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I am maybe getting a little distracted.

For one, I slept like crap last night. And early this morning Erin’s alarm went off well before mine. She reset it and went back to sleep. I wasn’t as lucky. Most of the night the cats (Bean and Gaiman) were being rambunctious and, we found this morning, destructive. So even with the melatonin and with my sleep mask and everything, I had a restless night. And that’s not even taking the well-deserved blame that i didn’t get to bed until nearly midnight.

(oh, and now my sneezing fit)

But all of that aside, the last part of my “still awake” time last night was finding a song that is by a band I don’t really listen to (not because I have anything against them, they just aren’t normally on my list) that I guess came out a couple of years ago. And it is practically an anthem for the story idea I was trying to talk myself into doing for NaNoWriMo. Which means, openly, I am admitting now that I’ve been considering NaNo this year. Considering doesn’t mean doing of course. But I was closer to it than I wanted to admit. My real plan was, if I did it, to not talk about it. To just be able to say when it was done if I’d succeeded or not. Because I find that it’s really easy to talk about NaNo coming up, and my big plans for NaNo, and everyone should be really jazzed for me that I’m doing NaNo. And then I get barely started with NaNo and I just wish I wasn’t doing it, and that i hadn’t told anyone.

But here I am, having read a book (pamphlet practically) about NaNo last week. And now I’m watching videos by other more serious writers about prepping for NaNo. And I’m on the NaNo web page looking over the forums. And I’m saying the word so much at this point that I’d probably get great SEO if I knew shit about that kind of thing.

So it’s on my mind.

And last night, that song pops up, and i listen to it, actually watch the video, and it’s so spot on to the ideas I’d been playing with, and even name checks one of the characters (kind of). And I get… a little pissy with myself about it. Because my brain does this. Like I said, I don’t really listen to that band, but it’s not completely far fetched that I could have heard this song at some point. I don’t listen to much music these days, definitely not the radio any more (and when it’s on in Erin’s car, it’s classic rock the whole time). But shit passes through my gaze all the time, and my brain is a bit of a sponge, so I could have. And it doesn’t take a single thing away from what I was thinking of attempting anyways. The idea was half-formed or even a lower fraction, and it was never meant to be something to be taken seriously, only something I thought could be fun to try to write. Like that time with the people who wanted to publish me… I sent them three different things in pretty quick succession, each time saying, “Okay, well that was just a loose idea, but I think what I’d prefer to give you is something closer to THIS!” This isn’t the story I want to tell. But it helps get me to the stories I do want to at some point. Before you play your rock opera on guitar, you start out playing Ode To Joy.

Everything starts with Ode To Joy.

But I hate even having crap ideas that seem to be fully formed in something else. Elements are fine, but too much and I feel like more of a hack than I normally do.

I don’t feel like a hack. A hack gets shit done. It may be literal (literature) shit, but they finish it, get their check, and move on to the next hack thing. So I guess I just feel more creatively bereft in a situation like this.

But that’s an aside and it’s made me reassess the idea, maybe, of the thing that I might do, maybe. Or maybe not to both things.

Still.. here I am. Listening to people talk about writing. Reading about writing. Threatening to join up with others that are writing. So I may as well fucking admit to myself that something in me wants to try this. For good or ill, the compulsion is there.

I would like to do it in a better way though. What’s the point of doing NaNoWriMo every few years if I keep using the same method to fail at it. So aside from being tired and feeling shitty and having nightly allergy attacks that I should probably talk to a physician about… I’d like to figure out a roadmap to building myself a better path at telling a story. I’d like to think more about where my line as a pantser (someone who writes without much of a plan going in) to a plotter falls. Outlines and character descriptions have seeped into my last couple of tries. But they’re always too loose, and too forgiving that i don’t solidify my ideas enough.

I’m also tempted to rewrite something I tried writing (as a pantser) not too long ago. Because it was, just several months back when I still had a commute to think during, something that kept coming back to my mind. It also was developing a soundtrack, which I find compelling in its own way. Songs started to blend with scenes. Some songs actually created new scenes I hadn’t written before. Maybe that will help me bring it all together. Or not. I shouldn’t expect miracles. But I do hear writers say that when you find yourself struggling with a story, it may be that it’s not the story you should be writing right now. And if I’m being pulled back to this other thing, maybe it’s because it’s the right direction for me. It would be easier, sure. It would also probably not make the 50k word goal, but that’s not really something I care about. I don’t want to do NaNo to win a race. I want to do it as one more thing to drive me towards finishing something. Writing something I give a shit about. And yes, I know, the whole first idea pitch I was making I very clearly don’t give a shit about. But I do give a shit about finishing it. Or whatever I decide to write. My “win” would be actually having something done. Hopefully something edited too. Even if it just wound up on my web page or on Wattpad or wherever. Just to be okay with clicking “publish” to any medium.

So I’m going to start looking at letting these distractions be part of my exercises. Like tonight, I thought it would be in place of my writing, and I could have been okay with it. But I guess I didn’t feel like I did enough with it, so here I am doing this too. Maybe that’s a sign that I shouldn’t let up on myself about actually writing shit down. I can research in the easy chair or in bed. It might still be important to waltz back upstairs at 9 or 10 to put a few hundred words down.

Add, don’t subtract. There’s still room for more addition. Okay. No promises how I’ll feel tomorrow, but today I’m going to keep my expectations where they are.

Can’t see. This will be fun.

