One of the things I’m doing with these daily reports is working on trusting my voice. I’m having a bad day with that on the fiction side today; it feels like I can’t write for shit. I mention this not because I need the fainting salts, but because it’s pretty normal. Hey! Just because you feel like your writing is shit doesn’t make it so. You are not your feelings.
Yoga this morning: much curtailed due to skinning my knee the other day. It’s finally scabbed over nicely. The walk this morning wasn’t that long, either, because I got started late and felt pretty distracted. I finally just stopped in the middle of a block and turned around. Too hot.
I’m gonna be annoying below; it’s a bit of a rant.
I started watching Legion last night, then did another episode this morning on my phone (we live in the future!). I like the show quite a bit, and I really like the actor (I’m so glad he got out of doing historicals; the actor has always struck me as too wackdoodle for that). I can’t speak to whether the show reflects actual mental illness at all, but it definitely speaks to me about having an ADD brain and what gaslighting feels like.
“Why don’t you just do things the easy way?”
I love you guys, but if you scroll through about couple of days’ worth of posts, you’ll find *someone* who says some version of this in comments. It’s usually innocuous–but that’s how gaslighting starts.
Lately, I’m starting to understand that in order to write better, I have to allow myself to trust my own interests, passions, and tastes better.
While I love finding out about new approaches to things, the “easy way” that most people suggest off the cuff can generally go fuck itself as far as my interests, passions, and tastes are concerned.
I like complex, nuanced, glorious (and funny) things.
I don’t feel like my inner world is like the Legion character’s. I’ve done a lot of cleanup and de-haunting work, and I’ve avoided most of the worst habits that he gets into. I have/had different nightmares, too.
But ahhh, that feeling that the whole world is alive with possibility and that even the most terrible moments have their beauty, I get that. I hope I get even better at showing it.
Story stuff: I figured out more subtext that needed to go in a particular scene from yesterday. The narrators aren’t unreliable narrators in the sense of lying to the reader, but they’re struggling with trauma. Their actions get warped because of things they’re barely aware of, or quickly become un-aware of. I’d missed one of the characters’ triggers and the scene felt off. Fixed. Still debating whether to amp up the tension in the scene or leave it as is and have the reader be horrified about it later. Probably the latter.
“Abuse looks pretty bland if you don’t know the complex programming the abuser set up earlier and is using to push buttons.”
Started new scene with one character wandering lost around the hotel for a couple of pages. But she doesn’t feel like she belongs there and handles the situation in a particularly characteristic way that reflects a smidge of character development, so I’ll likely leave it.