Productive Avoidance

     There seems to be a strange feedback loop going on in my head lately. "All is naught, all is imperative,"--a thought that floats through every moment of my day, a senile shaman who's had too much peyote, dancing and cackling merrily in my poor sore noggin. The significance of every thought, every action weighs heavily on me, while the utter insignificance of it floats my feet inches from the floor. It's driving me crazy, this 'forcing me to address the day moment by moment' doublethink (thank you, Mr. Orwell, for that exquisitely appropriate concept).
     So to deal with my new affliction, I've learned the sacred and mystical art of productive avoidance. A moving target is harder to hit, or so the reasoning goes. Clean the bathroom? Heck yeah! Change the water in the fish tank? You betcha! Suddenly decide to fix that length of fence line that had been peacefully falling down for five years? Sweet Georgia peaches yes! Be so tired that you want to pass out at the end of the day? That's the plan!
     And it's there that the cracks in the dam are found; the blank concrete face that I had presented to the day found riddled with fissures and rotten to the point of failure. There is nothing so tempting to circular logic than a worn down, weakly defended mind. What that evil, spinning logic keeps forgetting, though, is my secret weapon. Or cache of weapons, if there is sufficient fodder for them all to come out to play.
     My books.
     Oh yes, that was a plural stuck in there. And no, it wasn't a typo (I have plenty of those pre-edit, thankyou vry muach). There are now two and a half books bubbling in the works, one mostly to completion, the other more of a series of post-it notes and scribbled notations on various scraps of flat, note-friendly mediums. They keep me busy with their worlds, and mostly out of harm's way.
     I play with my plot, scheme with my themes, fraternize and satirize with my main characters, and generally get lost within the worlds that I have created in my own head. This sets up a wave propagation of delightful harmonics, cancelling out the squallings of introspective shamans, and luring me into the hopefully peaceful slumber that I crave.
     Or sends me scrambling for note-friendly mediums to jot down a breakthrough concept that just won't wait for the morning. Either way, I consider the day productive if I can avoid spinning in circles, questioning the very reason for my existence on this wobbly globe we call home. 

Chasing Dreams

     Sleep and I have never been cozy bedfellows, for reasons both physical and psychological. For one, you're so defenseless--sprawled there on your bed with most every sense diminished beyond usefulness, a half-corpse waiting for the predators of the night to shred you with claws of sharp, swift death. For another, sickness manifests itself in the darkest bowels of the night more so than in the healing light of day--when the body is repairing itself in REM sleep, things can and do go hideously wrong. Dying in your sleep may be a peaceful way to go, but personally, I want to have that last burst of adrenaline before I'm dragged out of here.
   
And then there are the dreams.

     The moonscape in the deeper part of my psyche holds creatures that sincerely do not appreciate any kind of illumination, be it in the form of visible light or from intrusive inquiry. They rise up over the rim of their craters when I dream; dark tentacles grasping for purchase on powdery rock, seeking the intruder into their world of shadows. Escaping their grip is painful, and leaves me gasping on the edge of tears when I do rise to wakefulness.

     But every once in a while, the spirit realm lays a gentling hand upon my brow, soothing away the helpless, strangled feeling, and grants me a brief respite. Then dreams, and sleeping, lose some of their ragged edges, smoothing out into something intriguing and memorable. Oh, they may be filled with guns, corpses (not mobile ones--zombies hold not a iota of sway in my subconscious), and random glee-filled violence, but it's all in good fun. And every once in a blue moon I have cameos--people who walk onstage with their knapsacks full of sweet memories and honorable (or wickedly not-so-honorable) intentions. Then I linger, chasing them through the friendlier realms of my dream worlds, pursuing the joy that the dream brings as much as the visiting doppelganger itself.

     The challenge I face in my waking life if eerily similar. Learning to chase the beautiful things in life instead of being pursued by monstrous figments of my imagination is a hard chore for me. I have always been haunted by the specter of "hard work is its own reward"--that soul and body crushing folk wisdom that has been cold comfort to the huddled masses over the decades. As I pass through this many, varied, and opportunity-riddled world, I am coming to find the lack of truth in that time honored phrase. For if hard work is its own reward, why do people pull in paychecks? That's an additional reward, above and beyond the hard work they've done. It's unraveling right before my eyes, and I'm not going to say I don't find a certain amount of relief in its demise.

