writing

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That feeling when you have two different book stories developing parallelly in your head, but can’t write either. And that’s on good days. On bad days, there are five of them. Plus-minus.

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They were talking about all the bad habits of ‘sekkachi’ (impatient, restless, rash) people on the TV, of how they (we) constantly think of ‘what’s ahead’ and keep skipping over what is going right now… When you put it in words like that, that’s a nasty way to live.

But then, when you’re made that way it’s not like you can really change the way your brain works. These things are not just ‘personality’ you can ‘fix’, they are built in into your structure. (Even if you think it’s possible to fix it from within, it would require a lot of patient work on yourself, and thus it becomes a loop of impossible–to get the thing you need you need to already have the same thing in the first place.) ​And the only thing the ‘professors’ could recommend for fixing it is ‘to get fat’…because apparently big and fat animals are slower and more patient, and slow metabolism will help slow down your brain… (It’s better to not look at this sentence too closely.)

But all this reminds me very painfully of all my book projects where I have written the beginning and some ‘important plot parts’ and climaxes, but can’t find any patience to sit down and write everything that comes in between.

I keep going back to school in my dreams. Tonight, though, I also moved to Australia to become a singer. And go back to school.

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Me: planning things to do on Saturday, what to watch, what to watch after that, clean while watching, take out the trash, maybe play some DSIII sometime before evening, try to write some more for that story I’ve been focusing on last couple of weeks…

Reality: read a random paragraph of a random book I picked up in the middle of cleaning, get and idea, sit down for 3 hours and write 3000 words for a completely new story I didn’t even see coming.

I have honestly lost count of the ‘new story sketches’ with main characters and setting outlined I have ‘saved for later’ in my Scrivener projects…

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And summer ‘vacation’ is gone.

With regards to the to do list, I’ve managed only the web page design update. Mostly.

Also, got back to OmmWriter in an attempt to rewrite the Prologue to the main ‘Chronicles’ series…and realised that, since it’s about to go over 10,000 words, I probably shouldn’t really be calling it just a ‘prologue’ anymore.

(Also, found out that I own at least 6 pairs of shoes I have never worn more than once…likely bought in a wrong size because I wasn’t able to handle being in the store. Trying to get rid of them using Merucari app now. In order to prevent the repeat of this in the future, I do believe I will now mostly only buy shoes using Amazon Wardrobe option (tried once, worked great). Because, apparently, unless we are talking about boots, I can spend 2 hours in a store trying on various shoes just, trying find a pair that will fit and won’t hurt (everything hurts), and still only get something in a wrong size and a skull-crushing and stomach-turning migraine from just being in the store…)

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Once in a while I need to write these things out to force my mind to focus on them. As if to feel like writing/posting them will make them solid:

  • I need to change the layout of this site. I’ve even chosen what I want, just can’t figure out how to make it work. Which I should do now, because next time when I might have time won’t come around soon.

My writing projects currently feature:

  • Chronicles duology: over 160,000 words and about 30% done
  • Chronicles series: over 57,000 words and below 10% done
  • Shards and other ideas: 20,000 words over all
  • New SF standalone and contemporary standalone: both about 3000 words each, with first chapters and only plot notes done

My excuse is one and only – health. It’s been very difficult to write anything but shit when I only constantly feel like shit. But I do need to make some progress, to at least not feel like shit for failing at this as well.

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The head-hopping pov is turning very quickly into one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to writing.

(somewhere between the ‘using foreign languages when you can’t do it without mistakes’ and ‘adding rape for the coolness factor’)

I can’t believe how many writers don’t find not okay… I really think it’s nowhere close to okay, when your pov changes from thoughts of one character to another in the same paragraph. Or even in the next paragraph without a clear text break. Bite me.

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favorite typo of the day:

*scene: very serious, a group of men on the verge of violence staring at each other, hands on weapons, nerves ringing with tension, etc.

*** finally faced the man, undressing him quietly but firmly.

(it took me far too long to notice that it doesn’t actually say “addressing”, if I’m being honest…)

… this is probably how weird fanfiction gets born..

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I kind of hate most of ‘how to’ books and blog posts.

The only kinds of ‘how to’s I can accept are the the technical manuals, as in ‘how to correctly assemble a bookshelf/repair your appliance and not brain yourself’ kind of things.

The ‘how to’s that talk about art and living in general make me nauseous.

I think, compared to my dislike towards people who need to have someone to tell them how to live or write, I despise those who are all too happy to tell others how they should live or create things even more.

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With all the highlighting and sharing abilities, Kindle should have a ‘report a typo’ function. When you highlight a typo and send it back to the author/publisher.

