sethgray

Sigh, I have zero motivation and there's a whole bunch of shit I'm supposed to be writing right now. There's no less than three submissions I wanna get done before early October, there's a chapter due on Monday, and I should have had a side story up HOURS ago.

But I'm just...blah. It's a weird feeling, I'm in a good mood, but I just don't wanna write. I have to get it together enough to get the side story up before the day is over. Good thing about refraining from laying down an actual time. Bad thing is I probably procrastinate more than I should. Unfortunately, that's just how I operate. I'm not one of those people who can make the words come if there's nothing there. Lots of authors give advice "just write" but I can't make it work for me. If the well is dry, digger deeper accomplishes nothing.

On a more positive note, I was fiddling around with some songs of mine from back when I wrote songs, and one I wrote just the other day when I was pissed, and recorded them to my computer. Just for shits and giggles mostly. Then last night just before I dropped off, I had a brain blast and more lyrics came to me for two different songs. That was kinda cool.

Maybe my muse got her wires crossed or something. It's less than helpful. Don't get me wrong, it's cool that music is moving in my head again, but I kinda have more pressing concerns.

So I'm gonna do something really mundane and ordinary, like take a shower and go for a walk or something, to try and jiggle the wires loose. Then I'll come back and see what's what. The side story must absolutely be up today, that is imperative. Can't take money for something and then not deliver. I also wanna do some work on those submissions. It would be insanely cool to actually sell a story of mine--even if it's not that much and I couldn't tell any of my family about it. *sweat drop*

I'm feeling like I should hit the table of contents and read back over my whole story just to make sure I haven't gotten off track or lost the flow of things somewhere, and the only way you can do that is to start at the beginning and hit go. But here's the thing. I hate chapter one. I really do. As far as requirements for first chapters go it barely hits the minimum, introducing people and showing us a bit of Regan's personality. I'm not sure there's anything technically wrong with it, I just don't like it.

So the obvious thing to do, then, would be to start at chapter two and hit go. I'm not sure my OCD would allow that, but I guess I could give it a whirl. What I really need to do is sit down and brainstorm what exactly I want an improved first chapter to look like, but in order to do that I'd have to put into words just why the current chapter one is bugging me and I'm not sure that I could. There's just this sense of "wrongness" about it to me, in some vague, ill-defined authorish way.

Maybe I could hit up the other writers on my friends list and pick their brains. That might not be a bad idea actually.

In other writing news, I need to decide what I'm going to about the side story this week. I had a plan about doing a little mini-story in sequential order, but I'm not sure that will be feasible. The stuff I need to come across might be over and done with in the main narrative by the time the side story catches up. Which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, I guess. More background details to flesh in, while the absolutely imperative stuff has already passed on. I dunno, we'll see.

My whole process is very experimental, as you can probably tell. I've never made it this far in one of my projects before. The only ever thing I've come close to was in one of my previous projects that I churned out 28 chapters of. I only worked on that for maybe two months before I burned out on it. I've already been working on this for over 6 months, 24 weeks plus however long it took me to write up to chapter five before I started posting online.

It's not a stellar amount of progress by any means, but it's a record for me. Small victories, folks. Small victories.

One of the things that sets me apart from my friends is that I almost never remember my dreams. All of the people in my close inner circle have fairly regular dreams that they remember. I don't. I never really have. Part of that, I believe, is my aversion to nightmares.

When I do have bad dreams I can usually remember them. It's always the unsettling ones that cling to my mind (such as the straight men who picked on me in middle school tied naked to the fence by our PE teacher) never the more mundane or ordinary ones.

For instance, I can still remember this dream I had years ago, though I can no longer remember what age I was when I had it. I can even remember the green-tinged black and white colors of it, and that it involved a bubbling witch's cauldron that would change the gender of anyone dipped into it. Rather tame, really, as far as nightmares go, but I remember it scaring the shit out of me.

Last night/this morning was a similar case. I was dreaming that I had a split personality, and that the alter ego was a serial killer named Moe. He would signal the take-over of our shared body by saying "Moe is angry!" and then almost immediately killing someone. My mind provided Hollywood-esque visual clues as to when Moe was in charge by giving him a white face with blue marks spreading from the side of his lips. Other odd imagery filled the dream, such as an abundance of grainy mirrors and bow-tie tuxedos.

It sounds rather silly to describe out loud, but it was seriously scaring the shit out of me. I kept jerking myself awake to avoid returning to the dream.

Bad dreams have always been a thing for me. When I was the praying kind, I used to pray specifically for "good dreams or no dreams." I wish I was kidding. What's interesting about that prayer is that whatever effect it may have had has apparently continued long past the time I continued to say it. To this day my sleeping mind is blank, unless punctuated by the odd nightmare. My inner atheist remains unconvinced about what this means.

I came across a link the other day to a series of stories about a female-to-male transsexual who liked men. I don't know why, but that whole concept blew my mind. A gay male transsexual. It was one of those things that hadn't quite occurred to me before. Is it because of some lingering threads of my formerly religious brainwashing? I mean, a transsexual is one who is born in the wrong body. So to make things "right" he/she transforms to the other sex's body. It's an effort to put things the way they should be. Do I still retain so much backlogged religion that I parse "the way things should be" as automatically girl-on-boy?

It's a depressing thought, and I'm afraid of what truth it might contain. Religion is a culture, and like all culture it makes up parts of you no matter how much you might want otherwise. I say things like "there is no right, only what we like" all the time, but there are still little secret parts of me that don't quite believe it. Will it always be that way?

I severely hope not. But how does one completely wash the unwanted aspects of a "former" culture away? One can't. Even by immersing oneself in a new culture, there will still be those perceptions and defaults that remain of the former.

Every time I see a character with my name in fiction, I always get this little jolt. Like surprise or something. Is that cause Seth is a pretty rare name as far as names go, or are other people this way?

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30

Entries tagged with weirdly hung up

Work ethic, I have none

First Chapter Woes

It will probably shock no one to say that I have a lot of weird hang-ups.

Perceptions and Defaults

Your name in fiction?

Profile

April 2010

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags