I’ve just started a new writing project, and I’m still at that stage where I’m giggling, scribbling, spacing out, and completely ignoring Write What You Know in favor of wallowing in that marvelous honeymoon period where you conveniently forget that you were going to outline this time, because you’re so high on channeling/creating people who aren’t you that you let them do whatever they want, even if they take all the vowels out of their names and become experts in teuthology and also declare descendancy from Attila the Hun’s fifth concubine—but, oddly enough, not him—for Important Reasons of Character Motivation that you’re sure you’ll work out later and end up yanking scenes and hair over down the road.*
This happens because you’re sleep-deprived and over-caffeinated** and delusional in that special way unpublished writers with decent day jobs are allowed to be, but mostly so relieved that you can actually pry your mental fingers from let go of the previous project—which you have edited and obsessed over and re-edited until you had actual visions of pigeons in hamster wheels before you declared it done and kicked it sent it out into the world—to work on a new one.
Or maybe that’s just me.
But I really am enjoying myself, and I’m planning on indulging in my whimsical delusions—and run-on sentences, thank you—until tomorrow, when I will dump Atilla, add some surname vowels, and do some actual plotting.***
I may keep the teuthology, though, ’cause Watson thinks I should write funny stuff on purpose this time^ and I personally find squid hilarious.
Or maybe that’s just me, too?
How do you start writing?
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*Not literally, except for the outline-ignoring and scene and hair yanking. That’s all SOP.
**Bought a French Press this weekend so my husband won’t have to worry about my hazelnut-vanilla-Highland Grogg-mocha-donut flavored stuff cutting the tongue-dissolving acidity of his own preferred brand of coffee. I’m still working out how much of my mellower stuff to use for two cups in the morning—the instruction recommendations are based on a 4oz cup of coffee, which is just crazy talk.
***Metaphorically. Except for the plotting. Probably.
^She’s truly the wind beneath my wings, that woman.
Earful of Cider 