It Came From Outer Space…

My room mate was watching “Wonder Boys” yesterday and at some point in there the main character Grady equated writing a story to giving birth. Some one was asking him what his book was about and he said he didn’t know. They chastised him for not knowing and he asked them what their child was going to be, and they said that they didn’t care as long as it looked like it’s mother. So, that illustrated the point. I find myself wishing at this point that there were prenatal vitamins for my story, given I’m stuck.

I’ve been looking for tips on ways to become unstuck given my normal things aren’t working at this point; and I ran across this site: Ten Tips for Overcoming Writer’s Block and have been reading through those a few of them aren’t as feasible for me.

For example, the first tip suggests walking away from the keyboard. I’ve got a billion other things I need to do which involve the computer so instead of walking away I just switch tactics and work on those other things, catching up on blogs, reading things that are in my feed reader and the last and most useless one playing games on Facebook. However this morning I also have things to do which do not involve the computer, which is number 2 on the list. I have laundry to sort out, and washed dishes to put away. Later on today I have a massage booked that my Mum bought for me, so if nothing else that should give me a ton of time to clear my head and just be for a while and hopefully enable me to come back refreshed.

I find it helpful some times to just do random blurbs even if they’re not related to what I’m working on. I liken it to running salt and ice through a filter, it gives your brain a cleanse and a rinse and enables you to focus more clearly on the task at hand. In my case the task at hand is working on “Too Deep” but I’ve come to a rather sticky area of the plot which is very emotional, where the main character is recounting coming across a friend of his, a girl he grew up on the streets with, being attacked by boys in his school and comes to her aid.

So, to cleanse my brain I’m going to write a bit of another story instead and then go back to “Too Deep” ready to slog through the muck and come out the other side. So, this is actually just a random aside with a character I have in another story I haven’t mentioned who is a pilot, who was in an accident, or so she’s being told.

The holo droned and flickered and flickered and woke her up. Holos weren’t supposed to flicker or break up that was part of the point, that and the crisp clear visitation of the events right to you as though you were involved. This was a definite hiccup. The daily deals being offered to contestants on a game show were discorporating the news broadcast that had come on.
She reached for the picture, stumbled and almost fell out of bed. That was when she remembered where she was. This wasn’t her room. Her left hand was completely bandaged which explained why it didn’t move the way she had expected either, as she’d reached for the newscaster. The bed didn’t go the way she expected. There were wheels and beeps and a strange stickiness against her forehead. She reached up with her right hand, the fingers were stiff, and two of them were splinted, but at least she had some motion. A monitoring beacon, well that made sense.
Things were out of place though and not just the rooms’ inability to look like her own room because it wasn’t her own room. The holo shouldn’t flicker, and even if it did she should be able to see why it was, and fix it. Machines had been in her blood before oxygen. Now there was an absence, she felt as though her limbs were lead, things were wrong…
The door opened and a woman in a white uniform walked in. Spying her charge reaching out in quiet desperation towards the hologram she rushed over, “Oh, honey,” she said, “if you need to change it the comm button is right here,” she murmured, “how are you feeling?” she put a hand on her charge’s forehead, despite the fact that all the information was being transmitted to the padd she had at her hip.
“Dry,” she managed, realizing that speech was causing her throat to crack, “it’s wrong…”
The nurse went to the door and picked up a bottle of liquid and brought it in, “Are you one of the cult of Sanqui…I’m sorry I can’t pronounce it, but you know what I mean, right?”
“Yes and no,” she said, then frowned, “I mean, I’m not, but I get it.”
“While we’re at it, what would you like me to call you?” she said, and then realized she was still holding the water, and, “Sorry,” she started to hand it and then stopped, unscrewed the cap and opened it and then offered it.
“Denny’s fine,” she replied after draining half the bottle, and carefully setting it on the table, “I’m sorry though, um, which hospital am I at?”
“It’s Sword Coast,” the nurse replied, “and don’t worry P.D.F. made sure to bring in their own people so they’d fix you up appropriate to, you know,” she wiggled her fingers.
Denny frowned again, “Right,” she said, slowly, “Well, then I’d like to be talking to those people and very soon.”

It’s always interesting when you’re writing a character and suddenly realize they’re racist. Hello Nurse?

I’ve gotten a lot of outline planning done for “Too Deep” over the past few days; but I got stuck yesterday. I have 20 pages of outline and am about halfway through the story (probably) I know where it’s going; but I’m still not quite sure how to get to the outcome. I had some ideas but they were a bit too cliche, and I keep scratching things out and coming back to it and still being stuck.
I’ve been thinking about actually working on the story itself and then coming back to the planning, get things out a little more, much the way you might go to www.fatburner.org to get help with losing weight if you’re stuck on your diet.
Some times changing things up a bit does help with getting things moving again, and that’s what I’m hoping to achieve.

