Adventures du jour!
The attack of the plot twist continues, with the subconscious revealing more plot stuff now that I’m passing the halfway mark.
The last couple of days have been trying to keep up with whatever my subconscious thinks I need to be doing. After the bit Midjourney update (and me taking the stops off my Weaponized Curiosity aspect), I’m constantly being nagged by my subconscious to do things for it. These things have been turning out well, in my opinion, if not exactly being communicated well to other people involved.
Yesterday morning, it was still difficult to form memories (after going nuts on Midjourney, to the point where part of my brain switched resources from “memory” to “intuition”). I ended up brainstorming something that was a pretty weird shift, even for me. I know I did most of my yoga, improved on the new balance pose somewhat (still bad, but I can feel muscles building), and went out for a walk. On the walk I had to take a couple of books I’ve written with me to the closest Little Free Library. The book I left there earlier was gone, and apparently it was time to give them different books. (The first one was Crime du Jour, crime shorts; these two were Mindsight and Darkscan, the SF/noirs.)
More than that, I’m not sure. I took a few pictures but not many. I don’t remember taking the posed shot. I can reassemble the memory from the image, but the memory itself had degraded.
I started to put things back together around noonish. Ray and I crossed the Bay to the St. Petersburg side and got haircuts with our fabulously nerdy hairstylist, who was trying to explain to me why one type of keratin was better than another because of the way the proteins bonded. She was doing the hand gestures and everything. I couldn’t follow the explanation. I got stuck on the part where she said it was important for reasons of color, and I went, “protein bonds affect light?!?” and could accept no further inputs for a while. (Of course proteins *must* affect light; hair is at least partially translucent as well as reflective.)
After that, Ray and I ate pizza at Oak and Stone, which I kept going, “Oakenstone? Thorin [never mind that it’s really Oakenshield] has a pizza joint? Dwarves don’t eat pizza; Hobbits eat pizza. The name of the pizza place must be Oaken Barrel.” Like, I had that same thought three times. Brain still not fully activated.
I had Hawaiian pizza with pickled jalapenos; Ray had a sweet heat pizza with pickled jalapenos, capricola, and spicy honey. Both were good, although I’m sure purists will hate the crusts–something like a thinnish Chicago? Thin but not crackery.
Came home, finished answering a friend letter (lots of good aha moments there), edited my previous scene multiple times but couldn’t move forward. Then Mr. Assassin abruptly had a thought and I went over the scene one more time–and wrote another 500 words on the end of it. I’d forgotten to resolve the insight from the previous scene he was in. Derp. But the insight wasn’t what I expected, or rather it wasn’t ONLY what I expected.
I’ve been freaking out over something Three-Pointer did before he died (before the book opened, that is) and how to handle it. Mr. Assassin had the insight I expected, then pushed it further, into the same territory that Three-Pointer had been exploring before his death. Innnnteresting. But that was the end of the scene and I had more words to write, so I kept going into Goth Girl’s next scene. She’s processing the confrontation with her ex and WOW she said things I didn’t know I had learned.–Like, both therapists had said something to the same effect, but I hadn’t internalized it then.
These words will probably get edited and tightened, but here she’s sorting out why she’d ignored all the red flags and accepted everything her ex had done:
“All of it had paled in comparison to the feeling of being thoroughly used up at the end of every day. Of feeling like she had used her entire soul in the pursuit of something meaningful.”
Another one:
“He’d convinced her that there was a good man who needed her, underneath all his flaws. The fact was, there was nothing underneath all his flaws, just an imaginary friend like the ones she used to invent for herself during her childhood.”
OUCH. A palpable hit, Goth Girl. A palpable hit, even if maybe not 100% accurate.
This morning I got up and the subconscious was in charge again. More brainstorming that is nowhere near ready to communicate but that has to be done, because the project is so complex.
I read a little more of the yoga book:
“No single term for a joint action takes into account the volume of the movement possibilities at every joint. It is a fundamental fallacy to think that our human bodies work like the structures that humans have built.”
FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE. It’s time to just be wrong about how I think about my knees. It’s probably time to be wrong a couple dozen times, actually. I accept it.
Out on the walk, Goth Girl was in charge of taking pictures. She *rarely* comes out when I’m taking photos, but today she was all about the textures of *everything*. It was like walking a dog who wants to smell, and pee on, everything. (It was also a relief to get back more of an eye for texture; I’d lost it for a few days.) I did not get very far–I headed toward the park I like but didn’t even make it to the cool cement house, just turned around and went, “That’s enough.”
Just as I turned around, there was an older gent–in his eighties?–on the sidewalk behind me, about 30 feet back. He gave me the creeps, but I wasn’t really aware of it at first. These weren’t the kind of creeps that I get when I’m being catcalled. These were the other kind. I stopped to take a photo, and a woman with a stroller passed me. I stopped taking pictures and followed her like it was life or death. Only when we’d both passed the older gent did I relax. It was like walking past a black hole, trying to resist the pull of gravity.–I don’t get that kind of creepy feeling very often but when I do I try to trust it. It might all just be flashbacks to my Grandpa on my dad’s side or something, but I would hate myself if I hadn’t taken it seriously and something had happened.
WTF. But okay.
After that, the plot inspirations started snowballing, and I could see how it would start to ripple out through the other characters. PHEW.
After a while, my brain popped up with something I’d run into yesterday, perhaps at random, perhaps not.
I’ve been realizing as I’m working with Midjourney AI that I treat myself a lot like I have an AI in my head (my subconscious) that happens to be smarter than me but that I can’t consciously access–but I can give it prompts and let it spit things out that are useful. (Maybe that’s why I was so concerned about feeling disconnected from v4 the other day?) In artsy terms, I feel like I have a powerful muse that is both creative and responsive when I care for her, allow her freedom, summon her rather than command her, and take care to give her interesting problems to solve.
Anyway, *after* I had written down the deluge of plot ideas, my subconscious pointed out that someone else had, effectively, fed me a prompt that had got woven in among the plot twists. I can’t tell whether it was intentional (probably not?). But it WAS fun seeing how the prompt got recorded by the subconscious, chewed on overnight, digested, and baked into the plot going forward this morning.
If it WAS intentional, well, fair. I had already been thinking along the same lines, but had been planning to delay that aspect until toward the end of the book, not the halfway point. Clearly, though, nuh. This is better.–The new plot twists break the traditional plot structure, but I think the subconscious was heading that way anyway, and got tired of fighting me on it. C’est la guerre.
I *should* do groceries today.