So are we gonna give in?
What happens if we fall?
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I keep digging around in the drafts folder (20 posts) looking for material to use. There’s this one that I keep circling back to as it’s actually complete, but completely irrelevant. I wrote a whole thing about a couple of story projects that were at the forefront of the moment, and it was a decent, complete post, but I didn’t publish it at that time because I wanted to read through it again after taking a break. The timestamps for the revision history tell me I started and finished writing it over the span of about twelve hours. (Most have several days, if not weeks, worth of revision history.) Then within a few days just about everything I wrote had been rendered completely irrelevant because I changed so much with the projects in question. So it’s just been sitting there. Unpublished.
So. Welcome to another installment of Cleaning Out the Drafts Folder. If I had posted it when I originally finished it, it would have been relevant at that time, even if it wasn’t a week later. That’s pretty much the case with every post I write about writing. I purge things onto the page and walk away, and the empty space left behind can allow some clarity in the situation at hand.
Or it’s April 30th and I haven’t posted anything yet this month and my efforts to write more here are failing miserably and I really just need to stop trying to justify my brain to the abyss.
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[ October 4, 2017 ]
Writing.
Here’s something I learned recently…
Starting a new project less than 24 hours before you have surgery is not going to let you get much actual writing done. At least not during the depths of recovery.
This seems obvious in retrospect. But to be fair, recovery knocked me down a lot harder than I expected for what I had done. (And then I have to point out to my idiot self that this minor procedure has a massive impact on my ability to breathe properly, and hey, maybe it’s going to take some time to work through that. I STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THIS MUCH AIR AT ONE TIME. *ahem*)
Anyway.
I didn’t make much progress on this thing for weeks. I didn’t even know if I was going to write it when I started turning over the idea. It wasn’t new, but I was giving it new attention. I probably spent a few weeks working through details before I even created a new Word document. I had a lot of reservations hindering me—the biggest being a worry that I was just grasping at straws in a desperate attempt to kill writer’s block. And it had a few predictable character names I just didn’t even bother trying to change. I had a multitude of reasons why I shouldn’t write it. I finally created a folder, leaving it unnamed and otherwise untouched for several days before I gave it a label, and put a file in it.
It’s really not like me to be so hesitant to just start writing on an idea. I usually just dump it on the page and worry about its viability after the fact. Sometimes that’s the only way to get any writing done. Sometimes it’s the only way to clear out the crap. I really wasn’t getting ANY writing done, I might as well write something. Sometimes I need to get out of my own damn way.
Sometimes?
According to the document timestamp, I started writing it the day before I had surgery. I don’t even remember how much I wrote on day one. And I spent a lot of time staring blankly at the document when I was loopy on oxycodone and otherwise utterly, soul-crushingly exhausted from breathing exclusively through my mouth and not sleeping more than 20 to 30 minutes in a row. Then I spent a lot of time staring blankly at the document as the recovery fog gradually lifted. I sputtered a few words here and there, but it took a long time to see anything that resembled progress. Three months in, it’s sitting at about twenty thousand words, and that’s nothing to scoff at, but it still feels like a slog.
It has some pretty strong similarities to another story that’s been in the works (and sitting in limbo) for a few years, but it might be a more viable plotline. It’s taken a few sharp turns from where it originally started, but the pieces are falling into place. I’ve spent a lot of time talking through things with Bob—like I do—debating believability and other details. In one conversation, he actually said, “this is good, I like this” and I was genuinely shocked that it didn’t completely derail me from progress. (That whole fear of success thing and all…)
It’s a complete disaster in terms of coherency. It doesn’t even have a proper beginning to it yet. I have no idea where it should actually end. I don’t even have a complete cast list built. But it has promise. I’ve largely been focusing on this one single project, mostly because I got nothin’ on anything else right now.
Except…
Now there’s this…new…thing…that’s been invading my brain space for the past few weeks. It may or may not have started with a dream. I don’t know for sure. I just know that I woke up at an offensive hour on a Saturday morning and I had—of all things—a floorplan stuck in my head. (Say what?) I stared at the ceiling for an indeterminate amount of time, cursing my inability to get back to sleep, mulling over the implications of said floorplan, wondering where exactly it came from, and what situation would even warrant such living arrangements? I ended up getting out of bed and heading for my home architect program to put some walls down. It didn’t take long to have a completed plan (two versions, actually), nothing extravagant, and I sat and stared at it for a long time, wondering what I could do with it. What kind of story would it fit into?
Ideas started manifesting. Some not unlike existing stories. Some touching on things I’ve never really written about before, at least not from this angle. I had a potential timeline of events starting to fall into place. And then a certain little gremlin crawled out of his hidey-hole, and started tapping me on the shoulder with a slew of WHATIFs. Things shifted one way, then took a sharp turn in another direction, and veered briefly off the rails to someplace else, before heading back. And I’ve been sitting here with this…thing (and three new floorplans)…poking me in the brain, wondering if I should just open the floodgates and see what spills out.
It doesn’t have it’s own folder or Word document yet. It does, finally, have a potential code name. It’s just three floorplans and hours of me talking to myself in various locations of my house, mulling over the prospect of starting another project I probably won’t finish. (And, if we’re being honest—and predictable FFS—we’re still trapped in the rubble of the ∞Tyler avalanche. GET A NEW OBSESSION ALREADY.) And it’s not helping that there is (is? are? is?) a pair of songs that crossed my endless playlist that made me stop and hit repeat, thinking welp…there’s my theme song(s)…
And what about the one I’ve actually been working on?
I’m not going to just shove that one aside. I’m still working on it. Or trying to. I’ve been trying to focus on getting a proper timeline in place, because right now it’s an epic disaster and there are a fuckton of contradictory scenes happening because I keep changing the timing of things to make more sense, and making an even bigger mess in the process. Par for the course. And it does have it’s own theme song* in heavy rotation.
*Heh…Theme Song…
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Who’s Gonna Save Us Gavin DeGraw |