Sometimes I find myself falling into the abyss of reading old blog posts. I’ll go to look for something I wrote and suddenly it’s six pages of posts later. And in the process I usually completely forget what I was originally looking for in the first place.
Par for the course.
Most interesting to me are the posts about writing.
A lot of my writing about writing is pretty much just me talking my way through (thinking out loud, in a sense) whatever project is currently eating my brain. I reread posts so many times before I actually publish them, by the time I finally hit that button, it’s all just a blur of letters that may or may not spell actual words. The surprising thing is—things I’m pretty sure are just absolute shit are actually a lot more coherent than I originally thought. Not all of it. But far more than I expected.
What makes me wonder, is how much sense does any of it make to some random stranger who happens to read this stuff. (Though I can count on one hand the number of people who visit this place and I don’t need all my fingers.) (I am okay with this.)
It all makes sense to me…to a degree. Sometimes I read things and have no flipping clue WTAF I was talking about, but I’m sure it made sense—in some bass-ackwards sort of way—at the time. But since I know all the details of whatever story I’m rambling aimlessly about, I don’t always see what does and does not make sense from an outside perspective.
If it comes off as absolutely incoherent drivel, that’s fine. I write for myself here. If other people choose to read it—hey, I appreciate it, but I won’t be offended if you run screaming and never come back. If I had any aspirations to be social with people, I might seek out actual feedback from kids who are not wholly familiar with my demented little brain.
But we all know that ain’t gonna happen.
Guess it’ll just remain a mystery.
The past six months (Already??? WTF???) worth of writing can pretty much be summed up in two tweets.
(The fixating is a whole lot more than just writing, but right now we’re just talking about writing.)
I started a story dubbed Lightning. Why Lightning? Your guess is as good as mine. It was a mix of old ideas from various projects and some new[er] inspiration from a few different sources. It took some finagling of the character names, but I was mostly content with the way things were playing out in the early pages.
And then BASIL showed up and initiated an avalanche of Whatif??? and Tyler to the Infinite Power.
Because he’s an asshole.
Scout was intended to be just a pile of Scenes Without Stories, providing me with an outlet to purge some of the crazy rolling around in my head. It’s since been reworked into something entirely different, that may or may not actually make a complete story. The reworking probably belongs under its own code name but…ehh…logic.
Haven (versions 2 & 3) spawned after I started looking at an idea I’d recently stuffed in the Stalled folder. (Code name Haven, in case it wasn’t obvious.) It was short lived on both versions as something wasn’t quite meshing with the [new] characters. Which was fine because a certain creature shoved a wrench in my face in the form of a Train song.
Lightning v2.0 kept a few elements from Haven, but shifted in an entirely different direction with the core characters. Why I named it Lightning 2.0 is a mystery (though it’s slightly more fitting to this story than the first) but I haven’t come up with a different code name for either version so…it stays.
Next Gen is a little muddy how it was spawned. I can’t pinpoint anything specific, but there were pieces that I really liked so it grew rapidly into a full-fledged storyline. And aside from the characters, there’s not really much for overlap with other stories, which may or may not have everything to do with why progress has been very slow on this one.
Trust Fund v2.0 came up while digging around in the Stalled folder in a bout of writer’s block and frustration. I started mulling over the original story and a plot point that I had considered in the beginning, but ended up cutting out. I put that piece back in and it ended up changing the entire story considerably, giving it a level of substance it didn’t have before.
Pictures stemmed from a separate trip into the Stalled folder, pulling pieces from other ideas that warranted revisiting. Certain parts make it largely similar to Lightning v1.0 with a role reversal, but digging deeper into the story, it’s different enough to keep both.
Fleet is just an outlet to purge the crazy from my bad-addled brain. It’s not meant to be a complete story. It’s just a series of conversations between characters that don’t fit in anywhere else. Writing this kind of stuff is surprisingly effective in clearing the murky waters Basil stirs up when he’s on a rampage.
Every single one of these “stories” falls under the Stephen Tyler marker because every single one of them revolves around a group of characters that can be largely interchangeable from story to story. It’s repetitive and confusing and I’m okay with that. The circumstances vary from story to story (mostly) but the core characters all largely stem from the same inspiration point. This is how my brain works. I’ve stopped trying to figure it out. If I just go with it, things eventually fall into place in a way I can actually work with.
I’ve been beating my head against the wall over all of these ventures, knowing that if I’m going to have any success at all, I NEED to focus on just ONE AT A TIME. Balancing all of these attempts simultaneously is never going to work no matter how hard Basil tries to convince me otherwise. Some of them belong in ye olde Stalled folder, but they’re staying put just to keep all of the inanity of Stephen Tyler together.
The other night Bob and I spent a good chunk of time talking through all of this stuff. He challenged me to summarize each story and tell what I liked and didn’t like about each one. We do things like this every so often, especially when I’m spinning my wheels at the bottom of a hill. He’ll be the first to admit he really doesn’t know anything about writing, but hearing the details of a story as a potential reader, he asks a lot of questions and gives me some perspective I have a hard time seeing as the writer who knows all the useless and dirty details. I had to keep clarifying which version of ∞Tyler I was talking about (because seriously) but when all was said and done, he gave his opinion on which story I should focus on, and when I step back and look at them all from a distance, I think he’s right.
Doesn’t mean I won’t still keep stabbing at all the others when the inspiration strikes, or the blocks interfere. But my primary focus needs to be on ONE.
So Lightning v1.0 it is.
Makes sense.
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