I'm having an ADD night, flickering from scene to scene like my mind is a hotel of wandering characters - let loose from their stories, their purpose, and so they're haunt me.
There's a father frying greasy meat in a kitchen beneath a blanket of smoke. A mother snapping gum and tapping on a windowpane as she and her daughter drive up the coast. Down the hall, a young woman is squeezed between a grimy airplane window and a particularly fleshy man with sour milk breath who refers to her as Mam. Two pages down, (open Word document 5 on my desktop) we have a young couple with blackberry stained fingertips and lips lolling on the lawn. Upstairs we have a daughter returning home to her mother, with a secret so guarded that I don't even know it yet, and so they're idling over tea in a sun dampened room, talking about nothing and everything all at once - but going nowhere.
None of them are going anywhere because my mind is going everywhere.
I'm surrounded by deadlines - the closing, my first submission of the semester, various magazine contests and deadlines - yet, I can't accomplish a thing. I'm spinning my wheels in six or seven different worlds.
I'm even reading three different books.
Can I blame this on stress or pregnancy? Or is this simply a case of temporary writer's insanity?
I so badly want to have a clear focus. A story.
Actually, I'm going to need more than one. This semester I need to be working on gathering pieces for my thesis, the first draft of which will be due early next semester. Considering that I have only two or three short stories that are within a draft of being complete, I've got a long way to go. And I'm going to need a little more direction (and a lot less distraction) to get me there.
Do you hear that, you crazy characters taking up residence at Hotel Mella (and in Word documents all over my desktop)? Go home, and don't come back until you have your story ready to be written.
There's a father frying greasy meat in a kitchen beneath a blanket of smoke. A mother snapping gum and tapping on a windowpane as she and her daughter drive up the coast. Down the hall, a young woman is squeezed between a grimy airplane window and a particularly fleshy man with sour milk breath who refers to her as Mam. Two pages down, (open Word document 5 on my desktop) we have a young couple with blackberry stained fingertips and lips lolling on the lawn. Upstairs we have a daughter returning home to her mother, with a secret so guarded that I don't even know it yet, and so they're idling over tea in a sun dampened room, talking about nothing and everything all at once - but going nowhere.
None of them are going anywhere because my mind is going everywhere.
I'm surrounded by deadlines - the closing, my first submission of the semester, various magazine contests and deadlines - yet, I can't accomplish a thing. I'm spinning my wheels in six or seven different worlds.
I'm even reading three different books.
Can I blame this on stress or pregnancy? Or is this simply a case of temporary writer's insanity?
I so badly want to have a clear focus. A story.
Actually, I'm going to need more than one. This semester I need to be working on gathering pieces for my thesis, the first draft of which will be due early next semester. Considering that I have only two or three short stories that are within a draft of being complete, I've got a long way to go. And I'm going to need a little more direction (and a lot less distraction) to get me there.
Do you hear that, you crazy characters taking up residence at Hotel Mella (and in Word documents all over my desktop)? Go home, and don't come back until you have your story ready to be written.
Labels: Ramblings, Writing Life
6 Comments:
You tell 'em, Mella...tell those crazy characters to "get it together...or else!"
Ha ha, you know how it is, Chuck sometimes you've just got to tell those characters who's boss.
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Oh, Honey, you have all my sympathies. Tell them that if they don't give you some piece, you'll write "Then a plane crashed into them and everyone died. The End."
You can add prettier details, but the plane crash is their main punishment. ;)
Hee hee. I meant to say "some peace".
They're like pigeons. If you flap your arms and yell "SHOO!" they just rise up with great flapping of wings - and then settle right back where they were.
Try bribing them with peanut butter.
Grinning.
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