I’ve been in bed sick the past couple of weeks, and as I’ve mentioned in my last two posts, sort of  struggling with feeling sorry for myself. But, in the middle of that, I’ve been working over these short stories I have going. They’re all speculative fiction (this term encompasses fantasy, scifi, horror, etc.) and have a common supernatural theme in them, which I haven’t decided if I’m going to tell anyone else about until I’m done.

Anyhow, I think my theme is pretty cool, and ever since I had the idea for this project months and months ago the idea has excited me. My stories have this common theme, but they’re all fairly different stories, and excite me in their own unique ways.

One story in particular stars a brother and sister, Cory and Anna. I had written the first chunk of this story a few years back and never really touched it. It occurred to me today that I should finish this story, andd encorporate my theme into this story. I didn’t really remember that I’d written, but I remembered the general idea of it.

There is nothing that quite makes my head so big as picking up something I’d written years ago and forgotten about, only to read it and go, wow. This really isn’t bad at all!   As a general rule (that I would love to start breaking more often) after I finish writing anything I feel like tearing it up and throwing it away.  I’m quite pleased to be breaking my own rules on this one.

I’m a little bit scared to pick the story up now and continue it. I’m pretty convinced I’m going to ruin it. It looks like my general state of being is sinking back in….

I tweeted early today that I have more story ideas than time, which is really true. I have a novel going, about five short stories, and this evening I need to spend some time writing down all the thoughts I have for this other novel idea so that eventually, when I get to it, I’ll remember what the idea was. The problem is that when I write these things down I just sort of write my train of thoughts, so that I make sure to get them all down, and then later when I read these messy  files I think “What was I thinking? This is atrocious!”

I guess I should try and write my outline files more like persuasive essays, convincing my future self that my current self does, in fact, know things.

When I write sentences like the one above I’m reminded how being a writer makes me sound like I’m becoming more mentally unhinged every single day. Early today I was talking about how I think my charachter should do these certain things and then burst out “But I can’t do that, because that’s not who she IS!” …because the people I made up are in some ways real, I guess.

Yeah, I worry about me a little sometimes, too.