Madness and Doubt

I think I am going blind. 

This is probably something I should treat with more gravitas, but the black, blurry spots floating in my vision are silly, little things and until they can muster up some organization and take over the eye entirely, I’ll treat them as such silly little things.  They are a bit annoying, though.

I’m writing again.  I don’t know if you understand how wonderful that feels.  Characters are filling up my brain again, they’re talking again—again, more often in the shower, when I’m wet and naked and can’t do anything about their conversations, like, say write them down!  But they’re beating out the white noise, the random, staccato stream of consciousness that’s not a stream at all as much as a rain storm, hitting random surfaces and dissipating into the great, wide nothingness of it all.  All this thought of daily toils and duties has finally surrendered to the fantasy world of my imagination where stories happen and I can watch them with my eyes closed and write them down with them open.

So with that careful sense of excitement, like one has watching a hummingbird, not making a move, hoping it doesn’t go away too soon I have sat back down in front of my computer and started adding more pieces to this story.  The last of this story.  But this is the emotional rollercoaster that is writing.  You get on a run, you lay out a chapter and that flows into another chapter and then you fill in this part that’s been empty and unconnected for awhile and suddenly you have a whole beginning pieced together with action and words and you think, “Oh my god, I’m going to actually get this thing completed!” and then you look at your word count and eff the monkey you’re not even halfway through your goal.  Then the demons eat at you.  The ones that tell you, you could essentially tell your whole story in about 20 pages, the ones that make you doubt how worthy of a story you’re telling, the ones that nag you’ll never get this book done.

Writing is finding a way to silence some of the voices in your head while listening to the others.  Writing is trying to make sense of your madness and then presenting that crazy as craft.

“There’s an Indigo Girls song called Romeo and Juliet,” he said.  “And it has a lyric that says, ‘Juliet, the dice were loaded from the start.  And I bet, and you exploded into my heart…’  I think of that sometimes when I think of you and me.  I know it can feel like the world conspires against us, like it’s doing its damndest to keep us apart.  But it can’t.  It never will.  We always emerge stronger.” –Jarrad, Queen of Arèthane