Inspiration in the air

Any progress towards any project is good progress in my opinion, even if that progress is only around one paragraph a piece – this is how I am doing things these days!

Today for example, I struggled to get into a creative mind-set, I told you earlier what I did and the results of that – well that wasn’t the full story as after I posted that post other things occurred.

I did a little bit more towards one of my previous projects, the Steampunk 1 project to be precise.  This hadn’t been worked on since Easter 2022 and after I posted my previous post I started to draw up a map of a new area within the story.

I had also had a brainstorm of what happens in the mid-section of the novel, an area I was struggling with for months.

After I did this I had yet another entirely new idea for yet another story and once again it is another horror idea although I would say this is more of a psychological horror than a dark fantasy and no sign of any animal distress in this tale at all, thankfully!

This story will be known as The Hermit Horror story and you’ve guessed it, there is a hermit in the story.

I wrote the synopsis to that already and I know the beginning, middle and end which is unusual for me as it usually takes me months or even years to see all the three sections pieced together appropriately; which got me starting the project immediately and I am halfway through the first chapter already – again, highly unusual for me!

What is concerning is this story reflects quite a lot of my personal life as the main character had a life of isolation and has a similar health problem to me and well… let’s just say I can really identify with her!

So by “How to write” books this book is destined to be a bestseller then?  With any luck, though I am not holding out!

I have also added paragraphs towards the Anthropomorphic Dystopian project too today and I have to say this has meant that today has been my most productive day since September – which is something I didn’t think I would do this morning because of how difficult it was to get into the creative mind-set initially!

I don’t think I have finished yet, yes I am having a break – but technically not because I am still writing… well this post for you right now – so that’s not a true break is it?  But to my brain if feels like one!

I feel poems coming on, so I am going to wrap this post up now and I am pretty sure later on tonight I will do more Project AD snippets as well as Steampunk 1 and even more towards the Hermit Horror… I can feel inspiration in the air!

Thanks for reading!

Brain hurricane season

It’s what time of year again, a time I call “Brain Hurricane Season”.

What is Brain Hurricane Season?

Brain hurricane season happens approximately twice a year for three weeks and inundates me with new story ideas that I have to plan out; but they come so fast I often have to pause current projects and oftentimes I never get to write all the stories I dream up!

The catalyst for this brain hurricane season was an idea I had for Marvel, thanks to discussion Henry’s friends had about Iron Man.  Can he be saved or not?  Is there hope?  I did some research but not much, only about four hours and I have got side-tracked by other things.  But still, interesting stuff nonetheless.  I need to get watching the last two movies though to fully understand what the kids are on about.

Anyway, the kids moved on and now they’re talking about three or four other Marvel movies, such as hearing rumours that Tom Hardy is giving up Venom, is that true?  I did some research and it doesn’t appear to be!  We’re big Venom fans here in this house, it is a recent movie that made us cry laughing – it was so funny!

So I can blame this little bit of research and playground gossip on being the catalysts for my brain hurricane season.

Turns out some of the new ideas are connecting to a current project; my so-called standalone Christmas novel is now going to be part of a small series, hence why subconsciously I have been holding off it for a while.  I thought it was just Christmas music as to why I couldn’t write it.

For some reason or another, the Christmas novel is going to contain poems and songs and is going to be connected to another story about Candyland and The Easter Bunny.  This idea was brand new on the 16th October 2022 and will be known as my Easter Project.

I think another catalyst to all this is the fact that Henry and I realised we listen to a lot of songs related to candies and chocolates and so we created a playlist last month called “Candy” on our only luxury, Amazon music.  It’s funny what the brain does when you listen to certain types of music!

Henry is excited by my new plans as he loves movies about candies and anything Willy Wonka related, he just loves food that kid!  But put it in a dream world where you are having adventures it gets him all excited, but my Henry is ever the businessman – he said to me “ma, think of the merchandise”, oh yes, he is already acting like my manager!  I just wish he would let me write!

I have also decided that although I love writing horror, I want to downplay the gore and darkness of it to make them into family friendly Halloween style stories, as I have decided to focus mostly on family entertainment more than just doing whatever I feel like doing at the time.

I sat back and thought the other day about what kinds of responses from fans will I enjoy the most?  I thought, I love kids, the kids of the world mean everything to me and I am most likely to respond to a child in full if they ran up to me.

