%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 Well, not so much fun and leisure as...get some damn writing done, you fool! |
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A while ago, I attended a writers' workshop and the lady who hosted it told us all to go away with this bit of advice - to write for just ten minutes a day. I was determined to go ahead with it and I did...for two days. So today I remembered that I'd resolved to do so and I whipped out my journal and wrote for fifteen minutes. I'm typing out pretty much the same thing that I wrote earlier, with some differences. I find I can go a lot more in-depth when I'm typing than when I'm writing by hand. Writing by hand is such a chore! I've struggled with loneliness a lot throughout my twenty-nine years. I struggled with it when I was the only one home with my mum when I was a teen and everybody else had other places to be. I struggled with it after marriage and when we moved into our own house for the first time. I struggled with it after my son was born and I felt torn between pursuing my writing and being a good mum, because my culture seems to indicate that a woman has absolutely no chance of living her own life - or at least, she has no chance of attaining any goals she hasn't already attained - once she has children. I feel it occasionally still, even though I get so little time to myself nowadays that any alone time is simply awesome. I've tried to come to terms with the idea that being alone isn't a bad thing - and a lot of the time, it isn't. My friends don't live nearby so I don't get to see them often, and even when I do, I feel like there isn't much depth to our conversations. I'm surrounded by people who do not think like me, who do not share any of my interests and hobbies. I feel like I've become desensitised to isolation. Loneliness is my preferred way to be. I walked into my college cafeteria at lunch today and it was the usual hubbub of activity. Youngsters walking around, chatting animatedly, shouting across the room, laughing, eating, socialising. I could recall how that clamour wouldn't have bothered me ten-twelve years ago, when I would have been one of the youngsters talking excitedly with her friends. But, as this moment, I just found an out-of-the-way little table and sat down. I watched the crowds for a while, wondering why it was only at moments like these that the sense of isolation became so strong. In the middle of a crowd, I feel most alone. |
| 07:24 I was straining my brain to come up with a plot for my NaNo story but nothing happened. It's often like that. If I've got nothing to go on, I draw a blank. Mostly, I get an inkling of an idea in my head (at this point, it's just someone doing something - not an actual story) and then start building a character around that idea. These ideas are almost always character-building ones. Then, as I start to write, I get to know my characters better and put them into situations which they have to somehow get out of. The plot comes later. But with NaNo, I don't have that luxury. Pressed for time and on a minimum word count limit for every day, I'll have to make sure I'm following some kind of plot. But I can't think of one! So I just started writing the story, because that works best. I didn't even think to ask myself what the hell I'm doing - that came later, when I took a break and remembered that I'm not supposed to start it till 1st November!  But it's fine, I guess. I only got 500 words or so. I'll be sure to take that off my end total at the end of next month lol! I'm still struggling but I'll get there in the end. Anyway, I thought I'd begin Yuichi's enormous story. See, it's weird. I think I'm overstretching with this one. So, originally, Yuichi was going to be part of a fanfic I wanted to do for D.Gray-man (many, many years ago). It was about the whole vampire-werewolf conflict thing. But with the amount of detail I put into the backstory, I thought "What the hell! This deserves to be an original story!" But then I had the idea for my main novel 'verse featuring stories from different people and Yuichi became one of them. Or maybe initially, I just liked the name Yuichi and his character design and wanted to reuse it rather than these characters being the same people. But the thing is, Yuichi's vampire story takes place in the modern world and Yuichi the Other is from a fantasy world where people have glowing eyes and special powers. So I thought...maybe Yuichi is an immortal and the vampire story is for the far, far future of this place but at the moment, he is just a...well, not normal in any sense of the word, but...yeah... Does it sound overblown, for one character to have so much happening to him? Maybe I should just forget about the other stories and incorporate them all into Yuichi's and call the whole thing the Chronicles of Yuichi, with like a hundred volumes in the series. What a scary thought! 07:37 |
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