Trying to look inside my own head a bit here, I think I’ve talked about this before publicly either online or to a friend, so it’s not like the secret it was my whole childhood where I wasn’t sure how to express it.

I assign pretty much everything a personality.

Obviously we attribute traits, as we perceive them, to the people in our lives. Sometimes they might be unfairly labeled with things like “busybody” or “worrywart” or other terms that nobody has used in twenty years but they sound good compared to some of the truly heinous shit we say about one another behind our backs.

And with pets. I have three cats now and they are all very distinct with from one another. A big joy for us lately has been seeing a whole new aspect of traits from our Bean, the middle “child” of ours, who has been like a pestilence on his older sister Gidget. Just a little demon we probably shouldn’t have invited into our home because it gave him power over our dominion. But when we got his little brother Gaiman, Bean has become the doting big brother that we could only dream of him being. He plays with him, he teaches him things, he looks for him if he’s gone missing or been locked in the other room to have is his kitten food separate from the adult cat food. And he bathes him, endlessly, sometimes to Gaiman’s bother. Bean loves his little sibling, and he is both the same asshole we’ve had living with us the last two years as well as a completely different being now.

But living beings have traits, so they have personalities outside of what we assign them. And unless we’re totally ignoring reality (sometimes I do), that at least has to color how we see them.

Yet still…

I would say as a kid it makes sense to have a doll or a stuffed animal. Because again, they represent something. My Mego Batman talked and acted in my head like Batman that i knew from television or comics. A stuffed animal may have a level of anthropomorphization (spell check that) and it may be that your stuffed frog is also a baker in your mind whether he came with an apron and whisk or not, or your Raggedy Ann is secretly a nurse in a soap opera. But again, based off of living things, assigning living traits makes sense.

In my head, every single thing I come in contact with, or even perceive on a regular basis, winds up having at least some human-type traits.

For example, I would sit in math and be doing my work in nursery and grade school, and each of the numbers had a personality in my head. Also genders. And relative opinions of one another, like a power structure, that’s not just made up of lesser numbers being less powerful that higher numbers. No. There was basically a 4th grade level Game of Thrones in my head when it came to the war of the Odds to the Evens and to the Primes and the Tens. Also, when I say gender, I don’t just mean male and female, which I think maybe made me far more progressive as a youth than I would’ve guessed myself to be. Some were male-assigned female. Some the opposite. Some were not genderless as much as multi-gendered. It was instinctual in my head, I wasn’t making these traits up for any of them. They just existed this way. I saw it. I thought everyone saw it. But no one talked about it.

It’s like, you’d hear an adult man talk about his car or his boat, and he’d be call it “She.” In his head it was a woman or a girl. Maybe because he felt like if he loved it that much or wanted to spend so much time with it that it must be a woman. I don’t know. I’ve had cars that were male, cars that were female. Again, I can’t say why. My brain just kind of tunes into them, works out who they are, and that’s how it is going forward.

I also apologize to everything. Like for basic things. Bump into the cupboard, accidentally bend a fork’s tongs in regular use, drop the bottle of conditioner… If I’m alone, I say I’m sorry out loud. If I’m not, it’s internal, but I feel bad because I didn’t announce it.

If it’s a living creature, like a spider or a moth, I don’t feel as judged when I talk to them and my wife is in the room (and seriously, I’m not sure my wife would judge me all that much if she caught me communing with the silverware. She seems to have a good handle on my weird). But at some point I must have realized that what i was doing wasn’t normal. That I was very much not like the other kids.

A vivid imagination is okay. To a point. Right? Weird and funny is okay. Creativity is something to be admired. But at some point it’s down to, “That kid is a psycho and should be locked up.”

This may be why it was a lot easier for me to not have a lot of friends when I was young. Because I didn’t feel lonely at all. Oh sure, you put me in a crowd of other kids my age, I stood out like a sore thumb at how much I didn’t feel like I belonged. But in a quiet room, with toys or my furniture or doing long division homework. I guess that was my space.

I haven’t got the same attachment that I used to to it. Probably because so much of my free time is spent devouring media. Always with the TV on, always on the computer or my phone. Podcasts or music playing. When something else is making noise, its easier for the voices in my head to quiet down.

But stick me in a quiet room one rainy day with a 64-pack of Crayola crayons, and it’ll all come back. All of their lives and dreams and voices. Same as when I was six.

I have worked to have a healthy level of disassociation because, man, I don’t know how I would function otherwise. How would I eat? How would I drink water? I’ve tried to build it into a personal philosophy, like how energy is constant, so when people or animals die, their energy continues on, and it passes through other objects. Perhaps it passes into ideas. It’s like reincarnation taken to a higher throughput.

“Dave passed but came back as Becky.”

“My cat was put down, but now I think he’s this lizard.”

“Albert found a new existence as this equation.”

“I got a rock.”

I just wonder sometimes if this is just a Me thing. I can’t imagine how. That I’d be the one person to have these thoughts, and to never let them go. I should, if given the chance, talk to my younger siblings to see if it’s been something they’ve dealt with. But like I said, I tend to not talk about it. I’m less afraid of how people would perceive me now. At this point in my life, opinions on me have been formed and cemented. Most anyone I love and care about, I just don’t see this being the thing that makes them say, “Oh. Well in that case, fuck off.” I’ve given each of them ample excuses to use that one before and it hasn’t happened yet. “Corey’s weird. So what. Must be a Tuesday.”

And in my head, “Oh, don’t get me started on Tuesday. That guy is a fucking prick.”