Stumbling Through the Prose

Today is a good day.  I’ve only been up for an hour, and already I’ve read some insanity from a person I used to speak with on Facebook, a person I would best describe as ignorant and crazy.  They’re the sort of person who believes the characters she creates tells her how to write her stories–when she is writing, that is, as it has always appeared she’s one of these “writers” who can only write when she is sprinting with others–and that she is probably, likely, most definitely had arguments with her characters and, at times, lost.  Like I said, she’s crazy.  If you’re having arguments with your characters, and losing, you need to get your ass into therapy and up your meds.  But since she’s more of a poseur and not much of a writer, maybe those voices will help keep her warm . . .

Enough of crazy people, as I have enough crazy to keep entire subdivisions happy.  Was out last night, was driving in the dark, was talking out my own scenes as I flew through the darkness.  The sky looked strange with the low clouds reflecting lights that, around here, never go out.  When I was heading to my friend’s earlier in the evening, before the sun had fully set, I thought of what the sky would have looked like next to Hudson Bay, close to the Arctic Circle, with the stark yet beautiful desolation of the tundra all around.  I tried to imagine it as I drove, and could see it all around me as the cold fields of Northwest Indiana faded into the past.

I started Chapter Fourteen yesterday, and what I thought was going to be a very quick thousand words turned into a bit of a slough though the literary mud.   I’m back on Keith, getting ready to bring Elektra into his life and turn up the strangeness in a way that should be interesting.  At the moment, at the start of the chapter, he’s thinking about the two women in his live, how one is developing a relationship with him, but he’d not certain how long it might last–and how one is already there, but he knows that as soon as he types “The End” at the bottom of his manuscript, she’s gonna pull a Tara and be gone with the wind.

But getting those thoughts onto the page–or Scrivener text file, take your pick–became a bit of a pain in my ass, because whatever I’d type simply didn’t seem right.

This is happened a few times with this story, which is probably why I’m just now clearing fifty thousand words after two months, and probably won’t finished Suggestive Amusements before the end of March.  I know Stephen King says ninety days is about right to do a first draft of a novel, but I’m used to being faster.  I’m used to cranking it out, and yesterday was like crawling along the pavement when you have to be somewhere in twenty minutes.

My Muse, who would never leave me, says my problem with writing this story is I’m not as connected to the characters here as I am in other works I’ve produced.  That may very well be true; I don’t know.  There could be issues with me writing this while working some long hours, but then I did the same thing at The Undisclosed Location, and cranked out some wordage.

Or maybe I’m ready to go beyond writing, and into publishing.

I know my characters would like that–because I would like that.

Love in the Shrunken Universe

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 . . .

Little Miss Hellspawn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I promise, this hellspawn will listen to you.

I might even write about it later . . .

The Killing Inspiration

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.

Trials of Love and Remembrance

Day Two of Sick As Hell, but getting better.  No fever now, but I can’t hear out of my right ear, my head is stuffy, and my throat was swollen last night to the point of intense pain.  This morning I’m better, though my head is swimming about because I’ve only seen about three hours of sleep in the last two days.  Tonight I hope to get enough sleep to be sharp enough that I’m not stumbling about like I don’t know what I’m doing.

I was in decent enough shape last night, though, that I could write.  I wanted to get back into Chapter Ten, and it was a good time to do so, because I’d only need about a thousand words to get the job done.  So I got into it, and I was right:  it took a few words over a thousand to finish Chapter Ten, and now it’s time to move onto pillow talk between my two main characters.

With it being Valentine’s Day today, it’s a bit interesting that last night my muse (not my Muse, just to keep things straight) thought about how her newest charge was going to be another in a very long line of lovers, and that she’d remember him all the way until the end of time, well beyond the time when he is not only forgotten by his descendants, but by history as well.  Creatures who are not human, who do have recollections that go back thousands of years, could be expected to remember every encounter they’ve had, every touch they’ve experienced, every kiss that’s graced their lips.  As I said in the story, for Erin the Muse it’s both a gift and a curse, because while she can remember all the good times, she will also remember the bad–and there is now way you couldn’t go through thousands of years of encounters with people and never have a bad relationship spring up.

I’m not a muse; there are no thousands of relationships in my life that I can remember, much less write about.  The reality is I can count on both hands the number of relationships I’ve had, and still have a few fingers left over.  I don’t regret this–and there’s little I could do if I decided to regret my choices.  It is what it is, and not even a TARDIS is going to save you from your own time line.

There are also a few that I’d rather not remember.  One in particular, the family hatted me with a passion, and that didn’t help when it came to developing a romance.  There is one that I do regret ever getting into, though it’s not one most people who know me would understand the reasons why it was such a bad thing for me.

There are others, however, that I will always remember.  They showed me things I didn’t know were possible; they allowed me to achieve an intimacy that had never been there.  And if I can borrow from Mr. Spock (D. C. Fontana, actually, as she was the one who put the words in his mouth), there is one where it was easy to say, “For the first time in my life, I was happy.”

