Nonsequitur Life

Dear Writer’s Block,

You are an insufferable bitch.

GTFO please and thank you.

No love,
—Me

Something, something, dead horses.

When the writing sits at critical mass for extended periods of time, my brain comes up with a lot of inane activities to fill the void. (No, no, more inane than usual.) I was looking at my Last.fm stats…like I do…and noticed a couple of artists were sitting at nice clean numbers. And then I started doing math to see how many plays it would take to get the other top artists on the page to equally clean numbers. And then that was the only thing I listened to until I had those numbers. Some only took a handful of plays, while others took a few dozen. And then Last.fm forgot how to math and the plays didn’t add up properly on every artist so I had to keep listening until it was correct and…well…the only thing that I really accomplished was a screen shot I could make a blog post about because I have nothing else to write about.

This is my brain and welcome to it.

You can’t possibly be surprised anymore.

You know, for being my very favorite band, Train is only in 5th place on this list. They have some catching up to do. It used to be an ever-rotating competition for them with 3 Doors Down and Ingram Hill in the top three. Then Andy Grammer entered the picture. Then Ryan Star. Then the switch flipped on O.A.R. and…Ingram Hill is still top three but Train and 3 Doors Down have fallen down the list. Although 3DD hasn’t put out an album since their Greatest Hits in 2012 so that might have something to do with their slip. They keep talking about being in the studio, but there’s never any release date mentioned. THROW ME A FRICKIN’ BONE, BOYS. And it will be a little weird when they do finally put out an album since Matt and Todd are no longer in the band. Change and all that.

*sigh*

Sometime in junior high or high school—the memory is foggy at this point—I started writing a story dubbed the Dysfunctional Family story. (DysFam for short.) It was the main character and her brother and their life split between their divorced parents. Life with their mom, stepdad, and his kids was a miserable time. Life with their dad, stepmom, and her kids was the safe-haven. I concocted a number of different versions of this tale, but it never went anywhere because I never really had a clear plot to follow. It eventually fell into the archives, but the idea was always there to randomly poke me in the brain.

Several years later, that idea resurfaced. The characters were aged to match, and instead of desperately trying to get away from life with her mother, the main character finds herself moving back into the house she always hated while she goes to grad school. Instead of a constant war, the focus is on mending fences and building something other than volatile relationships with the step-family. (And probably a brewing romance on the side with some guy she meets elsewhere.) There was an actual plotline, but it never really went anywhere for unknown reasons, and back into the archives it went.

Skip ahead another decade or so and I find myself with this idea jabbing me at the front of the brain again in several incarnations. It could be just a desperate attempt to combat the relentless writer’s block. Or it could be I have an actual idea (or…a few) I can work with. I’ve built up a lot of story in my head at this point, but whatever I’ve tried to put down on the page looks more like I just rolled my face across the keyboard a few times. It’s gibberish.

The original idea that cropped up…recently…sometime within the last…few months?…can’t brain…actually had nothing to do with the old DysFam idea. It was something else entirely. But as it started developing, it managed to warp itself into that old idea. It fits. Surprisingly well, actually. I just can’t seem to get it down on the page and have it not look like I face-rolled my laptop. I have no idea how to get around this roadblock and it’s driving me absolutely crazy.

At this point, it has a pretty strong potential to turn into a hodgepodge of conversations with no rhyme or reason to them at all—scenes without stories—and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s not at all what I want.

Something, something, mother effing writer’s block.

And dead horses.

—

Undeniable Better Than Ezra