Writing Misadventures

Don’t get me wrong, I love NaNoWriMo. I’ve been participating on and off since it first began. I think it’s great to help kick-start a novel project, especially for those who would never have started one in the first place.

For me, however, there’s a side effect … and I wonder if I share it with other writers out there: After forcing myself to crank out over 50,000 words in one month, for quite a while afterwards I have no desire to write. At all.

I don’t work on manuscripts only in November. I work on them all year around. It’s what I do. Except now … I need a vacation from my manuscripts.

I seem to remember this happens every time, and every November I seem to forget and jump in again. I’m pretty sure, in fact, that I’ve written on this same subject before. I’ll have to go back and check after I hit publish.

I would love to take a writing vacation. I would love to give up writing fiction altogether. Imagine that! All that free time to do mindless things, like play video games all night long (which I did last night), or get caught up on all that TV I never watched. Sometimes I really wish I could do that.

Alas, it’s never going to happen. I’ve been working on these stories for so long, thinking about the characters, collecting traits, plots, and ideas, that I can’t stop. It’s a compulsion. Fortunately for me it’s something I usually enjoy — I do it for me.

But for the next few weeks at least I’m going to take a vacation.

Here’s a beginning to one of my new stories:

In the state of transition, when you’re neither here or there, there’s this ominous blackness.  You’re nowhere, but you are still aware of being – your mind is working – and you sense time passing.  Sometimes it’s only a split second, sometimes it’s several seconds, and sometimes it’s long enough for you to wonder if you’ve just died.

Then there’s light and the world comes back into focus, but not all at once.  It builds itself around you, spreading from you outward, and I really think that gives you a deep clue about reality.  On one hand it could be that you’re actually seeing the process of your senses coming around, or you’re seeing how reality builds itself when you are suddenly observing it.  It’s almost like you’ve caught reality by surprise, and it has to scramble to catch up.

I can’t swear to this, but what it feels like to me is that your heart has to start beating again, and then you take the first lungful of air, and that’s when life resumes.

That’s what it’s like to teleport.

So my question is, if you teleport a long distance, it would go against physics for you to be able to transfer information back and forth faster than the speed of light … so would it make sense that if you were to teleport 4 lightyears away, you would also be teleporting 4 years into the past?

I was making some coffee this morning and noticed that the grounds weren’t bubbling in their usual baking soda + vinegar behavior, which means they’re growing stale and it’s time to roast some more.

Then, standing there pouring the hot water into the French press, it struck me what an odd term that is: “growing stale.” I had to think it through, because initially it seemed conflicting, as “growing” brings the images of plants, greenery, and children marking off inches against the wall year after year. Hard to reconcile with the word “stale.”

But when you look at the true nature of entropy, then no, it’s perfectly logical, but no less magical. We’re all growing into corpses. We’re all growing back to dirt.

“Growing stale” encapsulates a universe-spanning concept in the heart of a innocuous plain-brown-wrapper phrase.

Regardless, it’s time for me to roast some more coffee.

I have no idea who she is.

Google found her for me. I went into picture search and typed in “long straight blond hair.” There was a reason, I know there was, that I wanted to illustrate what I write here with a picture of a girl with long straight golden blond hair, but for the life of me I can’t remember why. It’s because it took so long to find exactly the picture I wanted, that I forgot why I wanted it.

It must have something to do with a scene I just wrote. The character, Loo-Loo, who doesn’t have any idea of who she is or why she’s so astonishingly clairvoyant, has long straight blond hair. But that really has little to do with what I’m writing about. Maybe it was supposed to, but … like I said, I forgot why.

I keep coming back to this manuscript. It’s strange, because I’ve abandoned it four times now and try to work on something else (there’s two other things I really feel I should be working on, one of them being the sequel to Eleven Days on Earth) but something keeps pulling me back to this one.

