2002-03-28 - 10:02 a.m.
Stricken By The Muse

Pop-up advertisements really, really irritate me. Especially the ones that try to be clever. They disable or disappear the little X in the upper right corner, so that when you try to click on it you get sucked right into another website; you have to actually look at the damned thing to find the little link that says "Close This Window" and get rid of it. Or the ones that put an extra little X in the upper right corner, hoping you'll click the wrong one. Argh.

I promised myself that I wouldn't write another story for a couple of weeks so I could relax and rest my brain from the last one. I'm trying to cling to that, but my brain doesn't want a rest. I got up out of bed twice last night to write down ideas that wouldn't let go so I could get to sleep, and at least three times this morning my Muse sent up little rocket flares trying to get my attention. I've been typing the bursts of inspiration into a Wordpad file as story summary hints and trying to otherwise ignore them, but despite everything I'm starting to get a sense of plot, narrative style, and tone hanging out in there, waiting for me to notice.

It's unnerving. I can keep ignoring it for the next couple of weeks, by which time it will have lost most of its vitality, like an old helium balloon, or I can sit down this weekend, when I the structure has finished assimilating itself in my mind, and get cracking. And lose most of my freetime again for several days.

Like I said, it's unnerving, this imperative to write. But it's fun. I'd forgotten how fun, since like I said yesterday, I tend to burn myself out on the things I enjoy. I think the last time I really had the story bug was in high school, in the twelfth grade; I wrote a dozen or so short stories that year, some of which ended up being 40 handwritten pages in length. They were mostly set around my friends in various AUs and alternate timelines, and tended to be alternately angsty and hysterical, and usually pulled big grins from my friends even when they were going "Agh!" at whomever I'd romantically paired "their" character off with.

That could be why I'm enjoying the fanfic idea so much; I am presented with characters whose personalities I already know in a fleshed-out world whose rules I already know, and here I am with a pen (or keyboard) and license to tweak things around for my own amusement.

Hmmm. P'raps that's the trouble with my novels. I haven't sat down long enough with the characters to really get to know them; they have histories and purposes but I don't really know their quirks, their sense of humor, and the things that push their buttons to piss them off. Writing a chapter in my novel has been like trying to push a camel through the eye of a needle, lately; but that Buffy-fic I just wrote flew by like it was nothing, 25,000 words in 14 days. And I could have written it much, much quicker if I hadn't had to work.

Anyway. Shutting up now. I have a meeting in, like, 30 seconds. Later!