Nonsequitur Life

I don’t know, ask Pete Wentz.

Fever-dream tangerine sweat sounds like a review of Panic‘s Viva Las Vengeance album.

*ahem*

This is only about half as long as that monstrosity.

And probably makes even less sense.

Anyway.

Clearing out my brain.

And by brain I mean…well…my actual brain but also my writing folder.

Same difference really.

Regardless, not a pretty task.

Writing about writing…folders.

Twice in the history of this blog, I went through and summarized all of the active stories sitting in my writing folder. ( 1 | 2 ) I wrote a blurb on each and included a snippet of story where I saw fit. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about doing that again, but it just never happens. And in the last several years, my writing habits have kind of gone off the rails. I don’t know that my writing has ever been on the rails but…it’s a mess. We’ve been over this.

Anyway.

Awhile back, I realized I needed to do some cleanup in my writing folder and shifted a number of long stagnant projects into the stalled file. (It killed me to put Ben and Marina in there, but such is the writing life.) I’m used to seeing a dozen or more folders in the active list, but once I finished my clean up, I had two.

S’cuse me?

And that was when it became so glaringly obvious how things have evolved over time. Because it wasn’t just two stories that were considered active projects, it was two…sub-directories? I was working with. This is not new, but it hasn’t always been so…excessive.

Here’s the thing.

I start writing a story. Doesn’t matter if it’s going well or floundering, inevitably a what if crops up that warrants enough of a plot change that it becomes a different version of the original. I may or may not start writing that new variation. This may or may not happen multiple times to the same project. Regardless, now I likely have more than one document and probably more than one folder to show for my efforts. This generally leads to creating an umbrella folder to house all of the different variations and their supporting files to keep things somewhat organized and remind myself which stories are connected. Sometimes it’s not so much plot overlap, it’s more the characters. (Or the character names.) I find I really like given characters, but their story isn’t working the way I want, so I try them in a different plot. Or a what if crops up and now they’ve morphed into another timeline. I frequently have characters stuck in my head that don’t have a proper story to live in. I’ve been doing all this for a very long time. But in recent years, it seems like that’s ALL I’ve been doing.

When I cleaned up the folders, I had two left. One was more or less fine as is, the other I came to realize had multiple umbrella folders nested inside of it. There is still a lot of character name overlap, but they were mostly separate ventures. So I moved them out to the main directory, giving me five active projects. Or at least the appearance thereof. Because inside each of those folders sits far too many sub-folders of countless hours of arguing with an imaginary, blue gremlin. I wouldn’t consider ALL of those sub-folders active plots (some are barely viable at all), but I keep them together because they are all related in some fashion. In most instances it’s the characters versus the plot and yes, it is stupidly excessive.

Does any of this make sense? No? Didn’t thinks so.

This is my brain and welcome to it.

The main folder is looking pretty clean these days, but when I lay out all of the active folders, the number of sub-folders is…offensive. Doing another summary post of all these plots is just…not realistic. If anything I’d have to break it up into multiple posts because it would be so bloody long otherwise. It would definitely serve to showcase just how similar so many plots are. I’ll admit I’ve outright copy/pasted parts of one into another and edited to fit the destination numerous times.

Most of this stuff is really just clearing nonsense out of my head so I can find and focus on the stories worth working on.

blogging… Kind of self-explanatory. It’s blogging related…stuff…and things.

reference… Any number of reference files—calendars, medical notes, maps, writing resources, so on, so forth.

stalled… The folder where stories go to…sit and collect dust until I need to look up something I wrote years ago, farm for ideas, or just reminisce about old plots.

chance records… At this point this is really just a stalled folder for stories about musicians signed to the Chance Records label. It wasn’t always just stagnant projects, but it has certainly turned into that.

crossfire… Every one of these revolves around the characters Alexa and Richard—musicians, business associates, recovery, marriage problems, frenemies, new love, old love, reconciliation, and probably other things.

cruzed… This one has been around for roughly a decade telling stories about Kailyn, Olivia, Jordan, Savannah, Kate, Alison, James, Billy, Gavin, Marc, Matt, Ian, Andy, and probably more names that I’m forgetting. There’s a lot of music, reconciliation, long-time-coming, awkward moments, new love, and…other stuff.

greymatter v21… Not to be confused with the greymatter of several years ago which is sort of tangentially related. Kate, Juliette, Alex, Jamie, Christian, James—not nearly as much variation in names—living mostly through relationships that start with a lot of NO THANK YOU and turn into Okay fine.

ledger… Stories revolving around the band Friends of Ledger (and Artifice of Silence by association) and different ways Alexa ends up with either Richard or Brendon along side life with the band and a damaged teenager plot for good measure. There is also an iteration of Hallie and Ryan in an alternate history of Wicked White, because…obviously.

seek therapy… That’s where most of the fanfiction lives. I say most because at this point some of it has escaped into these other folders. There are some that are the base ideas that turned into just fiction that may or may not be completely obvious which stories started out that way.

vices… This bitch. It’s a diagnosable illness at this point, I think. I had no idea how fitting vices would be as a code name when I started writing this stuff. And yes there is a vices story under the vices umbrella. Wicked is the beast, but spoiled is actually the oldest by about ten years. There is a lot of music, talk of addictions and recovery, baggage galore, a lot of this is a bad idea, and a lot of change one detail to make a whole new plot following Hallie, Alexa, Hannah, Jordan, Savannah, Olivia, Marina, Kailyn, Ryan, Benji, Christian, Brendon, Patrick, Richard, Ben, Andrew, James, and…probably some others.

Crossfire, greymatter, and ledger were all buried in vices for a long time before I realized they really didn’t need to be in there. This one still needs some clean up because there are also a handful of folders still in there that are either empty or hold a single, blank Word document because I had an idea that I fully intended to work on and then never did.

Makes sense.

No it doesn’t.

None of this does.

I’m okay with that.

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Hold Me Like a Grudge Fall Out Boy