The problem I’ve been having with it, is that it has a lot of sex going on – and I’m a bit uncomfortable with that. But it’s set in the mid 1970’s, there’s no AIDS yet, it’s the height of the disco era an there’s orgies everywhere.  The protagonist was right in the middle of a sexual situation when he found out his parents are dead. That’s how it begins. The protagonist, who’s 17, gets shipped off to live with his Uncle in a small seacoast town in California, which is like an alien planet to him, and it turns out his Uncle and Aunt are swingers and are always throwing orgies.

It’s a weird little town next to an oil refinery. People who live there either work for the refinery, or they work in one of the little seaside shops, or they fish, or they work at the golf resort on the other side of town. The chief of police is the brother of the school principal, and their brother-in-law runs the refinery, and all three of them make a ton of extra money from the cocaine being smuggled in on the refinery ships.

The town is also a very complicated tangle of relationships, mainly because of the loose morals of the adults – in an era of very loose morals. Back then, in the movies the drug dealers were the good guys. It was hip to be a swinger. And the protagonist, who wasn’t supposed to attend his uncle’s orgies, inadvertently attends one, and finds his pent-up, hidden away grief, his inability to let it go, has also given him a super power: he can’t achieve orgasm. But he’s young, full of energy, handsome, and as the older ladies of the town discover, he can go, and go, and go … and keep going.

Amid all this, there are some mysteries going on. Up in the old county cemetery, there’s a tombstone with the protagonist’s name on it – indicating that whoever it was, he died at 17 years old – exactly a 100 years before. There’s a shamanistic ex-doctor who combs the beach with the mysterious Loo-Loo (the blond amnesiac with strong psychic abilities and some definite angelic qualities about her). There’s a town bully, the son of the principal and nephew of the chief of police (as well as the big boss at the refinery) who is fixated on the protagonist – alternatively violently aggressive, and then almost homosexually obsessed.

There’s clues everywhere to where this is going, and what is really going on in the background … but the story hasn’t told me yet where its ultimately leading. I know the protagonist will eventually start butting heads with the principal / police chief / uncle’s boss. I know people will be murdered.

The details still escape me. I think that’s why I keep coming back to write more of it.

In my mailbox this morning I received a surprise: Me!

It’s an interview that was actually conducted sometime around the beginning of the year. Not a bad little boost for the ego of an unknown author.

Also…

A new toy! I love gadgets, and I love fountain pens. This is both. A Harley Davidson fountain pen by Waterman. Now, one doesn’t associate fountain pens with Harley Davidson — the mixture is in fact absurd — but that’s why I like it so much. It’s just a few steps away from being steam punk.

Call me silly, but there’s a story I’ve been wanting to write, and I think I’ll write it using actual paper and ink, and using this pen.

This is the way Microsoft would have me write it: “…the girl who’s in charge of all the party favors is going to be upset that you has got someone else’s hat and horn.”

Flesh and blood proof readers, your job is still secure.

I touch type.

I’m not a speed demon but I’m not bad, either. My fingers dance around the keyboard with a gentle and loving familiarity. Being that I literally type for a living, I’m as proficient as you’d think I need to be.

That being so, I’m having a really hard time retraining myself to only put one space after a period. I knew it was going to be an ordeal, but I thought I’d lick it in just a few days. Alas, it appears I will be battling this for quite some time. I now have to think about the typing instead of thinking about the words, and having my fingers deftly translate the thoughts to keystrokes.

I know this is a rather mundane thing to share, but I felt compelled to do so anyway.

Here’s sending you all my gratitude for reading this. Without you, dear reader, I’m a mute. I’m beginning to wonder if I rely to much on this form of expression.

IN A RELATED NOTE: I was just interviewed this week for my employer’s global magazine. This publication — even though it’s internal — has a circulation surpassing many external magazines, and they’re all my peers. I was so nervous during the interview that my voice quavered and I did a lot of babbling and stammering. You see, I’m perfectly comfortable turning the spotlight on anyone around me, but having it turned on me? Yikes. I  haven’t been interviewed since the NY Times did a piece on my former Time-Warner publisher back in 2001 — and that didn’t turn out so well.

So, yes, I’m a bit nervous.