Adventures du jour.
I got up in a foul mood, the kind of mood that develops into (my version of) depression if I don’t take care of it. “Why do you even bother to write?” is a red flag for this. I’m learning to take it seriously when something triggers me to bring hate or contempt to my creative process.
So I started taking care of it. Read a little to engage emotions, drank water, took meds including pain meds, did some gentle yoga. I don’t know how I developed the ability to screw around with bits and pieces of my autonomic nervous system, but I can. (I think a lot of people can, actually.) I had raised the threshold for pain this morning. When you can’t feel pain, it’s hard to understand a) that pain is what’s missing, and b) that you have to feel it if you want higher functions to operate. Ray can always tell when I’m suppressing pain, though, and has inadvertently taught me to recognize it. (She uses a certain sound of breathing; I recognize a spike in irritability.)
When I can’t feel pain, I feel depressed. Worse, if it goes on too long, I can’t feel that I feel depressed. I just feel angry and destructive.
Taking pain meds when I don’t feel pain is a signal to my body that it’s safe to feel things. Turning off the “stop most of the pain” switch lets me access my emotions better, though, and I’d rather be in physical pain than depressed.
During yoga, I worked on lower back stuff; the automatic tensing up down there is lessening, so I was able to do some work with the foam roller. I found a tense spot that felt like a knot in the bone and left it alone for later. Connor, whom I’m gonna start calling Three Pointer, showed up and radiated the horrible mood I was in, depressed and angry. Angry about what? I couldn’t get him to say.
Then, friends, I went out for a walk.
Yesterday I wrapped up section 2 on the WIP. Yay! What should I write next? I had some general ideas but I didn’t know exactly. It’s the part where the big twist of the book should be, though. I’ve learned to just let my subconscious handle that part of things; my conscious awareness is the tip of an iceberg and I need the whole-ass iceberg to pull some of this off.
Subconscious delivered the plot twist to me this morning. I DID NOT WANT IT. Motherfucker, I already been trying to sort out how to pull off a romance set in a world with human trafficking, abuse, and PTSD. I don’t want to deal with this other thing, too!
I walked for a couple of blocks, upset, but I knew that I wasn’t going to seriously say no. It fits perfectly; I’ve been setting this up since fairly early in the story without knowing it; it’s a problem that I have to deal with in my life if I’m going to move forward; if I don’t include SOMETHING on this level, the book will turn flat and false, and I’ll betray the characters I’ve spent so long making real.–Not that they’re particularly happy about the plot twist either. Three Pointer in particular is hurt, depressed, angry. And I’m not sure how to handle it.
Mr. Assassin, the Batman character, had already considered it, apparently. “Ah. That was one of my least favorite options. I’ll talk to the others. It’s my turn to have the lead scene in the section anyway.”–On some level, when the characters are inside the story, they don’t know about being in a story; when they’re talking to me more directly, they do. The discussions we have work their way into the book, but more because the story is an ongoing thought process that the same physical brain is thinking, than my having to put it in deliberately.
Once I “agreed” to go with the plot twist (which I have NO idea how to pull off in plot terms), I stopped being depressed. It still hurts and I don’t want to think about it, either in terms of the story or in terms of the things it reflects in the real world. It will probably make perfect sense by the time I get done writing this book, too, to the point where anyone who put two and two together (Marla comes to mind) would go, “But wasn’t this exactly the book you planned to write?” And they wouldn’t be wrong, as long as by “planned” you include “set up by parts of my subconscious that knew I needed to not know this until later, or I wouldn’t have written it.”
So here’s to the hope that I do my characters proud, and that I find an answer for this, too. I thought of a way to cheat my way out of it, and have set one of the “rules” of the story that I’m not allowed to use it.
Readers: please note that the plot twists that upset you so much don’t necessarily come from a place the writer wants to be, either. Ugh. I’m gonna go buy snacks. I think I’m just gonna assume that I’m borderline depressed through this whole section and care for myself accordingly.
Side note: I ran into a little free library this morning and picked up a LaVyrle Spencer book, Bitter Sweet:
The room held a small refrigerator stocked with apple juice and soft drinks, a two-burner hot plate, a phonograph, a circle of worn, comfortable chairs and a smeared green chalkboard that said, GRIEF GROUP 2:00-3:00.
Just so.