The Unintentional is often the best...

I had a series of events all laid out in a line. They sort of made sense, and it helped with the flow.
Then I set down to writing them, and I thought about the actual CHARACTERS playing these roles, and suddenly what started out as a simple row of events, took on a whole new beautifully layered complexity.
It stopped being just Oh, Bob did X... and became Bob needed to do X to prove that Y was important to J thus allowing event B to have SO MUCH MORE significance.
It became beautiful and crystalline and complex. With layers and depth and real functions.
I LOVE the way this is going.

At the edge, and all that's left is the falling...

My wordbaby is almost complete. My character's hurt and struggled and fallen only to rise again. Each fumbling triumph adding more feathers and wax to the wings that bore her higher and higher...
But now we've reached that point, the sun is too hot, the wind has carried us too high, and the wax begins to melt...
She doesn't see it... Oh, they never do, but she's about to fall.
I find myself too locked into her hopes... I stare at the page and the words won't come, I hesitate to write them.
Because this is going to hurt. This is going to break everything.
It's the perfect tragedy, we both knew it from the start, it's only the beginning...
but sometimes, to begin, you have to destroy everything old to start anew.
She was so happy... but she knew it'd never last.
The feathers flake away and the gut clenching reality of gravity takes hold, in one split second you see the inevitable, before it happens, but to late to stop.
It's my fault. I built her wings and I made the sun, I sent her up on a fickle wind.
So I hurt too.
What goes up must come down... and the pain is for a reason...
But it's still pain, and it's still real.
Take one last breath...
Don't look down, you really don't want to know.
Close your eyes, and start to fall...
The end is your beginning.

Fantasy being interrupted by reality...

My brain annoys me sometimes. A lot of things I read or hear stick with me, like a tiny grain of sand lodged in my ear canal that moves every time I tilt my head to the left.
Many of these nuggets are writing related.
"Make your fictional world make SENSE." Chides my inner editor.
I plan out my world, HELL I have an entire dictionary of files on my harddrive about my fictional beings, their society, and what makes them tick. I have NO problem writing monsters. Monsters get to rely on sci-fi science, or "technobabble" and I can make those *uckers do WHATEVER I WANT.
It's the humans that give me trouble.
"Justify your characters reasoning. Would my character have a reason to understand that inference?" This sort of thing occasionally sticks in my craw and makes me snarly. Why the hell WOULDN'T 'average joe' understand that a wall mounted trebuchet, if designed by an INTELLIGENT warlord, would be specifically measured and mounted to provide optimum defense in fortress perimeter? I mean, -I- know that, it's OBVIOUS if you THINK about it. I mean, if a guy has wall mounted arsenal, you can BET he knows how far those weapons can hit with any degree of accuracy.
I don't feel like I should NEED to justify all these little factoids that people pick up throughout life. We're magpies picking up shiny things, do we particularly REMEMBER where each and every shiny bauble came from?
No. I doubt it. I sure as hell don't.
I'm just going to decide that my inner voice is a troublesome pain in my butt and take it on faith that the average reader, MY average reader, is not a mush dribbling moron and can see through the lines to understand why my character 'gets' certain things.

Some things you just KNOW.

A beginning of sorts...

I have a blog. And a twitter. and all those crazy social networking things that the driven nature of social media tells us will be useful ultimately to ones career.
And yet here I am building another.
Maybe it's just to tame the chaos that's in my brain right now. Maybe it's to help build a place to quarantine all my mad writers thoughts. So much of what I'm doing sits as a secret, because so many fear that thin line between what is copyright, and what is stealable.
I can SAY I am writing something. I can even refer to it in vague terms, thrill about word count, or ask about research... but I can't say WHAT I'm writing.
IT's too soon. It's not done. It's not bound in a copyright, and it's not even reached the point where I feel I can even bear the vast pressure of public scrutiny.
and yet it's devoured my life. I haven't slept... not properly... for weeks. and for a week or two before that. I'm always puzzling over it. My mind is a montage of scenes, images of character faces you haven't met, funny moments between characters not yet written, elegant chaos and beautiful tragedy.
I have come SO FAR. It's been a work in progress off and on for years. I've showed it to a few people in it's unfinished state, I've ranted and raved to them. I even killed it once and buried it, vowing never to speak of it. But like the still beating heart beneath the floor boards, it wouldn't stay dead.
The characters were too real. The potential too great. and finally I surrendered to the truth that I needed to make it real. I will finish it. I will give it wings. I will make it fly.
If I fall, and I will, I will glue the pieces back together and try again.
I have to try. I can't decide not to... I just have to try.

There's still much to be done. A second draft to finish. Editing and revision. Agent queries to attempt. A second novel to write... All these things I've left to do.

but god damn it I will do this. I will not quit. I will do this, or sacrifice the remainder of my sanity in the process.
This is my vow.