Monday 27 August 2001

Pic of the day: Don't kill a tree, write with electrons!

Compulsive writer

So I had today off, without being sick. It feels strange. I can hardly remember having a vacation. I usually used some of the vacation for extra sick days, since I didn't want to go to the doctor to get a 1 day sick leave. My digestion problems in the past several years tended to manifest in the form of 1 or at most 2 days of sickness and diarrhea. Just so y'all know. :)

So what did I do? Did I travel away to Thailand, or at least Germany, or at least the west coast of Norway? No. I spent most of the day writing, or else listening to the narrative voice in my head. Muse, as the more refined writers call it. Actually, I spent the time up to noon on IRC, which I guess is also a kind of writing. But after that, fiction.

***

The "girl from the future" story is already faded away. It turned kind of ecchi during a horny day, and I stopped listening to the voice in my head. So it went away, and now there is another. This one is a very traditional fantasy story, with spells and a hero and magical weapons and evil armies of undead, the whole package. Though the focus so far is on a teenage boy dropping into a medieval-style fantasy world with magic, and his comparison of that world to the one he ran away from. Let's say that the ordinary world is perhaps not so bad after all ... Unless you are a mage, at least.

Oh, and the main character automatically assumes that he is the Hero, and is somewhat dumbfounded to find that the Hero is actually a rather plain young local girl. She won't even be scantily clad ... well, not except when normal girls would. No sane girl would go half nekkid to battle, or for that matter to a rough drinking place.

The inspiration from this is from GURPS magic. I actually have my 3 ordinary dice lying here at the table, and throw them whenever there is a spell or other uncertain action and the outcome is not absolutely dictated by the plot. (Yeah, as if there actually is a plot.) Writing novels with dice is somewhat refreshing, but one should not lean on them too heavily.

***

After a couple days of errors, I got access to the LiveJournal Friends page again. (I can't believe I started to write "LoveJournal". QWERTY keyboards need to be fixed to avoid such errors.) Anyway, there was a rather long entry by my friend Allison (shouldn't that be Allidaughter?) who commented on how she felt depressed if she couldn't read books about how unfair society is regularly. She has noticed that other people have other things that they need to "fill up" from time to time, to function optimally.

With me, I think it is writing. Even when my hand hurts (it's not as bad as it has been, by the way) I still can't keep from writing. Writing is an extension of thinking. The paper or screen is an extension of the brain cortex. I feel kind of retarded if I can't write regularly. This includes letters, essays, and the diary. But not least it means fiction. Even though I don't really have much respect for fiction (it is just lies!) I still feel the need to write it.

I used to have it pretty bad when I was younger. I think the writing kept me sane (relatively speaking) for a while there. It just bubbled up like a spring. Now the flow is slowing. But still, some days my head just fills with ideas. Books I'd like to read if others wrote them, but of course they don't (or I just haven't read them) so I write them myself. And then the ideas disappear and I stop in the middle of a story. Like I did with my online fantasy story Gwalawala. (Actually I have un-used ideas for the fantasy part of it, but the mundane branch was harder and harder to fill. That's why I have dispensed with the mundane entirely in my newest story.)

I have floppies and before that binders filled with stories I started. There are stories about naive and very pure religious boys who get into trouble with the opposite sex (don't get your imagination up people). And stories about naive young men with various superpowers. And stories that are slightly less autobiographical. Heh. But few of them are even near completion, so I guess it is no great loss that they'll just go in a container when I'm gone. If they had been good, I would have noticed. As the years wore on and I stopped mixing autobiography and fiction like that, there were some pretty good ideas. But nothing I could live off. I remain an amateur.

And you don't need to be a cunning linguist to know that "amateur" is related to "Amor". I do this because I love it.

(On a related note: Yet another Sim Comic! Today Chaos & Super debate the mystery that is guys! Tee hee.)