Potatoes are quietly, slowly, baking in the oven, in creamy goodness, as I sit here and type a little, hoping to get some writing in before sunday dinner. I only have a few minutes, so I don’t think I’ll get into any huge topics or discussions today. But I needed to sit down and get some words on screen. Or paper. Or whatever it is you’d call it.
I’ve been in such a mood to write lately, yet I haven’t. And I don’t know why. I have all these awesome ideas for my book running around inside my head, and I have a lot already written that I need to weed through to see what else I need to write. Yet I keep putting it off. It’s maddening.
It’s even worse than when I had to write for the AHS Weekly and waited till Wednesday night to even start my columns (this very one, in fact, as Strange Thoughts originated at this semi-lovely publication). It goes beyond my normal procrastination tactics. I have no excuses. None.
Lately I’ve been running into weird coincidences where I see something in a television program, or read about something, and it magically clicks with something I’ve been trying to explain in my novel. I was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer the other night, and all of a sudden I realized how to make my characters appear more real in the world that I’ve placed them, and it’s a world where they shouldn’t be, but are. I would explain it more but then I’d be giving away the whole thing. And I can’t have that. Suffice it to say that by watching Joss Whedon’s masterful series I have tapped into some unconscious understanding of a)how I can work the characters in my own writing, and b) where I may have gotten the idea for it in the first place. This is not to say that I’m using one of Whedon’s ideas as my own. It’s a twist on something he might have done in the series, but nothing outright the same. There are similarities, that’s all. And it’s giving me loads of ideas.
Yet I don’t write them down.
One of my main problems is that I’m at a point in my book where the timelines are all messed up. And the present day, real world stuff is getting to me. I can’t seem to find any conflict with it. And if I wrote what I really should write, I think I’d be revealing way too much about myself than I really want to. It would add the best sort of conflict ever, but at the same time, it’d be far too much.
But recently I’ve started thinking about people. Not just the people we know, but the people we don’t know. Or the people we think we know, but yet we don’t know. There are things about people that we might never find out in our lives. They may have done things in their past and let them stay in the past. And no one was around back them to bring that past into the present day. And so they live without the need to tell anyone about this past life. It could be something as simple as fighting in a war, or having lived in a different state. Our own families are full of these type of things, as I’m finding out with some genealogical research.
I’ve been trying to find a way to incorporate genealogy into my book somehow, and I think I’ve figured it out. And it will add just the right amount of conflict to my story. And maybe even a stranger twist than I had at first imagined.
The only thing left is to sit and write. And with me, I have to physically write it, cause typing it never works the first time around. For some reason I need that physical aspect of really writing with a pen on blank paper. Otherwise, it’s too easy for me to delete words, and not like what I’ve typed. My inner editor sleeps when I write with a pen, but comes awake when the laptop opens. Even now, he lurks behind me, watching me type this, wondering if I’ll go too far and type too much. Cause then he’d have to step in and act like the word cop.
It is almost time for dinner, and the potatoes are done. So I have to go, for now. Hopefully, I will sit down and do a lot of writing. Soon. I have the whole day off tomorrow. And it’s either write or clean. And I know I don’t want to spend my holiday cleaning.