Then I had the idea of, wouldn’t it be cool if I became a bestseller and I had mini merchandise toys in my handbag of the characters I wrote and handed them to a kid who recognised me on an off chance?

Thanks to Henry I am thinking about the other business behind writing, not just the book sales now.  Good to think big I suppose?

So I decided, well then, that settles that, I am writing for family entertainment with kids in mind and my inner child has been singing about it all day!

It means I can be more light-hearted and playful and I love seeing kids laugh! 

My inner child has also been insisting that I revert back to being a nine year old but I told it, OK, on some conditions… we don’t eat like we did when we were nine years old and we don’t laugh hysterically in people’s faces when we are nervous and put on a show for them and then hide behind the sofa because you forgot your senses and realised what a nitwit you made yourself out to be!

My inner child nearly cried, I was too harsh to it, so that’s why I said sorry to it and gave it 4 individual jelly babies to make up – she wants the whole bag, I said no, she cries and I am trying to ignore it – it’s for her own good!

I am not saying I can give up horror for good though, adult horror that is, because it’s a major part of me – but it’s just not as big as it used to be in my heart anymore as I am healing a lot of my darkness lately.

All I really want in life now onwards is light hearted fun, lots of love, good friends and a comfortable home, health would go a long way too – but hey, I am working on it!

There is a children’s picture book series brewing in my head too, for kindergarten age.  It’s about a friendly community of monsters that are friends with each other. 

Another story is about an angel who decides to become interviewed by a chat show.

So many new things coming to me and this is only the start of the Brain Hurricane Season, I still have two weeks to ride out, if this is a normal storm!

I wanted to do NaNoWriMo this year, but there are lots of problems in the family right now where I can’t concentrate on more than a paragraph or two per day; so this year I am just not going to bother.

I really wanted a project completed by now, but it wasn’t meant to be, I guess.

To be perfectly honest, I am losing hope to do anything creative these days as I am simply not allowed the time to myself to do anything.

I can’t rely on working on anything whilst Henry is at school, because at any moment Henry is sent home early in the day and I lose my flow.  He is being sent home as often as twice a week!

Since Henry overheard the school suggesting he has an autism assessment, Henry seems to have taken it upon himself to emotionally play up all the more, like he enjoys the attention he is getting about it.  Henry is really play acting towards the teachers concerns and I have told him, this is a dangerous game for his life long-term, but he thinks it’s all a game!

I suggested to Paul he is only doing this so he can be sent home from school to create his robots all day long and play for twelve hours a day on that darn laptop of his!  When he is sent home from school, we should ban him from TV, laptop and his robots until his proper home time comes.  But then Henry plays the suicide card and Paul relents and lets him have the things!

Then I hear the arguments and screams between the two of them because they are getting in each other’s way, and Paul can’t move around the house because of the mess Henry is causing!  I try my best to help, but every time I open my mouth it just fuels the fire in the both of them! 

I tried to take myself upstairs to my bedroom to write upstairs, but they shout so loudly to one another so often, it’s hard to drown them out unless I put earphones on and I don’t like to do that because of increased ear infections. 

I am dying of embarrassment because neighbours walk cautiously past the house, staring at it because of the hysterical screaming that goes on consistently.  I tell them about it, but Paul and Henry are so self-absorbed, they just don’t really care. 

I hate this kind of environment, it doesn’t help my PTSD at all, in fact I am often drained and can’t eat because of the stress of it all, because a lot of the huge arguments are at dinnertime at the dining table and nobody can eat when this goes on! 

I don’t wear my hearing aid when Henry is home, because to be perfectly honest I don’t need it – that’s how loud things are here as soon as he gets home.  Besides, there are times Henry will randomly screech loudly for the slightest thing and it blooming hurts if I have it in my ear at the time!  I even lost hearing a couple of years back where Henry did a screech so loud my ear bled, found out I had a perforation over it!  Henry was two feet from me at the time! 

This is what I am living with.  It’s not excuses to not working, you have to be here to experience it for yourself, because I am telling you, it’s constant!

I do most of my blog posts when they are all in bed at night; this means my sleeping pattern is badly out of sync for a healthy and social lifestyle.  My sleeping hours are anything between 3am and 1pm depends on the day!  Mostly its 4am to 10am, not enough I know, but what else can I do?

