I once wrote a story where a guy’s fart killed a man

Monday, April 19, 2010 at 11:46 pm Comments Off on I once wrote a story where a guy’s fart killed a man

Current mood: ehhh

Listening to: Just Love – The Strawbs (yeah the name’s a bit dorky but my god is it rockin’)

When I’m mildly depressed (read: unable to be adequately productive), I tend to look back at things I did earlier in life and just think it over, and although it’s a pretty dumb thing to do (because when you’re wallowing in self-pity the best thing you want to do is do it even more), it does offer food for thought and a mildly different way to look on my current situation. For instance, one of the many things I am currently pissed about at this point in time is that I’m having difficulty just sitting down and writing some fiction. About three years ago, I was actually quite competent at consistently sitting down and writing a few thousands at least three nights a week, and I was skimming over them and their notes earlier today. Man, while I do commend myself for having a good routine, I seemed to have absolutely no patience when it came to making an episodic story arc. Barely five episodes in and the story is essentially hijacked by an evil band of monsters who totally steal the spotlight, and I just threw in ideas I thought sounded cool in my head, but actually reading them as text they come across as rather moronic. Case in point:

“[…] seated as the desk with a bowl of oatmeal while listening to the politics discussion of the pixies inside a clam shell.”

Pixies talking politics.

Honest to god.

It did originate from a draft that wasn’t fully developed, but come on, me, what was I thinking? If you were around when the site still had the Embarrassing Crap section, you might have actually subjected yourself to a few of these.

I think the reason I could write so consistently back then was because, quite simply, that fantasy story was my only focus. Amber Clouds and Diamond Skies was the only writing I did, I essentially lived and breathed it. I was very, very immersed in it and seemed to have a rather grand plan for it, and I admittedly didn’t do too badly – at about six thousand words each, I wrote about twenty stories in about a year, which is nearly about of a word count for two novels. Pretty disjointed novel, mind you, but even if I do find the stories a little lacklustre now, I have to admire my old self’s sheer manpower.

I think the problem came when I wanted to reboot the storyline, giving me the opportunity to clean up the crap parts and generally prepare a little better this time, as the series was rather continuity heavy, but I think doing that separated me from it. I still thought a lot about it, wrote lots of ideas and was quite keen to start it afresh, but despite generating a rather admirable amount of reference material, plot outlines and other nonsense, I never actually wrote a new story and stuck with it long enough to actually finish. Bit of a pity.

I think since then there’s only been one story I’ve actually finished, and I’ve kinda been riding the success of it – it’s the one I recorded with a bunch of buddies back in February and I’ve been told by a couple of legitimate media people that it’s good enough to be produced for public consumption, either on the radio or as a stage production. I won’t deny that that is a very awesome proposal, and the folks in charge of The Continued Adventures of Space Aladdin (see December 2009 entries!) would have the perfect kind of energy for a play of it (the writer of that pantomime also enjoyed it, so I heard!), but at the same time, I can’t help but feel a little bummed. See, I’ve got this horrible habit of refusing to do something until I’ve moved on – like, I’m reluctant to take any creative courses until my time at my workplace is over, and I’m kinda reluctant to dedicate my time and resources towards a production of this story until I can feel confident that I have my writing groove back again. I’ve had a plethora of sequel ideas for the story, but I’ve had little more than rough outlines and some basic scenes written down; and some of these ideas are pretty old, dating back to a year or two. Something to think about, I suppose.

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