Fictionalizing Life.
At first glance, it would seem like I have been slacking on my mission to write some fictional stories. I got two decent ones done and posted, then the other night, I started on a new post that got kept me up writing for 14 hours or so straight. So really, I’m not slacking, if anything I am being an obsessive, perfectionist. That had never happened to me before, most times I capture the moment and go with it, I always thought that editing would tarnish something pure that could never be felt the same way again to be added to or changed. Sure I would binge on words for hours on end before but never one piece at a time, it would be poem after poem, random thought after random thought. I like fiction and so far I have been incredibly proud of what I have created within the genre but I don’t know if I can get off this story long enough to create anything else. Once I wrote a story called She, I got eight installments in and wrote myself into a corner, but it was for the best because I could get back to writing ten posts a night, She always lingered in the back of my mind and recently I pulled it out to edit a bit but then I got caught up with the need to write more stuff again, last night I saw a way to put the two together and make it something really fantastic.
When I started writing ‘No Such Thing as Normal’ I didn’t know where I was going with it but like I said, the story poured out of me like it was just sitting in my brain waiting for me to set it free. I was excited, I was high like I never had been before and when I got done, I had a thirty something page story on my hands that I thought was too long to post anywhere online, I also felt like it was good enough to send to some magazines so I held off publishing it online and sent it to some friends to get some feedback instead. I sent it off to some magazines too, just to see what might happen. They all want unpublished works and now it has undergone so many transformations that it isn’t even the same beast anymore. That first draft is going to be useful in the future though so I have kept that “in the moment” draft that I made that night.
Reactions ranged from “Holy shit” to “ok, the military part was kind of out there and you could add some more detail, make me care about the characters more”. It was all constructive so I went back to take another look at it last night a little more objectively. Now, a week later that short story is turning into a novella and I am thinking about dropping the whole military angel since it really isn’t something I know anything about, that is where I can switch gears and intergrate the She story into it, take my heroines out on a senceless killing spree together instead of having them join the military and meeting a tragic end. If anything, it would give me more aveneus to take the story.
Aparently my egnorance about the military and it’s practices was pretty obvious to people who read it that know about things like that. To me, in this crazy world we live in, it seemed possible and even somewhat likely that something like what happened to these poor girls could have happened a thousand times already but no one would ever know, the military being what it is and all. What I know on the subject, I learned from movies about water boarding trigger happy trained killing machines so that’s how I wrote the charectures, secretive, shadowy and above the laws that they claim to protect. They had to be over the top to make the statement about how insane reality can be, like no one is saying it but if there are soldiers out there throwing innocent puppies off cliffs and laughing about it, who’s to say that they aren’t also out there teaching lessons to anyone they perceive as weak, rape and pillage has always been a fact of war. There are countries where men go out in parties together to turn lesbians straight by rape and tourture and most times, things went too far and the women ended up dying at the hands of these beasts. I took this idea and appyed it to a power hungry military in totalarian police state and what happened, happened. Now I have to figure out how I can still make my statement but make it believeable, if not, I am going to end up writing the lesbian version of Natural Born Killers.
After putting ten more hours into the tale and adding twenty more pages, I still keep hoping to put off the military part and have something present itself to make it work, I am going to have to do more research before I commit to it fully, a few angles are rattling around in my head that would be more likely than the one I have there now. Chances are I am going to write all the versions because I have become so involved and devoted to seeing this story through.
So I guess what I am saying is that, like any job, I felt the deadline and the need to post something to say, I am not slacking, just otherwise involved with a project I feel might become something really special. To keep people updated though I felt like I should say something. If I get enough people interested in checking it out, Ill post the draft in some installments, otherwise, I am going to be other here working on it and I shall return when the world I have created finally lets me go.
2/7/2012 4:12 PM
