Out of my head

Man, what a freakin’ weird day. My Tinnitus has been playing up badly today. None of the low throbbing, but the high pitched squealing (which is normally destroyed by loud enough background noise) could be heard over everything! So if Anneke was crying I couldn’t hear a word Bec said to me all day. We are going to have to learn Auslan if this keeps up. So the ‘noise’ just tired the crap out of me all day, didn’t get anything written until this evening. I had to stay around noise, because if I went into a quiet room, it was all the noisier for being quiet with nothing to block the Tinnitus. Very very tiring, you just get that listless feeling going on, so I laid on the mattress in my study and watched anything on my external HDD (but not TV, I’m not that desperate!) so I had background noise that wouldn’t disturb Anneke, go headphones!

Well, after three days of struggling to get anything written, I continued working on some outlines for stories today. It’s certainly helped, I don’t feel quite so stymied by myself now and back into the swing of things.

I’ve also started reading Harlan Ellison for the first time, I’ve seen him talk in different docos etc in the past, but realised I’d never actually read his work. So I’m reading Troublemakers and the Fifty Year Retrospective, The Essential Ellison. Liking it a lot so far.

I’ve also never read Lovecraft, and I’ve started reading various stories of his online. Weird style, but boy oh boy! Is there some racism in there.

Well, December has rolled around, yay! Insert sarcasm tag here. I was really annoyed I didn’t meet a deadline for a competition. I don’t care if it was a self-imposed, they are the important ones, it’s called discipline. I would feel a lot worse if I had procrastinated it away, but I wrote three different stories for the competition and I wasn’t happy with any of them. I don’t see any point submitting something unless I think it’s the best I can write, if I think it’s not good enough then chances are the competition judges will think the same. But, that said, I do now have three decent ideas with these stories that I can work into something interesting and worth reading.

Now my word count has rolled around to zero, in between looking after Anneke and family fun I managed to churn out 18,000+ words last month, which only comes to about 600 words a day, I’d like to see that at a couple of thousand instead, of decent prose. Seeing the zero next to December’s word count, is spurring me on to break my last month’s word count.

This has been weird, I’ve had to write two versions of the same story to get to the point where I want to be. I wrote one version of Loiterers, this didn’t work and felt like a scene from something much bigger. So I wrote another version which clicked together nicely. I’ve got the same thing going on with Thunderhead. What I am writing now feels again like scenes from something larger, so I feel that I have to get this story out, to be able to write the story that I want to.

Not much in the way of word count the last day, but lots of editing getting Loitering in the Nightworld, as it is now known, ready for competition submission. Hence the title, keeping that prose nice and neat, and lean. Rebecca really enjoyed the story and she’s helpfully critical of my writing, so I hope the competition judges enjoy it as well. Now to get Thunderhead finished, it has to have a twist (for a another comp), and as yet I have no idea what that will be, I hope I find out before I get to the end!

Now it’s time to go vote out our current government, oops gave away who I’m voting for!

I just noticed that in my Currently Reading list, that I am having an absolute orgy of Barker at the moment. I’ll get it out of my system and then I can go on to reading other things. I really hope his Scarlet Gospels delivers more than Mister B. Gone did, although funny the story just didn’t suck me in. That said, I am really enjoying reading his Books of Blood, there are some fantastic stories in those volumes.