Archive for the ‘ Writing ’ Category

Saline

Breathe.

Just breathe.

It feels like forever since I’ve been able to stop and breathe and sort through my thoughts.

Imagine Dragons. New band I’ve been listening to. When I get home from work I sort through iTunes’s proffered musical treats and then I plug my brain into my iPhone and close my eyes.

Trying to breathe.

Free time, something I miss and wish
I had more of. Scratch that, something I wish I had any of.

This post has no flow to it whatsoever. I’m too tired to write most of the time lately – which is mightily frustrating for someone who can only process things properly by writing them down.

Salt water and sunshine so close I can taste the saline.

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Write, you fools.

Finally, I have a solid plan for finishing this project.

So many other ideas have been pounding at the doors in my mind while I’ve floundered about trying to come up with a believable piece of storytelling.

I could hear them, singing outside my window each night, begging for their turns, for their stories to be told. Their cries became shrill and I had forced the chorus of their shrieking demands to become a sort of background chatter – that while growing dim at times – never fully quieted.

They can spared a bit of my attention now.

Upon further review…

This schedule has left me drained, depleted. Sometimes my muse flees like a rat down dark hallways fast filling with water.

But still I manage. Ploddingly adding a word here, excising one there; editing…an excuse to flex fingers on keyboard.

And then there comes a sudden explosion of inspiration or of something very nearly so:

Rewriting the first several chapters, adding more depth, new characters emerge and demand that they be explored, explained – given stage time, the novel moves in strange new directions. My synopsis goes out the window.

Deadlines and plot be damned. The story begins to write itself; I feel more like a medium than a writer. I begin to believe that the words merely pass through me, from the aether, to you.

Yes, I know I’m weird. I’ve made peace with that.

On writing…

Just sayin…

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Influx

These things I write. These emotions I have been given the gift to evoke. I have at my disposal descriptors for nearly every possible emotional-experiential influx.

I can make the words I choose become motion pictures in your minds; make every feeling so gruelingly real that you are forced to feel it. I will chain you to my muse and tied to my dream, my nightmare – you will fly and you will cry.

Clarifying

Insomnia.

When you have insomnia you’re never really asleep but you’re never really awake either.

I don’t sleep well, I never have. I don’t keep what one might call regular hours and I’ve learned to function productively on very little rest.

Sometimes, just sometimes, I can sleep for more than a few hours at a time.

I think that this post is going to be a bit more about the mundane parts of my life. I’ve got a headache and that’s not really conducive to exploring the things I generally like to discuss here.

I still feel compelled to write though, even when my thoughts are moving at the speed of cold sap. That’s actually weirdly encouraging.

My back hurts. I pulled a muscle in my lower back a week or so ago. Pretty much awful, I’ve never had back problems so rather naturally I was unprepared for just how limited your world becomes when you can’t tie your own shoes.

I’m stuck at the dividing line between the end of one novel and the beginning of the next. Foggy, gray area you have become my home.

My poor beaten up civic has been acting oddly all week, maybe it’s sympathy pangs, that car and I have been through a lot together. Side note on that: I have, since my first ride at sixteen, named my cars after early twentieth-century starlets.

Strange? Maybe.

That scene in the first matrix movie when Smith is having a bit of a breakdown interrogating Morpheus is close to the surface. I must escape this place and in this mind is a key, my key.

I am seriously going a little crazy since I can’t run. I need to run. It’s something that I don’t think I can really live without.

This annoying injury makes me feel old. I’m not a fan of that feeling in any way. I will say this though; still no gray. Not much leaves marks on me, yeah I’ve got some (fairly serious) scars but I’ve earned every single one of them.

I think that my blog has been far too serious and somewhat depressing for a while now. I hardly ever write down the things that make me happy, or any of those things that make me laugh. When there are days between posts you can be certain that I was smiling enough that I didn’t need to write through anything.

I think that I need to change that.

Here’s something. Sandwiches. I freakin love sandwiches. Probably my favorite food. I love bread, and cheese, do not get me started on cheese. Sandwiches have an endless variety in terms of fillers and condiments. One can never be bored with a sandwich if that sandwich has been properly made.

This is from a conversation I had today about cheese and sandwiches, it illustrates my views perfectly:

Cheese is the most important part of a sandwich – adding both flavor and texture and also getting another food group into your hand…that being said, I think it’s chief virtue is that it provides a stable platform for condiment deployment.

I tend take an engineers view on sandwich construction. Probably because my undergrad/grad roommate was an ME guy. And handy with a grill.

But I digress, I’m quite happy right now. I want to get back out of Ohio like no other, (why did I ever come back here again?) and I really really want to tie my shoes again but other than that life is quite good. I do like to explore some serious concepts here, but a large percentage of the time I’ve already worked through it by the time I finish a post. Sometimes I don’t even post them, unless it’s something I think might help someone else or provoke some discussion. I just delete them after I’m done because the act of writing it down solved whatever it was that I was dealing with and I no longer have a need to share it. For example there is a post sitting in my upload cue dated February twenty-eighth.

As for the concept I brought up in my last post, I’ll get to that after I’ve gotten some sleep. I will say this though, right at this exact moment my heart sleeps under a starlit sky, the beat of a desert night keeping its rhythm.

I write words.

I write words far into the night, weaving tales from my waking dreams while the world sleeps.

Blurbby

It’s a tale of heartbreak and redemption. The story of an unlikely hero, forced by fate to make a choice that will change his world forever.

No big deal.

Writing words is fun, cover blurbs are just weird though.

Screaming

…but the shadow still remains from your descent, your descent (you’re decent)…

Going big, going hard, or going home. These are not just words, they’re a philosophy. For me it’s a reminder to always throw everything I have, everything I am, into everything that I do.

I can be far too demanding of myself, I push myself constantly, sometimes too far – how else do we find our own limits, how else do we expand our personal borders?

On a lighter note, this is what I write my novels on:

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It’s about four and a half years old, pre-Dell buyout. It still screams. Just like me.

Write

My blog is looking a little bi-polar these days.

I feel the need to assure everyone that I’m not tragically sad in any way. Writing things down is how I work my way through the issues that crop up in daily life. And for all of the other things I worry about; generally unquantifiable ephemeralities.

I have to rewrite my synopsis for the series again. It’s becoming a weekly event as ideas come to me. A novel is truly an ever-evolving creature, one that takes on a life of its own and grows beyond the original vision in utterly inconceivable ways.

Of all of the things that I do, all of the things that I am; I love writing and by extension being a writer, the best.

It is incredibly cathartic.

I’ve got a few days of uninterrupted writing coming up and I’m sure it will improve my mood exponentially.

It always does.