I rarely watch TV as nobody respects the fact I want to watch something, reading is getting less and less for the same reason – practising art is almost non-existent, my meditations are slowly going out of the window… it’s tough to have a decent life here on any level!  Even when I am asleep, from 7am until I wake up, someone checks in on me every 45 minutes waking me up, so it’s not even undisturbed sleep.

Lately Henry’s behaviour has been so bad, that I have often forgotten to take my meds because he has been so demanding! 

Anyway, just a heads up about why I can’t finish things.  Never used to be this way! 

Happy reading! 

Who influenced my writing Part 2

Susan Hill’s books taught me how to effectively write spooky narrative but also how to convey the fear and the confusion that occurs in people when they are unsure of both their sanity and the reality around them.

She is very good at portraying self-denial of the senses whenever supernatural events occur and is very effective at sudden and fantastic twists in plot.

Susan Hill also taught me through her book “I’m the king of the castle” that you never know what is really going on in a characters mind, that sometimes things are just on the surface and the events that come through her books are often a shock even to the reader.

George MacDonald’s books taught me that you can play with uncomfortable ideas and he can do so in such a gentle way, that readers almost forgets what it is he is writing about subject wise.  I remember reading his book Lilith and was surprised at how well he skirted around the religious sensitivities and turned this character almost into a fairy tale, he wrote about the dream state and life and death as though it was a beautiful journey and in some cases it can be.

Edgar Allen Poe is one of the main reasons why I love horror and poetry.  I really love gothic culture and the macabre and he really explores the depths of human emotion really well, he was beyond his time.  He didn’t portray the human condition in airs and graces, he put down the most rotten of all of humanity down on paper in all its rawness and left you feeling either numb or depressed right after you have read his works – but nonetheless it left you feeling in awe of his creativity.

He really showed me how to reel in my reader’s emotions and play to their hopes, dreams, dreads and fears.

He really knew how to play in the dark.

Happy reading!

A monster calls (a non-review)

Last night I finished a book called “A Monster Calls” by Patrick Ness, I won’t say this is a review per se because it really isn’t – but I would say it is more of a little chat about the characters. 

I felt that this book was a huge tear jerker, it certainly got my eyes watering in parts – as for the monster, well to me the monsters in this book aren’t what you think they are, I think this book has a moral and that is “not everything is as it seems and don’t judge a book by its cover” you will misinterpret at the very beginning who the monster/monsters are, trust me, you will only find out in the ending chapters the truth of who the monster really is.

Because it is a twisty turning fabulous book, I won’t give you any spoilers other than what I have already said. 

Now, about the characters, the main character is a boy named Conor who is going through a huge amount of trauma at the age of thirteen – but I am more interested in mentioning the supposed monster that comes to visit him at 12:07 every night – why skip the main character?  Because he is just a human boy going through a bad time and I am more interested in the fantasy aspect of this book rather than the realism of it.  The so-called monster is nothing more than a big brash ancient yew tree that comes alive like an ent from middle-earth to basically have a chat with the young boy and tell him a few stories.  I loved this about the book because in the past ten years I have thought off and on about writing a novel about a tree that comes to life as well based on the Germanic folklore of the wood wives, the wood wives according to legend are beautiful female spirits of the forest who are also vampiric, basically vampiric faeries who turn into trees and bring trees to life amongst other things;  I am also interested in the yew tree because it is very similar to the avenging birch tree from the short movie “The Birch” which again I believe could have been inspired by the ancient Germanic legend, the wood wives. 

So if avenging wrathful trees are your thing, you know what to look out for.  I got this book from the library but I have bought a copy along with the DVD from Ebay because I just find it absolutely fabulous!  The movie stars Liam Neeson and Sigourney Weaver.

 

 

 

NaNoWriMo Day 5

NaNoWriMo word count so far… 12667 and writing first draft without revising each paragraph like I usually do, is coming up with some surprising results.  The results are similar to brainstorming and brain drain, similar to the things I tend to get on my morning pages with the Artist Way. 

So far my novel contains talking animals and several magical items I had never planned on.  The journey is cut short by a weird mode of transport and I have added a supporting character I had never planned to add, the supporting characters I had planned to add aren’t as important to the story after all; I am sensing a death coming up any time soon for those!

Yes I know death to one of the least supporting characters is callous, but it is necessary, as Stephen King always says “Kill your darlings” and I have to say, I am not uncomfortable with it.