Words Written: DFL not enough to count

“I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think,
all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read,
and all the friends I want to see.”
~~John Burroughs

To that I can add, “and all the stories I want to write”, but that would probably be too obvious. Another writer recently asked me if I ever worried about running out of ideas, and I laughed and laughed. I get ideas from random conversations, from snippets of things I read*, and from my subconscious as it rumbles forth with another weirdness. The way I see it, Stories (capitalization intended—I mean short stories, books, whatever) are, at the heart, about people. And there are a gazillion (that’s a technical term) people in the world, each with his or her own story. So how could I possibly run out?

No, I stress about not having enough time to write them all, about not being able to catch up to the wellspring of my subconscious. I’m finally learning not to stress about forgetting an idea, mostly because Kris has had to repeatedly tell me that if I forget, it wasn’t a good one. The good ones will stick.

I take that to heart except for the one phrase I wrote down in my random idea file, which I cannot for the life of me remember where I was going with it, but it still haunts me and someday I’ll use it as the first line of something: “Ghosts take care of their own.” Nice, huh? Not a clue what to do with it…

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No writing on the carpool in today, because we were talking about Star Wars, and the way I saw it, it’s part of my job to talk about story arcs and characterization and archetypes and whatnot.

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The problem with carpooling to work (leaving home at 7:40 a.m. and getting home at 7:15 p.m.) and having an SCA event on Saturday is that I have no idea when I can mail my sister’s overdue birthday present. Very, very annoying. I must remember to call her early on Sunday, as well as my mother (who was at our phoneless cabin on Mother’s Day). Last weekend I forgot until it was too late on the East Coast.

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Currently Reading: something by Heather Graham
Lately Listened To: Styx, Big Bang Theory (obsessively)
Recently Watched: “Tru Calling”

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* This is how I started writing (in my head, at least), back when I was 9 or 10. I’d be reading, and I’d put the book down, and make up the rest of the story, which invariably turned out to be entirely different than what the author wrote.

Although I wrote my first spec fic story in 3rd grade (“My Magic Map”, which really was more of a treatise that predicted GPS units), I didn’t start writing my first novel until 7th grade, a horrifying pastiche of The Chronicles of Narnia and LOTR with a sprinkling of The Deryni Chronicles and a dash of bad romance. I got to about 100 single-spaced handwritten pages on that one.