It Came From Outer Space…

I haven’t written much about this before because I’ve yet to complete a story enough to have it really be an issue. Though the one story that I did complete (when I was sixteen) when I review that now it makes me gag. It’s full of cliches and repetitive language and melodrama.

Some times those things can be used to emphasize a point, but when they’re the entirety of the story then it becomes trite and pathetic. When you find someone to be a reviewer and editor for your work you need them to be unbiased and brutally honest about what they’re reading, like the people at the hgh website claim to be. It’s no good if you have a reviewer who just tells you, “It’s good. I <3 it!!" as a lot of the people on Fanfiction.net are known to do. Instead you need someone to point out to you when your characters appear to be acting out of type or when there’s a plot hole you could drive a car through.

They not only have to be able to correct spelling and grammar but also challenge you to improve not only your work but yourself.

You may noticed I’ve added a donation button into the sidebar here. I’ve seen it on other blogs and I’ve often wondered about doing it, but held off, but recent events of scrambling to avoid a major overdraft in the bank and things have spurred me. Perhaps there are some generous people out there who actually like what they see and would like to give me just a little something to help keep me a float, that would be nice, and if you are out there I thank you.

I’m figuring to try and expand my money earning horizons, perhaps I can get some work as a ghost writer or an editor. I don’t know, I’m trying to look at my skill sets and it’s tricky because they’re rather random and vary widely. Other than that we’re having to do another long hard look at what we’re spending and where. I keep thinking about looking for a better life insurance rate or just nixing that completely but that scares me, but at the same time tons of people go without life insurance, I’m sure. Other than that I think parts of our cable package will be going soon. It has to be cheaper to have internet alone without everything else, right? No matter what they say.

I keep thinking maybe if I use spring plungers I can suck the ideas out of my brain and redeposit them on paper. I can’t come up with words for that but I can write blog posts. I could cut and paste all of those into my NaNo document, but that’s cheating just as surely as writing “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty —” would be to fill a few pages.

There are lots of cheats on the NaNo forum for ways to pad word count. Ones I remember and have used are just to describe everything in infinite detail, it makes me feel like Tolkein. However, others I’ve seen and not used are to have your cast members start singing “100 Bottles of Beer on the wall” or have them have to explain things over and over again to a character with amnesia, or have someone with a really thick accent who several people can’t understand them and either keeps having to repeat himself or has to keep being translated.

I’ve just broken 24K words, and am stuck, which annoys me because I have less than a thousand to go and I meet my personalized goal. I took a break just now to clean up the kitchen a little hoping that things would come to me a little more, but so far they haven’t so I’m going through and looking at different blogs so I’ll see if something will come to me while I’m writing other things.

I hope those of you out there still working on NaNo aren’t experiencing this sort of writer’s block, and I have to give a shout out to Dethas, Hero and Jackdaw on my NaNo buddy list who have already won! Congratulations!

That’s all I’ve been able to manage today; but then my lack of brain usefulness was my own fault for trying to use NyQuil as a sleeping pill last night. I was hungover all day. It was about as productive as eating nothing but cookies is for fast weight loss.

I got to sleep, sure…but the medicine wanted me to sleep for the entire day and so I was groggy, foggy, irritable and narcoleptic. Not great for achieving anything. I’m lucky I managed to get groceries, but then that was helped with a Dew infusion. I’m definitely off the caffeine though. It took me several hours to drink the Dew. I used to down an entire bottle in a few minutes, and be back for more. So, that’s a good thing. My body’s detoxing from that…however, the creativity hasn’t been up to much, nor has the functioning.

Hopefully now I’ve managed to restock on my sleeping medication things can be back to normal tomorrow. Though if I have any hope of catching up on NaNo I need to write almost 8K tomorrow at least…heheh. Maybe I should just shoot for writing a bit more than 40 words…8K is an insurmountable obstacle that will just alienate me from the start.

I’m having some issues picking up where I left off yesterday, if you see the last portion I wrote you may understand why.

So she lay still and tried not to say anything, because that was playing along with the game and then the game would be over because she had been good and played along, and Maddie, Maddie was really good at the game now, she wasn’t saying anything at all. She was just staring straight ahead, like Snow White when she ate the apple, so Maddie, Maddie would get to go home first, she knew that, but maybe if she kept just as quiet they would both get to go home.
Maddie was the one here trapped here. She could never leave.
It didn’t matter how cold it got, or how much it rained, or if the ground shook. She was still here. She liked to paint, pictures could be distracting, and she wanted to sing, but that would be too much noise and that would make him angry. When he was angry that was going to be bad. He would know if she was telling, or if she was bad. He would know and then she would be in trouble from him and from her family. So she knew that she wasn’t going to be talking about it, maybe she just shouldn’t talk at all, that would make things a lot safer.
But that would make her family angry. Her mother didn’t like when she didn’t say anything, it made her angry and it made her cry and Mom and Dad would fight with each other then and shout about her, and Des would be unhappy too.
Des was always unhappy. She could see him sitting in his room. He didn’t play football or soccer any more. He stayed inside and tried to get her to play Snakes & Ladders with him or Ludo.
Dad would drive her to a special lady who kept telling her that she would listen whenever she wanted to talk, and that was something to not tell Mom either, wasn’t it? Mom would get mad about that. She thought the lady was a waste of time.
Still he had to be there. He was watching, always watching. It wasn’t going to matter where she went. Sometimes she saw him looking through her window, so she would sleep in her closet, curled up in blankets underneath her clothes, everyone would always think to look under the bed, so that wasn’t a safe place to go.
So, she would sleep in the closet, it was warm and snug, and one day he would stop watching and it might be safe to talk again.