(because apparently it’s not enough to be correcting people’s typos at work)

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sometimes I get these moments when I feel like writing might the very only and last thing I have for myself

and in the next moment I hate it, my writing, for it with all my heart

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I stopped writing poetry because it feels like vomiting words in a language I don’t myself understand, from somewhere around backside of my frontal lobe.
It confuses me and feels like I’m trying to say something, but can’t hear my own voice, and can’t know what I’m actually saying.
Even more than usual.
And when it just comes out and I can’t stop it, it reminds me of how a cat looks after coughing out some fur. I just stare at it, and don’t know what is it, what to do with it, and why did it even have to come out.

I also hardly ever read poetry for similar reasons.

Another problem I heave with poetry is that when it ‘comes out’ like a fur ball like this:

look at them hungered eyes
dreaming of soft toes
buried in black soil
look at them burdened skies

 it also ends as abruptly as it came out. And with a feeling that there is nothing else where it came from, like I’m straining to hear what comes next but the sound is not there. But that also for some reason I need to keep it.

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The point is, that even on those shittier of days of mine, the image that still carries me through those shittier days is the one of me finally holding at least one of my finished books in my hands. And it’s not about whether people are actually going to read it, or whether I’m going to try to get it published in the traditional way or put some money away and work out how self-publishing works. It’s about making it solid, and putting it in right words that will paint the right images and connect into that story that I’m trying to tell. And that voice in my head that keeps telling me that I will never able to do it because I’m broken in the head and can’t even connect words in sentences properly (unless it’s an angsty blog post) can just go and… suck on something nasty.

When I finally find the right words and manage connect them in the right way for the story, reading them back, feeling the tiny parts of it really come alive, makes me feel like home.

Which always reminds me of the Alfred Kazin quote.


“One writes to make home for oneself, on paper.”

For someone who doesn’t really have anything else that feels like home, this is sort of important.

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On my shittier days I can’t help but think about how, logically speaking, my specific Asperger’s likely makes writing not a thing I should be really focusing on.
I feel words a little differently from most people. I see them in specific pictures, colours, and tastes, I also often lose track of what they really mean, making up meanings and uses of my own. Sometimes it means that typos and mistranslations are the funniest things possible for me in the world, because of the pictures they make up, and sometimes it means that I think that “cooked a brow” is a thing, think “door” and write “tree”, and can’t stop thinking Singapore must be a hardly inhabitable country somewhere very cold, and that Eskimo live there (and it doesn’t matter that I know exactly where Singapore is and even had friends from there, my brain will still paint a Siberian scenery every time I say the word, since I was a child.) 
I’ve lost count of how many times I had to edit out logically impossible sentences, and, unfortunately, the important part is not that I manage to find them at some point, but the part where it takes me years and dozens of checks until I actually do realize that something is wrong with the way I described things.
It terrifies me how ironic it is that I actually work editing and proofreading things every day, when I’m like this. But, apparently, I’m pretty good at catching logical inconsistencies within other people’s writing, while I can’t notice them at all when I write them myself. 
I really struggle with putting things I see in words, and then I struggle all over again with re-arranging them into words that make sense to someone other than myself.
But the thing is, for some reason, I really need writing to be the thing for me. And I felt this way ever since I first begun reading. I started writing my first story when I was 8 or 9. I asked my parents for a typewriter, and they gave me Windows95. But when I first typed out the first chapter of my story, the people I was learning how to read good books from, read it without my permission and laughed so hard at the way I was using my words, quoting the ridiculous parts out loud, that I dropped any ideas of writing things. Because they were still quoting that stuff to me for years, and I felt hurt. And also because I understood that even though they were laughing, I still couldn’t see what was wrong with it at all, and it scared me. So I decided that I will be content enough with making up stories only inside of my head and writing only some things down in my diaries, because my handwriting is indecipherable anyway. I do wish I didn’t waste all those years now, but apparently learning to not hurt when people reject and dismiss the things that are important to you takes a lot of time. Or at least to hurt less and learn how to move on and try again.

I tell myself that I still can be optimistic and try to believe that I can do it. That I’ll just have to find a very patient person to ask to be my editor and comb through my my words to make sure I’m saying what I think I’m saying. But I still feel like an idiot stubbornly trying to swim against the current in the wrong river on most days.

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Oh how I want to be that person who can sit down, put their laptop, notebook or whatever on their lap, open a half-written chapter and just write, and write, and write, whatever, even if it’s something they’ll need to edit over and over again, just put the words out there in sentences and don’t feel like all they have in their head is lumps of dirt and wind and pain, but definitely no actual words formed of actual letters, and definitely not in any single language. 
Except irrelevant posts, apparently.