who’s died?

Well, my lovely ten day vacation has come to an end, and I’m back to work. I don’t really mind. Today was good, aside from the fact that my partner in crime has been suspended and I haven’t talked to him in over a week. Kind of starting to go a little crazy on that front, but I’ll cope. I just realized I posted the entire travelogue on Facebook and totally forgot to put any of it here, which is just totally unacceptable. Please wait a moment while I throw you this bone. Oh, and this one, and of course don’t forget this one since apparently I’m totally obsessed with flora.

For those of you who don’t know, NaNoWriMo is approaching soon. I’m participating, but this year I’m coming at it from a slightly different angle. I haven’t done any writing at all since abandoning Dreamfall back in July, (has it really been that long? holy shit…) and while part of me can come up with all sorts of excuses for that, the truth is I just don’t enjoy it anymore. And I’m scared of it. I’m scared that I’m no good at it. Every time I write I get this feeling that I’m just regurgitating the same crap over and over again. It’s pretty frustating, so I avoid it. What’s the point of wasting my time if all I produce is mediocre sludge? So I thought maybe I was putting too much pressure on myself. I decided to just spend some time being “me”, whoever that is, so I set writing aside. Today, though, something changed a little…I’m ready to try again. This is the last attempt for awhile, though. If I can’t make NaNo work…I’m walking away. Maybe not forever. (Probably not) But I’m walking away. I won’t call myself a writer anymore and I won’t think about it anymore. Maybe I just need to write about something that speaks to me, I don’t know. Trouble is figuring out what does speak to me. I know what I enjoy, what I’m obsessed with, but how do I translate that into words? And there’s the problem of me always having been a very visual person…I feel sometimes like I should be making movies instead of novels. Problem is I have no real skills to speak of, so I’m stuck doing what I can cobble together from my own ingenuity and what little I have in my surroundings.

Another problem I’m having with writing is I feel like I don’t think big enough. My imagination seems stagnated, like I’m trapped in this tiny little room with only a few toys to play with and it just doesn’t occur to me to bring in new toys until it’s too late. Meanwhile, everyone around me is having fantastic idea after fantastic idea and I can’t help but feel slow and left behind. Stupid. I always come back to feeling stupid. I get so sick of that. I get sick of constantly being slower than everyone else around me. How the hell did that happen? I’m an intelligent person who feels stupid all the time. Damn it. That’s not even remotely fair. It’s probably just all in my head anyway, but it still pisses me off. Thing is, I tried accepting that. I tried being the sloth I see myself as and it doesn’t work, either. I keep wanting to try new things, learn new things, go new directions…I don’t sit still well, mentally. I get restless. Problem is I can never seem to conquer the fears that keep me from progressing so I’m sort of trapped inside my own head, bouncing off the walls, trying to figure out where I should be going and not managing much of anything other than snapping at the people who love me and beating the crap out of myself.

Someone does have a good idea, though, and they were even kind enough to share it with me. Terry, in his infinite podcast hosting wisdom, suggested that perhaps for NaNo ’08 I write a story about a young woman trying to write a novel. It’s the kind of simple idea that totally eludes me most of the time. I tend to think in super-complicated ways that result in misery and confusion. When I think of writing about things that have happened to me, I immediately try to figure out ways to cover up everything that actually happened, transmuting them into these twisted half images of reality  in the hopes of not offending anybody and being “clever”. See, I try to be metaphorical and it fails miserably. Needless to say, I’m rather taken with Terry’s simple idea. The more I think about it, the more I like it. Still not sure what I’m going to do with it, but it’s gotten the wheels turning. We’ll see how it goes.

In the meantime, I’m going to tell my inner Emo Demons to STFU and sit in their naughty corner, and stop spewing my self-esteem issues onto the Internet. After all, that’s what LiveJournal is for.