     Dreams, the kind you imagine when awake, have always been a beautiful thing to me. In other people. I've had a hard time convincing myself that my dreams of authorship are worth pursuing, seeing as how they are not about hard work, in the "coal mine" kind of way, with back breaking physical labor that lets you know at the end of the day that you're "Another day older and deeper in debt". But now that the heavy weight of unacknowledged drudgery is sloughing away from my shoulders, I'm finding it easier to believe in my own waking dreams.

          

Organic, But Not Green

One of the advantages of being a writer is shaping worlds to your own particular viewpoint, and having the characters play out scenarios in the manner in which you envision them. One of the disadvantages to being a writer is the simple, unavoidable fact that sometimes your imaginary friends have a mind of their own, if life is breathed into them with enough passion. They hijack plot lines, blurt out things that complicate relationships, and pull things out of their pockets that I didn’t know they had stuffed in there. Keeping up with them has been hard work, but worth it.  It has made the journey of my writing a surprisingly spontaneous, organic experience-- organic not in the FDA certified way, but organic as in a growing, living thing that pulses with its own life and dreams.  What a long, strange trip it’s been, as the hippies would say.  

Using that particular quirk of my writing, I can tell if a character is doing what is right for them, or if I’m trying to force a point. If I’m writing them into behaviors that aren’t their particular cup of tea, they balk hard, and I struggle to write a single page of dialogue. Days go by, and I’ve done nothing but type, backspace, type, backspace. They’re not happy with me, and sometimes it takes me days to realize where I’ve wandered away from my friends. For instance: I have a new character I’m trying to introduce into the second book, and all my main girl can do is swoon over him.  Trust me; she’s not the swooning type. I have worked this guy over for hotness factor, rugged dude look, manly mannerisms, and intriguing background. I thought I had him DOWN. What I forgot to pay attention to was his situation. He’s an office guy. Pencil pusher. Heroine worshiper. He kisses the ground she walks on. Has the whole Bounty paper towel dude look going on, but gets manicures. He’s perfect, but too much so. He’s not rough enough around the edges, and not mysterious enough, doesn’t have the connection with the outdoors like he should. So my main girl decided to show me (I think by being a complete smartass) that he’s wrong for her, and the plot, by fawning all over him, blushing (!!) and agreeing to a ‘weekend away’ after just one date.

Uh, what?

This from the girl that would rather flatten another guy for breathing even the suggestion that she’s easy, rather than give into obvious mutual attraction. Even if he was half out of his mind with crazy, and didn’t have any control over himself? Didn’t matter. Decked him. And now she’s staring into the middle distance, sighing and having fuzzy-edged thoughts about this new guy?

Pshaw.

I went off the rails somewhere. I think, no, I KNOW it’s the new guy’s fault. I’m going to pluck him out of his comfort zone and toss him to the tigers, see what comes up red. Take him down a notch, rough him up a little. Then maybe my main girl will quit with the heaving bodice act. Wish me luck-I hope none of the tigers escape and maul anyone important.

Ripping Holes, Mending Tears

Restraining my urge to hit the 'select all' function then 'delete', I've spent the last few days doing some heavy editing on the first draft of the book, about 79 paperback size pages, ten chapters so far. I found some plot holes that I patched up, and made some room in other places for action that will happen later in the book. It's both harder and more gratifying than I imagined it to be. I've found that note taking is somewhat helpful, but I have to remember them for them to be of any use at all!
Meanwhile, my short term memory is stuffed full of 'gotta remembers'- he's wearing (fill in manly duds) while out in the (driveway? outhouse? where was he again?). No wonder most fiction writers are notoriously bad for carrying on a conversation-we're trying to maintain a presence in both the here and now, and in the then and where. I seem to say 'Huh?' alot nowadays....