Sunday, October 31, 2010

Something

I didn't understand would be vital to how I write this story:

How it feels to truly be in love with someone.

(And I don't think I knew how that felt until recently.)

I have a better understanding now of what sorts of things S might be feeling toward B, as unrequited as some of those feelings are.

I've always thought this story was, to some degree, an anti-love story. Not so much, though. It's more a different kind of love than anti-love. A weird kind of love. The kind many people read about rather than experience.

I've experienced some of it.

And I'm going to infuse this story with it.

Monday, October 25, 2010

.

Off from the day job for a few days to work on the book.

Inevitably, when I return, people will want to know how much I got done. Right now I've done three chapters. That number will surely increase.

But what they don't understand is that novel work is not all about just the writing. You can't always measure your work in pages. For me, it's about:

* Listening to that band whose work inspires me.

* Listening, for the first time, to Chopin.

* Reading lyrics. Then rereading them again. And again. And...

* Connecting with those people who inspire me, even though they might be bad for me. Good for the novel > bad for me.

* Reading things that other people have written (so much of writing is about reading--especially when you're constantly analyzing what you like and what you don't like, and what you think works or doesn't work in a story).

* Revisiting well-loved monsters. Hello, Dexter; hello, Benjamin Linus. Nice to see you guys again.

* Thinking about sex.

* Pondering the details of the sequel. And the next book, totally unrelated to this one and its sequel. (But only writing this book at present. Let's not overwhelm ourselves, shall we?)

* Taking long, hot showers. Often where I have some truly brilliant ideas.


I can honestly say that I've been working on this book all weekend long.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Just a little shaken up.

When I write, I can't be too happy. I also can't be too angry or sad--that distracts me. But I have to be some sort of weird medium. I'd call it a happy medium, but...no. I generally don't write well when I'm too happy.

I need to be in a mindset where I'm more or less content, but am just a little shaken up by...something. Maybe an episode of Dexter really got to me. Maybe "Unintended" came on the MP3 player unexpectedly. Maybe something happened with someone to shake me up, to awaken my own dark passenger.

Like, for instance, hearing from him. I've mentioned him before. There have been many men over the course of me writing this book, but there's only one him. For the record, no, I'm not still nuts about him. (I'm nuts about someone else who is similarly nuts about me. That's a good feeling.) But that doesn't mean that his words don't affect me. They do--possibly more than anyone else's words do. Four sentences from him can trip me out just enough that my literary dark passenger uncurls itself, stands up, stretches its wings...and grabs a pen.

He--that him again, he of the trip-me-out emails and text messages--wants very desperately to read this book. "It's art I know I want to read," he said. "It's you."

Except I don't think he knows that. I think he thinks that. Because if he ever does read this thing, I don't know that he's going to want to see it through to the end.

But he's right about one thing. It is me.