Selah // Something Witty

My cold little heart.

Date: 10.13.17 -- Day 58
Music: "Cold Little Heart" / Michael Kiwanuka

This has been a scattered October so far. Everything seems to be one step the left out of place. In town, you can feel the autumn now. The leaves are turning and the cold is coming in to stay. The mountains are capped in white and the bite of winter is just around the corner. My body has taken this change with a sense of bitterness. I can tell you that the barometer has dropped just by the level of pain I have. It's a neat, though extremely painful, trick.

Focus hasn't been the greatest thing either. I have little of it. If someone has some to spare, I would be grateful to take it off your hand. This has impacted my Octo Prep. The original idea I was working with was just a run-of-the-mill, slice-of-life kind of writing. I wanted to challenge myself not to do a sci-fi or paranormal story for NaNo, for once, which has been my go-to for 8 out of the 9 years I've tried to NaNo. The problem was there was no plot. At all. I couldn't get them to move, so doing assignments for OctoPrep was like pulling teeth. I gave up around the 11th, and switched to entirely different story because the idea of climbing a mountain of writing pain for the next two months was too exhausting. Better to start over now than panic during November. But that also meant redoing all the work I had to make sure I was on the right track for prep. Good times.

I can't even tell you why I wanted to branch out of my fantasy/sci-fi roots. It's my preferred genres to read as well as write. I guess for a while I just wanted to challenge myself on the presumption that I only seem to do one thing. I only write one way. And with the ideas bouncing around in my head, maybe I'm just writing the same thing over and over again. As a reader, when I fall in love with an author's writing, I have a tendency to read everything they've ever put down on paper. In one way, it's an amazing adventure to find their quirks and favorite tendencies. On the other hand, it's easy for me to find their patterns, and those patterns can be tedious and, you know, repetitive. For some reason I fear someone figuring my patterns hence the want to branch out into different genre. Luckily I came to the realization quickly that 1) patterns can jump genres as the patterns are me not the words, and 2) you cannot force something that isn't there. I love those characters in my original story idea. I'm going to try and see what they do on the back burner, and maybe find a plot one of these days. However, in a month that is more and more a bitter harvest, I don't want to bang my head against the wall for all of November. Life is tough enough as it is.

So, I didn't necessarily kill my darlings so much as I put them in a box in the attic. Not the way back attic, but close to the door for easy access. One day I'll need them, just not right now.