Pish's Friends

I don't have much to talk about lately. Everything I have to say seems either trivial¹, interesting only to me ², or both³.

I remember seeing a meme a while ago where the question was something to the effect of "Hey, we sure don't know each other as well as the Internet makes us think we do. If there's anything you've been wondering about me, feel free to ask." I'd been going to post that one, but I can't find it now.

So, hey, we sure don't know each other as well as the Internet makes us think we do. If there's anything you've been wondering about me, feel free to ask.

¹ I get to work twelve hours next week! I'd have got to work fourteen hours this week, but I had to wait around to let some inspectors into the house of a neighbor who had to move back to Mississippi and is trying to sell her house today. I honestly don't mean that in any kind of snide way. I really like my job, I just don't get hours anymore. When some librarians retired this summer, the system replaced them each with two part-time staff. I was stupid and didn't apply because I wasn't sure I'd make enough to cover driving out to Xenia twice as much, and I was pretty sure I was about to get a full-time job out on the east coast. So now they're all covered and only need a sub a day or two a month. My choice this week is to cancel Rhapsody or go to a couple of NaNo write-ins. The Panera near me is hiring and I can't say I'm not tempted.

² I did the math and I'm nineteen thousand words behind schedule for NaNo. Yeah, I'm not recovering that. I can't type quickly on the AlphaSmart--I did 579 words in ten minutes on Write or Die using the desktop downstairs the other night, which is on the slightly high end of what I can do in an hour on the AlphaSmart--and my laptop is out being fixed.

Partly I'm stuck around 12K because I have to do something I really don't want to do to a character and so I'm avoiding it. I borrowed him from from the bad high school writing from which I scavenged my NaNo idea, and he wasn't native even to that story. He goes back to the very first story I wrote for a creative writing class, where his name was Adrian Blackburn and he was a Gary Stu so good-natured and sweet that he'd hurt your teeth. I feel kind of bad abut all the things I'm putting Adrian through, because he is a nice guy, and he's not really in a position to defend or help himself until about halfway through the story. He's one of the characters who keeps hanging around in my head, so I keep using him. This is about the third story in a row where I just kick the crap out of him (fourth, if you count the old free-form RP character I played in the White Wolf-based rooms on AOL). Because I was raised Irish Catholic, I feel guilty about that.

Also I've been giving myself nightmares.

The story I'm working on is a combination of ideas that I scavenged from really bad old stories I wrote when I was in late high school and early college. One of the ideas I kept was of a world populated by characters who were the embodiment of trope characters--the Wise Woman, the Charming Rogue, those sorts of things--and have powers of a sort based on their tropes. So far the most active villain in this story is a beast that's the affable-but-vicious pair of villains like Croup and Vandemar or the "hands of blue" guys from "Firefly." It calls itself the Dyad. I've been playing in the "rate the above poster's excerpt" threads on the boards a lot lately. I haven't planned it, but my last few excerpts have been scenes involving the Dyad (this is the one I'm using now) and generally what people have to say about my excerpt is "oh my God, that thing's horrible! Oh, and also your writing's pretty good for NaNo." I don't remember exactly what I dreamed last night, but I know that the Dyad was there, and it was horrible. I had to get up and put on some lights and futz around on the Internet for a while, it freaked me out that badly.

When I went back to sleep, I had another really vivid dream about my other story that scared me awake. When I stall out on my official NaNo story, I write Charlie and Nicholas fluff, so they are still loud in my head. The story I started for NaNo 2006 and have never been able to write looks like it runs to two books. For a while I was thinking of killing Charlie off near the end of the second one because I just didn't see any way that he'd make it through. Then I decided that the reason in-story wasn't good enough to justify that, it would probably come out as one of those things that make the reader throw the book across the room. I still have no idea how the story actually ends.

I don't remember exactly how this dream began, but it involved Nicholas discovering that his Charlie had been murdered, shot through the back so that his heart and chest were gone. The two of them had been fighting about something and hadn't talked in a few days. Nicholas already had a bad feeling because he couldn't get hold of Charlie, and he was absolutely devastated. Then the frame of the dream switched, and instead of just watching this all from some removed third-person perspective, I was Nicholas in the dream and I think the horror and grief and helplessness he was feeling was what woke me up. Yeah, I had to fool around on the computer a little while after that one too.

Nicholas has always been really close to me. Charlie's dashing and boisterous and charming (even I'm charmed by him), but Nicholas is the one in whom I see a lot of myself. His voice is easier for me to write than Charlie's. I... don't know how I came to be that wired into him, though. What's weirder is that last night wasn't the first time Nicholas has showed up in my subconscious; the first time I saw "The Talented Mr. Ripley," he turned up that night to tell me how much the movie upset him.

And I don't think I'm going to do any better tonight because I just spent about twenty minutes looking up clips from movies like "An American Werewolf in London" and "The Howling" for a post I started to write and decided I ought to do some other time (like when it's light out), then I YouTube-wandered into some parts of "The Shining" and now I'm kind of spooked out.

Also my second order from Adagio came today and I tried all of them, so now I'm all caffeinated to hell and back.

³Jack the cat is my shadow lately. When he thinks I've stayed up too late, he tries to lead me to bed. When I kept getting up last night, he didn't like that at all. There's a step stool sitting next to the computer desk for some reason. Every now and then he'd put his paw on my knee and when I glanced over, there he would be sitting on the stool and glaring at me like a little schoolmarm. And if I didn't get the picture and go back to bed, he would dig his claws in and scold me.

Current Mood: restless
Current Music: Urinetown Original Cast - Follow Your Heart