These days, not so much.  I have way too many things ongoing, and getting out to local festivals usually isn’t involved.

Last night I finished the revised draft for Echoes.  To be honest there wasn’t a lot to do, maybe 2,500 words in two parts.  The penultimate part–no problem.  I breezed through that with relative ease.  The last part, however–oh, man.

I mean, I get emotional quite a lot.  I rarely do when I’m writing, however.  I’ve told people who ask me the one question that comes up when you tell them you write erotica–and you know what that question is, so no need to reiterate–that I don’t have time to be “affected” by my stories while I’m writing them.  As has been pointed out, writing is hard work.  For those of you who do, you know what I mean.  For those who don’t, try it, and you’ll see that putting one word before another, and string those sentences together into something that makes a chapter, and having those chapters create something that doesn’t read like one hundred and fifty thousands words of Mad Libs, it’s one of the more difficult things in the world.

Or, as I’ve said, anyone can write, but it takes a writer for it all to make sense.

So I’m going through the last few paragraphs of the last part of Echoes, and I’m reading it, which is what I do when I’m editing . . . and I start crying.  Just a tear or two at first, but by the time I’d finished with the soliloquy delivered by one character–a character that, by the way,  everyone had heard of throughout the story, but had never put in an appearance–to one of my main characters . . . I had to remove my glasses and wipe my face dry.  It was that bad.

I can only account what happened to the fact that I was channeling the feelings I’d had at the time when I’d wrote those words back in January.  It was emotional for me then; it was emotional for me yesterday.  I like to pride myself on not getting worked up when I’m writing and/or editing, that I can maintain a detached demeanor when I’m getting a story down, or getting it cleaned up.

Apparently I’m not always that strong.

So, one more on the slush pile.  I’m torn about what to do with Echoes, because it really ties back to the characters in Transporting–in fact, I had to do a little retconing to have someone make mention of a small event from that novel–and if you read it, you might find yourself a little confused by events.  Then again, when I started Echoes, I keep that fact in mind, and included mention of certain things that pop up in Transporting.  So, who knows?  Maybe it would be a good thing to get published, and perhaps generate interest in that great white whale of a three hundred thousand, three-novel series, that I have sitting on a hard drive.

That’s something to discuss tomorrow.

In the mean time, maybe I’ll take a day off from writing.

If the Muse will let me, that is.