The one thing I don’t want to know is:  do they remember me?  And do they remember me with any sort of fondness.

I guess I’ll never know, or even want to.

It’s better that way.

Misery Loves Immortality

There was a moment during the writing of Chapter Nine of Suggestive Amusements when I started feeling sorry for my muses.  Oh, sure:  they’re goddess-like creatures who’ve been around for a very long time, thousands of years, bringing inspiration to the masses, and they are legends in their own rights.

But they have to be miserable as hell.  And you wouldn’t want to piss them off.

While getting deeper into some paragraphs I was writing that intended to give readers a peek at their lives, I thought of the following line from The Prophecy, which is a great little movie that pulls no punches in showing the line between ultimate good and ultimate evil is a thin one.

The line I thought of last night was this:

 

Did you ever notice how in the Bible, when ever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel?

 

If you know your angelic history, you’d know that you can’t really lay eyes upon an angel, least you burst into flames.  Their current image was brought about during the Renaissance, where a bunch of white painters had to figure out how to do paintings of creatures you couldn’t lay eyes upon, and decided, fuck it, we’ll make them tall, white, and blond–with wings.

In the course of thinking about my muses, lovely ladies that they are, they had to possess abilities that would be pretty ass kicking, and overall frightening.  One of the sisters, Anna–not her real name, but you can probably figure out who she is if you look these ladies up–talks about how it’s really easy to go back to a moment just after conception, and fix it so that egg never find purchase in the rocky terrain that is the beckoning womb.  If they don’t get born, then reality gets retconned, and who’s going to give a shit about someone who never existed in the first place?

The more I wrote, the worse I actually felt about my characters.  My main muse Erin, she does something at one point in the early 19^th Century, and I didn’t feel good as I wrote those few lines.  I don’t like doing bad things to my characters, but that’s life, immortal or otherwise.  But crap always happens, and you gotta write the bad with the good, like it or not.

Because if all you did was write about good things happening to your characters, they wouldn’t seem very real, would they?

There will be another chapter added to the story, because it is needed.  That’ll bring the count to eighteen chapters, which means I’m at the halfway point.  The new chapter is going to ended up between what would have been Eleven and Twelve, so time to move everything down, and put the new card in place.

Scrivener makes it so easy to restructure your novel–

If only the lives of my muses were that easy.

The Windswept Silence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because our silence is always the loudest.

Museday

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?

I’ll keep writing.

The Memories Past

The story is over; the novel is finished.  Almost fifty-five thousand words.  Eighteen chapters.

It’s all first draft, and it’s all mine.

I only needed nine hundred and twenty words to finish the story last night.  I played Electric Light Orchestra’s A New World Record while I wrote, and managed to finish the story in about forty minutes.  That means I was really in my final grove, and the music was in me, I was in the music, and the story didn’t have to fight its way out:  it only had to jump into the computer and get comfortable.

Today there is no thought about writing.  In actuality, I couldn’t, because I’m going to head off to The Undisclosed Location tonight, and by the time I arrive, it’ll be too late to do anything but setup, relax a little, and sleep.  Then off to work tomorrow–or do I?  Du, duh, DUNNNN!

Fifty-five thousand words in about ten weeks; that’s easy math to work out.  Personally, in retrospect, this is about what I’d figure, based upon what I was producing every night.  But if I’m going to do NaNoWriMo, will need to work up that count.  Gonna need to go from eight hundred a night to about two thousand a night.  I might not “win”, but there’s the potential to get well into the story with a week, or so afterwards, to finish it up.

It’s safe to say, now, that Diners at the Memory’s End, was a tough story to write, because it was up, it was down, there were issues of loneliness, love, anger, isolation, and fear.  A large part of it, as I view it now, has to do with reviling your inner self to others.  There were secrets that both Albert and Meredith wanted to keep from each other.  As they grew closer to each other, they complicated their relationship by getting too close, and then realized they’d opened themselves up too much.

By the time the last three parts come into view, both have grown comfortable with who they are, and what they are, and when the final moment pass between them, there is the feeling that a great friendship is going to grow.

Does this mean I’ll write about Meredith again?  Actually, there is another Meredith story, somewhere down the line.  I can’t tell you just where in Albert’s time line he meets up with Meredith again, but when they do, there will be one hell of an emergency.  It will be written, one of these days.  But there are other tales to tell as well, and it might be a year or two before I get to this story.

There will likely be no writing tonight.  I think the next thing I’m going to do is an edit on Echoes, and get my ground work started on my NaNo Novel.  And I’ll keep up on Replacements for five more weeks.  But for now . . . I think it’s time to get into an edit, and concentrate on getting something published.

After all, if I do nothing but write, and no one reads it, was the story ever created?

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.

After Class Unease

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.

I hate normal.

Can’t we just play a little longer?

Atop the Vanishing Compunction

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.

Six chapters left, maybe fifteen thousand words.

Can’t stop now, not even for swollen eyes.