I decided that should be the end of the chapter, and I need to decide where to pick up for the next chapter — but that’s tricky. I need a Garmin GPS to navigate my way out of this one. I’ve been trying not to keep pressure on myself…because I know that doesn’t help getting out of a writer’s block but it’s hard with my perfectionist nature to not get hung up on these things.

Today would have been a good day for writing if I had one of those netbooks or had thought to bring a notebook with me. I got stuck waiting for a tow truck, though AAA actually got there a lot quicker than I’m used to. I only had to wait a half an hour or so rather than several.

However, there’s been a lot of trial and tribulation other than that. My car is fixed it was the water pump, but I found out also that the radiator is going to need fixing, or rather, replacing and that’s an expensive proposition.

Then my room mate and I spent several hours tonight battling with a part of my husband’s duty uniform, trying to fix it, so we don’t have to pay several hundred dollars to replace it. We appear to have been victorious, touch wood, but I’m left mentally fatigued from all the false positives that fell apart, and the worry for the car, which has been on it’s last wheels for a while.

I’m hoping that my creativity won’t lapse because of all these things. I’ve been enjoying a stint of drawing that’s been very productive and worthwhile. I don’t want to lose it to stress, that’s been a horrific thing for me to not be able to draw and write, but with all of this and all of the problems we’ve been having with our health insurance I’ve been pretty wrung out the past week.

The longer I spend at home the more that I realize that writers have a tendency to get lazy. We spend our time glued to televisions or video games and absorb sloppy writing habits and cheesy dialogue. I wonder if part of the problem I’m having with writing is coming from that legendary “brain rot”. My brain has become so accustomed to short bursts of information that it perhaps can’t process the length of time that I would need to actually write a full length piece.

I can’t concentrate to read for any extended period of time either some days, which I think is partially because I’ve been losing a battle with depression. When your brain is in a funk you don’t want to do anything, and half the time on bad days I barely even focus on the TV either.

I’ve been a bit distracted from blogging lately. We’ve had a lot of chaos at the house. I think it would have been smoother if we had set up a bunch of dog ramps and hosted Krufts out of our back yard.

We have tile floor that’s been torn up, mildew that’s needed to be cleaned up, trees that have fallen down in the back yard and knocked down other trees. All these are stressors which make it hard to write and remind me that I need to really work on giving myself an environment that is conducive to writing and getting myself into the groove again. It’s all well and good to say that I want to be a writer and that I have all these ideas but when they don’t go anywhere except circle around my head fighting to come out it doesn’t help.

However, there really is no one to blame but myself for that. I think perhaps I actually need to force some things out just so that I’m writing again, even if it is blood from a stone it will be something written and it will get me back into the rhythm of writing and once that happens perhaps I can then get to the meat again.

I haven’t been able to eliminate distractions enough to write much of anything lately. I could use the excuse that I’m adjusting to new medications but that’s not entirely it. It’s just that I’ve not been in the right frame of mind, but I realize forcing and pushing myself to write is not the way. I’ve been continuing with some writing exercises, copying down different plots that I’ve had over the years and trying to expand on them a bit more.

I’ll continue with the writing exercises here. They may be short but they’re enough to prove to myself that I have the ability; and every little bit helps when it comes to the overall story that I’m concocting. It’s not as if I’m having to write briefs for Mesothelioma lawyers so in theory it should be easy, but at the same time some times the muse just isn’t there and no amount of forcing yourself to write like eking blood from a stone is going to make it happen. It just breeds resentment for whatever you’re working on and makes things harder overall.

I have a major problem with procrastinating. It’s so easy for me to get distracted. The internet has too many shiny things on. I keep thinking that I should just disconnect the internet from the computer for a few hours a day and then I would be able to write more cohesively, but then I would also have to uninstall all the computer games. No more solitaire, or bejeweled or insaniquarium.

If it’s not that sort of thing I find myself reading through all the spam comments and spam emails I get that don’t get caught by the various filters. I’ve lost count of the number of offers I receive to get free life insurance quotes or check out hot nude girls, or enlarge various portion sof my anatomy (that I don’t even have).

All of these add up to excuses when all is said and done. I have lost the discipline I need to actually write for an hour or two per day. I have to work at regaining that discipline. I know I can do it. I’ve won NaNoWriMo twice before. I just have to be strict with myself, like I have to be strict with myself about my diet too.