Yesterday, the characters in the current scene–all I was trying to do was wrap up the scene, I swear–went off the rails at the last second in a way I didn’t expect but will make the thing I’ve been promising (a visit to the one character’s extended family) more fun to write. Okay! Slight replan! Yay! But the one character, while being a goob, also has Serious Shit to deal with, and that’s gonna come out, so I’m not sure how the scene will go. I realized yesterday that the other guy needs to head up into the mountains (was I really planning on writing a book set in Colorado where nobody goes up into the mountains?).
Yoga this morning turned into a mostly foam-roller day because of stiffness in my back. This was the first morning where I didn’t feel completely asymmetrical in how my back touched the foam roller; the one side is still sore and still “grabs” a lot, but it’s not rotated/warped out of place. WEIRD.
Out on the walk, the opposite hip was never sore, but it pulled me all over the place. “Now we go riiiiiight!” Still not sure what to do there. It feels like hips and traps are at odds with each other most of the time, unable to work together. They’re two coworkers who don’t get along.
I didn’t have any characters come out to give me company on my walk today or during yoga. I was stressing out about the move tomorrow (“something will go wrong and I’ll get punished for it”), but put a Nine Inch Nails song on repeat. It’s a relaxing one called “Letting Go While Hanging On,” a release from March 2020. Timely. The song doesn’t feel like it’s about COVID, but it’s not irrelevant to COVID, if that makes sense. Meditation music for people who aren’t HAPPY ALL THE TIME. I think it uses some binaural or isochronic sound techniques (I have no idea what; I don’t know enough to say) to help deal with brain-stormy type stuff, like anxiety/depression/migraines. I’ve been listening to Nails for a while, though, so it felt like I had company regardless.–One of those thorny guys who seems to have found some peace. It’s nice.
My experiment with Midjourney AI continued today with an attempt to recreate an existing work, “Castle in the Pyrenees” by Rene Magritte (there’s a floating boulder with a castle on top, over an ocean wave; it’s a surrealist work, I think). I couldn’t get anything even close! But the images that were produced were so satisfying to me personally that I felt enheartened by the world in general. I managed to sneak sci-fi writer Gene Wolfe into one of the versions, too. Heh. I feel like there’s a story in me somewhere about Borges’s story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” as written by an AI. But I’m not in the mood to write it right now, so it’ll have to wait.
I talked yesterday to a friend (Holly!) who explained to me what “standing in your power” means. I did NOT understand what she meant. I don’t have the references or context to get it. Do I imagine my energy on the ground and then stand on it? But she talked me through it: it’s centering yourself inside your skull, with a boundary between what’s inside and what’s out. “I am [state your name here].” The closest I could get is lying on the yoga mat and doing the thing where you relax with your knees up but your knees don’t fall inward or outward; they just stay put without effort. I can’t really relate to the other thing, but at least I can now grok what it means. Am I struggling with doing something positive for my life? Or does being “inside my skull” stress me out right now and I don’t find it positive? I don’t know. I do know that I’ve been told endlessly that I overthink things, I’m oversensitive, I’m stuck in my head, I’m anxious. I’ve been told I’m crazy a fair amount, too. So it feels uncomfortable being in my head AND in my chest/heart area, but being centered in my solar plexus/diaphragm feels safer? If not easy. I used to get a knot that felt like smoldering hair in my solar plexus if I thought about it too much; I haven’t been getting that lately.
The other cool thing that happened yesterday was that the writing thing I’ve been fighting with (seeing things from the reader’s perspective) eased up quite a bit. I was able to write somewhat faster, which is a relief.–I’m pretty sure I couldn’t build a career on the writing speed I’ve been doing lately. It was slogging through molasses. I still don’t have an intuitive grasp on it, but at least the process of guiding people through a scene is going easier.
I *have* to be able to do this to have a career as a fiction writer. I *have* to be able to do it consistently.
It’s not a huge change from what I’ve been doing. I know how to think through the process; I just didn’t know how to feel it so I could perform it as I write and not as I cycle back through and reread the chapter. Maybe it’s easier for other people. I read the words and they just kind of disappear.
But now I can go, “I need to have the reader feel the same types of things my character was going through the other morning,” and feel like I wove that in.–This last chapter, I went, “What does it feel like to have the things you’re suppressing wake up–but you don’t end up acting in a way that makes things worse?” My goob that has Serious Shit to Deal With isn’t quite remembering or thinking about it yet (why would fish think about water?), but he’s doing the right things to help that heal. I have a rule that the main characters can’t distrust each other when it comes right down to a choice of trust/distrust, so while he wanted to fuck things up even further, he didn’t, and ended up doing something that completely surprised me, but is 100% in character.
Well, okay. I’ll just trust him, too.
I feel like walking and talking with my characters is helping good stuff emerge, even if it feels nutty at the time. These people are blends of people I know, things I feel and think, logical and emotional extrapolation, and wishful thinking. They are my unicorn thoughts.