About Clarion West
My Write-a-Thon Profile
Day #25 Progress: 955
Objective: +12,415/+30,000
The upshot of the kind of evil 7.10am errand which shouldn’t happen to one’s worst enemy is that by 8.30 you can be sipping cappuccino, munching on millionaire shortbread and desperately trying to rekindle the bright shiny world inside your head. If you’re me, this is a painstaking process. And all because of this gosh-darned lack of a visual imagination. Hell, I have trouble remembering what I look like, let alone my characters, and left & right are but empty placeholders where units of meaning should be. Sure, I’m a modern writer, armed to the teeth with the OCD tools of my trade; but I’m not about to start rifling through personality profiles and building plans before each storytelling session. Do I look like I’m made of time?
Besides which, I shouldn’t have to. I have encountered those for whom my way of thinking is so alien as made them declare outright, ‘That’s impossible, no one thinks in type.’ Except yes, yes they do. Murder She Wrote-like. As far as my brain is concerned, convoluted concepts, ingenious ideas, tall theories are such stuff as synapses are made on. But faces? If only. This means that – no matter how bursting with ideas I may have been upon folding the previous day, irrespective of how positively sizzling with inspiration I know myself to be, in the face of the fact that I know these people like the back of my hand – I will always take way more time than is sensible or practical just seeking to recapture even a vague sense of setting. Such time I could usefully be employing getting words down on paper, hence the 3am angst-ridden rant.
Not that it’s all knotted up annoyance at my psyche, don’t you worry. Quite the opposite: I have, as promised last night, dived headfirst into Chapter 9.3, also known as “The Apparently Schizophrenic World-building Finally Starts Adding Up.” When I casually glance at the fact that the tome is at once high and urban fantasy, people tend to raise an eyebrow. Sometimes they'll raise both, perplexedly trying to imagine the monstrous chimera I must be working on, before I even have a chance to tell them of the extra Cerberian head called horror. Truth is, an incoherent world was the only one that would contain the story as I feel it needs to be told. It is a tricky one to hold in the mind’s short-sighted eye all in the same ago, and conversely none of it would make any shred of sense if not in the light of everything else. I know it sounds bonkers, and it is, yet I promise it all slots neatly into place.
IN FACT. [Insert sailor-like, office-unsafe swearing here]ING EPIPHANY. Of, like, right now this very second – I report live from my brain. Turns out, it does all slot into place, and even more neatly than I could have ever schemed. Not only (1).9.3 foreshadows (2).1.1 – it also retrospectively illuminates (1).1.1.
I go to bed happy.
My Write-a-Thon Profile
Day #25 Progress: 955
Objective: +12,415/+30,000
The upshot of the kind of evil 7.10am errand which shouldn’t happen to one’s worst enemy is that by 8.30 you can be sipping cappuccino, munching on millionaire shortbread and desperately trying to rekindle the bright shiny world inside your head. If you’re me, this is a painstaking process. And all because of this gosh-darned lack of a visual imagination. Hell, I have trouble remembering what I look like, let alone my characters, and left & right are but empty placeholders where units of meaning should be. Sure, I’m a modern writer, armed to the teeth with the OCD tools of my trade; but I’m not about to start rifling through personality profiles and building plans before each storytelling session. Do I look like I’m made of time?
Besides which, I shouldn’t have to. I have encountered those for whom my way of thinking is so alien as made them declare outright, ‘That’s impossible, no one thinks in type.’ Except yes, yes they do. Murder She Wrote-like. As far as my brain is concerned, convoluted concepts, ingenious ideas, tall theories are such stuff as synapses are made on. But faces? If only. This means that – no matter how bursting with ideas I may have been upon folding the previous day, irrespective of how positively sizzling with inspiration I know myself to be, in the face of the fact that I know these people like the back of my hand – I will always take way more time than is sensible or practical just seeking to recapture even a vague sense of setting. Such time I could usefully be employing getting words down on paper, hence the 3am angst-ridden rant.
Not that it’s all knotted up annoyance at my psyche, don’t you worry. Quite the opposite: I have, as promised last night, dived headfirst into Chapter 9.3, also known as “The Apparently Schizophrenic World-building Finally Starts Adding Up.” When I casually glance at the fact that the tome is at once high and urban fantasy, people tend to raise an eyebrow. Sometimes they'll raise both, perplexedly trying to imagine the monstrous chimera I must be working on, before I even have a chance to tell them of the extra Cerberian head called horror. Truth is, an incoherent world was the only one that would contain the story as I feel it needs to be told. It is a tricky one to hold in the mind’s short-sighted eye all in the same ago, and conversely none of it would make any shred of sense if not in the light of everything else. I know it sounds bonkers, and it is, yet I promise it all slots neatly into place.
IN FACT. [Insert sailor-like, office-unsafe swearing here]ING EPIPHANY. Of, like, right now this very second – I report live from my brain. Turns out, it does all slot into place, and even more neatly than I could have ever schemed. Not only (1).9.3 foreshadows (2).1.1 – it also retrospectively illuminates (1).1.1.
I go to bed happy.
I have missed this....i really have!
ReplyDeleteThe blog feels the same about you my dear <3
ReplyDelete