Apathy. You can blame it on winter, you can blame it on the fact that you only see the sun in the morning, or you can blame it on your workload. Whatever it is, you’ve hit that stage in the year when you don’t give a fuck, and all you want to do is sleep. Maybe you’re sick. Maybe your family is insane. Maybe it’s the terror of Christmas and the Jolly Fucking HoHoHos that send you into a self induced torpor.
But you can’t live like that. Dishes have to be washed. Clothes cleaned. The house cleaned. The cat fed. The job done.
So you make yourself get up off your ass and do something.
And then at the end of a week that feels long and short at the same time, and the dichotomy of only having been in the office twice all week because you actually were sick smacks you upside the head, you realize what you forgot.
You’re a writer. And you need to work on your craft or you’ll never get better. Which was the point of this blog all those months ago. Sixteen months, not counting the hellish fiasco of ‘BLU’ which was Better Left Unsaid. A word play on so many levels. That was a real blog/journal, where you wrote about what you were feeling and thinking, people who pissed you off and why, and the online wars.
Oh, dear god, the online wars.
There’s a reason that your MUSHing hobby doesn’t exist here except in passing. People burned you, scorned you, and on one memorable online forum, flamed the fuck out of you for being you. And oh yeah, it hurt like a mother fucker. But really, today you realize how much that molded you. So you have an aura of being a ‘cold bitch’ to some people. Who cares? People who’ve met you like you, and one of them you hang out with all the time. And yes, you may be a heartless bitch to people who piss you off, but you’ve always been that way.
No regrets here.
But MUSHing is like High School and the Family. They’re fragile bonds that are hurt by the least consequential things. You tell your aunt that you wish she’d not email jokes, but about her life and why she’s leaving her husband, and your mother replies to you with a ‘how dare you upset your aunt!?’ And High School, oh Lord, you had the indecency to like the boy your best friend broke up with. Shocking! MUSHing is the same way.
So those are topics that stay over there.
Not because you’re not a skilled enough writer to deal with them, but for the same reasons you started to change your stories from being about people like people you knew, and into people like people you wish you were once in a while
Hence your characters favored are …
The Cop – Spurned by a her parents, raised by her grandmother, married mother of one
The Quincy – Raised by her mother all around the world, has no grasp of pop Americana
The Mechanic – Crippled former Navy mechanic, fixes cars and plays basketball
The Computer Genius – Hip, funky, cool and groovy formerly slutty and disparaging of the law
The Doctor – Married to the cop, former ballet dancer
And so on. Those five make up the core group for your stories. The Cop’s Partner is notable for his quote ‘They’re here, they’re queer, I’m used to it,’ and while he can carry a story on his own, he rarely gets to.
Because you write about dykes.
Oh, yeah, all those five are gay. They’re a softball team. They hang out with The Pilot (airline pilot, former circus freak), The Transvestite (who performs at a drag queen club), The Traveler (who’s always out there, where ever) and a bunch of other weirdoes who only show up when it’s dramatically appropriate.
Oh and you write fan fiction. And you’re damn proud.
So maybe tonight, when the power’s back on, you’ll sit and write for a while.
Or maybe you’ll watch TV.