Friday 3 December 2004

Pic of the day: Allowing yourself to be surprised is a matter of trust. Here in a screenshot from the inspirational anime Narue no Sekai.

A-musing myself

I had barely ended the month of NaNoWriMo (which I lost, if you hadn't heard) and then the next morning I started writing a new story. I may return to the world of the Starborn some day, in fact I hope so. But right now, I have a muse telling me a different story. But this muse is a lot more cautious than the average for their kind.

Usually I have a page or so of memory buffer in my head: The muses tell me stuff while I'm out walking or sitting on the bus or such, and when I come home I write it down. If I just fill up the memory cache and don't write it down, they eventually stop telling. Or that's how it used to be. I think the muses may have noticed that I don't write as easily as before, and are putting some pressure on me. I noticed it in NaNoWriMo already, but it is even more so here. This muse doesn't tell me ahead. She (?) waits until I sit down to write. Nor does the muse consult me for world building or let me preview the character, or only to the tiniest degree. I was allowed to know that there would be three girls involved: The attractive cousin, one shy girl and one not at all shy girl. Nothing more until I came to the part of the story where they appear. That's pretty unusual. Normally I interview the characters before I start writing so we all know where we have each other.

I started out with only the name of the main character and a rough idea of what made him special. The rest pretty much came when writing. In the first chapter, I planned to introduce the main character by having people talk about him, before I shifted focus to him personally. This I was allowed to do, but first I had to write some stuff about a forest. Actually it looks pretty good in context, but I was surprised that I started to write something else than what I had planned to. It has been like this since.

It's OK by me. It is the kind of story I would want to read, and now I get to do that, it's just that I have to write it first. And no, I don't think this is demonic influence, despite the main character's tendency to look at girls in a manner that God would not reward in Heaven. Then again, the kid is 16. Only the most wholehearted of Smith's Friends don't do that at that age, I think. Normal humans who don't expect to partake in divine nature wouldn't even be ashamed of it. More about that another day, God willing. Anyway, if the muses spend too much time on the stuff, I just delete it. I'm still the one responsible for this body, and I am not giving that away. I am just letting myself be a-mused.

***

Oh yeah. This time I got a theme song, of sorts. Especially the first part of it. For this to make sense, you should know that the first unusual thing that manifests in the main character's life is his ability to see auras in the dark. (No, it is not autobiographic.)

Some people fall in love
in rooms that are so dark
they can't see where they are going
and they lose their hearts.
But when I saw your face,
it was a light so strong
I could see a long night coming on.

Chris de Burgh, In Your Eyes.