The Writing Life

Just a normal Saturday night, reading stuff about guns and suicide.

Thinking about my new writing project, and I realized from the getgo that my male lead is going to commit suicide. I swear he’s the only character I’m killing off in the book. Past means I’ve killed off a character include:

• one who hung himself with a yellow scarf
• one who had a heart attack after her boyfriend essentially raped her (cigarettes+birth control=increased risk of this)
• hit by a car
• vague description that involved beheading and mutilation
• blood loss after extensive demonic possession that included severed toes, vomiting up dirt, mysterious burns on his arms, and having his tongue ripped out

That last one was my favorite character I’ve ever written. But back to the original topic, which is: my Google search history looks…questionable.There’s a girl in my neighborhood who survived attempted suicide despite that fact that she shot herself in the head. Aside from the scar and lasting mental issues, she seems okay. Face is intact, bodily functions are still good. Now I’m not so insensitive as to ask her for advice but she did give me an idea.

I want to start The Fields, Once Burned off with my main character recovering from amnesia and a failed suicide attempt. How long does the amnesia typically last? What kind of memories is he still going to cling to; which ones would be etched so deep that they’d stick? And most importantly: what caliber of weapon should he use, and what position should he shoot in, to insure that he messes himself up pretty good but doesn’t kill himself.

I’m tempted to crosspost that last question in both the gun community and the writing community on Reddit.com, to see how quickly the former assumes I’m suicidal in comparison to how nonchalantly the latter answers me.

Obligatory Disclaimer: I like guns. I like being alive. Neither of those positions will change anytime soon.

I don’t think I’ll ever come to terms with this.

There are some writers who can find beauty in long walks on the beach, a mission trip to some wartorn county, watching a gentleman propose to his lady friend at a cliche Italian restaurant. I’m never going to be the kind of writer who can find inspiration in the positive. I’m at the point where I no longer draw from my own mental instability for writing fodder…to be honest, my mind’s dreadfully boring these days. My characters have more sex than I do, drink more than I do, and have dysfunctional relationships at a rate that I am happily avoiding.

But hate and anger are a continual stumblingblock for me. Is it even normal to react to them the way I do? There are relatively inconsequential things people can do, they don’t matter much in the long run of things, that will make me so fucking pissed off thatI write a full-length trilogy to exercise my anger.

I got a few hundred words into the Soren/Tadie/Fields Once Burned fuckery, and realized I wasn’t happy with the format. But I’m genuinely looking forward to killing my main character off. With Avry in the Apple trilogy, it was a necessary evil (as I recall I actually shed a tear during the climactic death scene). Not this time. When anger flares up these days, I’m less likely to act on those impulses the way I did when I was younger. It genuinely bothers me that I can only draw inspiration from negative, potentially disruptive and borderline violent emotions. Am I using violent scenes in my novels as a safeguard against actually killing people? No. I’d still be a law-abiding citizen without this coping mechanism, but I’d probably be much more prone to irrational outbursts and such.

And you wonder why all the characters in Apple like to throw around champagne glasses and bottles of booze.

no-honor-among-thieves asked: I want to be writer friends. Is that okay? I'm perfectly fine with just being writer buddies or that kind of thing. But you seem cool, and I dig your style. *hopeful high five?*

As long as you’re in the right Hogwarts house (which by the way is Slytherin), we’re cool. I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I’ve been reading way more than writing, of late. So my productivity outlet is pretty low. :/

“It’s just a matter of time before we’re all found out.”

I officially started my new writing project last night, and I’m excited about it. For now I’ll hold off on details until the storyline is more developed, but I do know that the main character (Soren) ends up killing himself. Nobody in my books is ever truly happy. Aside from a few character names—Tadie for Soren’s wife, Ava for Soren’s girlfriend—I’m not too sure about the final details. I wrote out a good paragraph of the plot summary just so I know the basic logistics. Still going to be told in first-person multiple; probably from the POV of Soren, Tadie, and Ava. If this similar beginning compared to the start of the Apple trilogy is atallan indicator of how much fun and how long the project will be…I’m in for one hell of a ride.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to shower in hopes of exercising my plot bunnies.

Taking a sabbatical, and computer errors.

I’ve decided I’m taking some time off writing to tackle the monstrous reading list I’ve made for myself (some delightfully subversive stuff by Dan Dennett, Carl Sagan, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens) as well as to focus on getting back into school. I have some ACT test prep books and scholarship websites that are seducing me away from my craft. Add to that the fact that a technical error deleted about 60 pages of edits from both my hard-drive copy of the current WIP, and from my backup copy.

I still don’t know how that happened. Pissed me off.

Less than half of those pages had a hard-copy, on-paper equivalent so rather than dive in re-editing stuff I’ve already edited, I’m taking a break so that material freshens up in my mind—or becomes stale, depending on how you look at things. So if I’m slow to update the blog it’s because I’m lurking reddit and doing other things traditionally termed “productive.”

I am finding so many bizarre short quotes in my novel.

I just came across a really creepy True Blood quote that is totally inappropriate, not to mention the previous two quotes I posted as entries here. It was definitely a case of the author inserting her own fetishes/favoritism in an area where it’s majorly inapprorpriate. I read it and had to wonder,what the hell was I thinking when I wrote that? Had I just watched True Blood? Was I fantasizing about my ex and his creepy southern accent?The situation is two characters sneaking back into an apartment. There’s someone at home—one character’s boyfriend—who probably shouldn’t be hearing those two have sex. What does the super-suave other man do?

HE PUTS ON A BILL COMPTON ACCENT.

Muse, sometimes you tell me very strange things.