Saturday 30 August 2008

Sweet Jiminy Christmas!

Crap in a hat it’s almost September!
How the hell did that happen? Where did the rest of the year go?
I don’t remember slipping into a coma but I suppose you wouldn’t… though if I did you'd think people would at least have the decency to ask me how I was recovering…
Anyway, it’s almost September which is practically October which – apart from heralding the indecently early arrival of Christmas carols in the stores – is right next to November which, as everyone knows, is NaNoWriMo time. Holy shits!

I haven’t done any preparation at all!
After I dragged myself weakened but victorious to the end of last November I had all these plans of writing various length pieces of a specific nature, having plotting practices and working on my dialogue until it sparkled like a very sparkly thing but um… I didn’t do that.
Oh jeez, what am I going to do!?
I already used a swag of ideas to get through last year’s run!
What if I can’t think of any more!?
What if that was it and I end up staring blankly at the screen, the cursor burning its blinking image onto my retinas as a cold sweat breaks out of my brow!?
No! Keep it together Ricochet! You can do this!
Stop listening to the Doubty McLogic part of your brain! When has logic ever done you any favours? You’re barely on speaking terms except when it comes to contemplating how to ‘remove the head or destroy the brain’ in the event of zombmergencies.

This fun-time panic all boils down to the fact that I can indeed talk a lot of shash but wouldn’t even be able to keep my own interest for 50,000 words without some kind of structure and direction. Being equal parts lazy and – if I’m being honest – perennially terrified of failure there is always the temptation to bail out on an idea when finding a Step B to follow my current Step A gets particularly difficult.
Finding a story worth telling is also tricksy – on an entertainment level or a deeper meaning level – as I certainly don’t want to end up with the ‘let’s say there’s a person a lot like me except with awesome powers/abilities and she saves the day and totally shows all those people who gave her crap; also she has this mysterious and alluringly dangerous guy hanging around her who in no way resembles any pre-existing sexy fictional characters’ story. If that kind of thing is allowed to run unchecked it can go very very wrong and the sense of achievement at the end wouldn’t be as high as an effort of 50,000 words should warrant.

I guess it’s just time to buckle down and have a think about the basics and psyche myself up to actually let something really bad happen to a couple of my characters this time.
I am such a wussie when it comes to really putting the screws to my little darlings. They give you the most betrayed looks. Big eyed puppy dogs have nothing on figments of your imagination who only wanted to live free under an endless sky and not accidentally or deliberately get booted off the top of a 20-storey parking structure just to keep your plot moving along.

Hmm, you know that could work…
Just have to calculate the velocity of a plummeting 80 kg man, factor in the wind resistance for the Panda suit and the probable impact on the vehicle below… let’s say it's a Rav 4…

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