I’m stalled with NaNoWriMo once again. The past few days I’ve not been feeling so great, and haven’t been up to much in the way of writing, and so other than a few hundred words that I wrote last night I’ve been around 14000 for the past few days, current goals indicate that it’s supposed to be around 28K by now, so I’m halfway behind again and I’m not sure what I’d be doing as far as catch up because I seem to have lost the thread of where I was going somewhere along the line.

I’m trying to skip ahead a little in the hopes of picking things up, perhaps I can talk about one of Kelsey’s alters being interested in carolina designs, something, anything to actually get the words going again. I think part of my problem is that I already know that I’m going to be scrapping half of what’s been written or at least moving it to later in the story to try and salvage it, because the way things are being written right now there’s nothing much in the way of actual action going on compared to what I was hoping for when I originally decided on the plot, some times that’s not a bad thing, but in this case I feel as though things are dragging a lot in certain ways, where I’ve been writing pages about things that aren’t entirely relevant just to keep writing.

So, today I haven’t written anything, at least for NaNo. Breaking my own pledge from this morning. I just haven’t been able to focus or come up with where things should go. I tried distracting myself, looking up how to burn fat in different ways, working on our Etsy shop, taking photographs, taking my son on a walk, doing the dishes, reading up on different things for a game I’m supposed to be participating in, but nothing.

I have 55 minutes if I’m going to keep my “write at least something a day” rule; because I’m hoping not to get into that spiral where it goes several days without writing anything and makes it all the harder to actually connect with the story the longer it stretches out…but I’m not sure. I’m in brain-mush at the moment which makes it even harder.

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.

NaNoWriMo has been a struggle for me this year, this is not the first time that it has, but at times the writer’s block feels like a horrendous acne treatment.

I think it’s because a lot of the topic is very familiar to me in a haunting sort of way. It touches very close to real fears and issues that I have, as well as being surreal and fantastic, so when one of those “close to home” scenes is coming up I find myself hesitating to write and having to really zone out and just type in order to get those things out.

Still each day I’m managing to write at least a couple of hundred words, today I’ve written a thousand. These aren’t the average NaNo goals which is just over 1600 words per day, but it’s still writing and I’ve only had one day where I didn’t officially up my word count at all, so these are good things.

One good thing that has come out of recent things, other than a major purge of a lot of unnecessary items from my household is that I have found a potential starting point from which to begin the story that I want to start for this year’s NaNoWriMo.

At about midnight one night this past week I got a flash of inspiration for a place to start the piece and jotted about three pages worth of notes. Things are still a bit clunky but there is a much greater starting point than I previously had which will hopefully mean that I can start first thing on November 1st without staring at a blank page for several hours and demotivating myself.

Today I’ve assigned myself to write at least 300 words about the Biosphere story. I’m hoping that some of these random shorts will help me find a spring-off point to write the full story from later on.

Kelsey sat on her bed flipping through the photos in the digital frame and trying to remember when they were taken. There were a couple of pictures that she felt she should be able to place, and a couple of them she recognized the place but not the situation. One of them was taken near the second classroom building but she wasn’t sure she knew who it was who was with her, and a lot of them she couldn’t place at all which disturbed her given it was a frame in her side of the dorm, which meant that it was hers, especially as she was in several of them, but it was as though she was looking at a stranger.

She sighed, and set the frame down. The mood Dionne was in she wasn’t going to ask her to help clear up the matter. They’d had another blazing row just before her room mate had gone to class, this one involving Kelsey’s purported change of heart about hosting a party that weekend. She had a test the following Monday so she didn’t want to have a huge crowd of people over and she’d thought Dionne would understand, but to Dionne this was the final straw and she’d had enough. They seemed to be doing nothing but argue lately, about stupid things like dishes, and other chore rotas. A ton of little things that were just mounting up. She found herself more and more seriously considering Isaac’s offer, but she didn’t want to move in with him purely to get away from Dionne, that wasn’t a good reason to move in with someone, and with all the things which were happening with Dionne she wasn’t sure she should subject Isaac to them. She didn’t want to risk the relationship that way. She didn’t want to put him through whatever was going on with her memory. She wasn’t stupid, so why was everything slipping through her mind like this, or was it? Still, this seemed an inordinate length to go to for a practical joke and Dionne wouldn’t have the patience for it.

I like a few elements of this but not the majority. For a free-writing exercise it served it’s purpose, but I think it’s too confusing. I need to get a bit better grounding in the situation.

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.