Friday, November 17, 2006

Why I need to stop being such a lazy ass and write a whole lot more often.

Even though I currently have a novel that is somewhere around the halfway point -- a novel, I should ad, that was going screamingly well before a limited amount of free time tore me away from it temporarily -- and even though I started tentative, very early-on sort of work on an incredibly absurd comedic play about a guy who gets stabbed in the stomach (because there's nothing funnier than that), I just can't stop new ideas from popping into my head. And they don't just pop into my head and say, "Hi, I just thought I'd stop by and see if you had any free time, but clearly you don't, so I'll disappear for a bit until you have time to work on me."

Instead, they appear with a sort of desperate insistence, demanding that I throw away any and everything else that I actually *should* be working on, and dedicate my every free moment to this new project. Because, according to that project, it's the most important thing in the world right now.

Even my creative ideas are pompous and full of themselves.

And so in my idle time today, I'm stewing on a rough idea for a short story that, at the moment, doesn't involve much more than a stain on the character's carpet. A stain which he vaguely recognizes, but can't remember its source.

A stain which looks eerily like blood.

But then, maybe it's just chocolate milk.

I have that very stain on my own carpet (wouldn't you just know that this wasn't a random idea) and, while cleaning my house last night for this evening's Fromage Homage (A Lactose Overdose!), I couldn't take my eyes off it for some reason. It's the same stain that's been there for, probably, years, the same stain I see every time I vacuum the living room (which, admittedly, maybe isn't as often as I should). But suddenly it occurs to me that I don't have the foggiest idea where the stain is from. Even though I know I've seen it before. Even though I know I should have some sort of memory of the cause.

Which is weird.

That sort of vaguely unsettling feeling is what, more than anything else, I want to try to convey in this story. At the moment, I have no clue what the actual cause of the fictional stain is, though just in tossing the idea around in my head it's seeming to me like trying to come up with a twist ending that either A) Hasn't been done before; B) People won't see coming; and C) Won't be annoyingly anticlimactic, isn't an easy thing to do.

In other news, yes, the blog is slowly getting coated in a fine layer of dust. Something will be done about that soon, more than likely. Among the planned updates are a bringing up to date of the Stick Figure Drama archives, as well as posting smattering of photographs from past social occasions to my even more dust-covered Flickr page. Also, I might start blogging on a slightly more regular basis, but no promises.

It seems that, more than anything else, it's the creative process that compells me to post here. Either to rant about troubles on a book, rave about a particularly good bit of writing, or just complain about the new and obnoxious ideas that arrive into my head, unwelcome, from out of the blue, and demand my total attention.

So if I can just start writing again, in places other than here, that should inspire an increased amount of writing in this location. And that can only be good, right?

5 comments:

elise_on_life said...

Aw, I didn't notice the stain yesterday! You should have pointed it out!

Todd said...

I suppose I should have. Strangely, though, a line like, "Oh, by the way, have you seen my stain?" doesn't work its way into casual conversation as often as you might think.

elise_on_life said...

C'mon - anything can fit into our conversations! Think of how many times "spleen" has just popped into our mouths!

Todd said...

Did you notice that using the word "spleen" and the phrase "popped into our mouths" in the same sentence paints an interesting picture? No?

Nonetheless, you're right. I'll be sure to introduce you to the stain as soon as humanly possible.

elise_on_life said...

That's gross!! (but really funny!)