Alice in Uni-Land

This post is up very late. Let me make it up to you. Here's a story I wrote last year for a prompt I got off of r/writingprompts: "Alice and wonderland but from the perspective of a university student doped up on caffeine and a massive lack of sleep."

A little something to entertain you with.

Alice stared down at her biology textbook as the clock ticked its way past 2am. The evolution of lagomorphs blurred into a puddle of text and diagrams. It grew bigger and muddier as her head dropped ever closer to the page.

She jerked awake and reached for her notebook. But it wasn’t there. Her dorm room had vanished as well. She now found herself in a forest, and she wasn’t alone.

Into the Void

All right, where are we at?

I'm alternating randomly between coming up with new ideas for the next draft of The Long Road and writing pithy nonsense for my romantic comedy. And amidst all that, I'm wondering what I should do for Camp NaNo in July.

So I have a lot going on. I'm multitasking, by which I mean I'm doing several things at once, but none of them particularly well. I need some kind of structure, some kind of schedule. But that's just not working for me right now. Right now I'm just writing when I want to, and not writing when I don't want to. Not efficient, but better for stress levels.

Me being me, instead of focusing on all the things I'm already working on, I'm going to talk about what I might want to do for Camp NaNo.

Paper Towns

I was thinking, in the shower, about paper towns. Really, I just said, out loud, "What if they were paper towns?"

By "they" I, of course, mean the weird locations in The Long Road. Obviously. I think a lot about stories even when I'm not actively working on them. I'll randomly come up with new ideas for stories I wrote five or ten years ago. This is by no means a stretch.

But anyway. If you're not aware, paper towns are towns that exist only on paper. They're fake.

Forking Roads

This post is being written late, because I got super distracted yesterday. By a book. Not one I was writing. One that I was reading.

I've been big on road trips lately. The Long Road was a road trip. My little rom-com involves an albeit short trip where two people get to know each other. And I just read (in seven hours) John Green's An Abundance of Katherines, which kicks off its main story with, that's right, a road trip.

I think this is a sign that I need to get back to at least one of my stories.

Just Write

Well, I dropped down to one post per week, and there was no rioting in the streets. I'm not sure anyone even noticed. And that’s fine. I know my content's been a little underwhelming as of late. I'm going to blame it on work. Basically, my schedule got all switched around, and I've been given new responsibilities. It just exhausts me. So I'm sorry my writing regimen has sucked lately.

I think I need to think more about seriously publishing. It's the goal, after all. Now, the rom-com I'm writing right now will never be seen by human eyes, so obviously I'm going to have to do some new writing.

But what? The age old question. What do I write?

They Raise Their Towers to the Clouds

This week I'm coming to you live from the deep dark woods. Where yes, there is internet. It's the 21st century, guys.

I had an idea about a story, where there was a model, and an overdose, and a guy who was trying to unravel… something? It seemed like a really good idea, but when I thought about it later, I couldn’t remember why exactly. I had the basic idea, but I'd lost the spark.

This is why you write things down, kids.

Playing Games

I haven't written more of my rom-com, and that's okay. Everything I've been working on lately has been full of deadlines. First it was NaNo in November, then it was that serial story I had to add to every week, then it was Camp NaNo in April, where I felt guilty every minute I wasn't trying to revise. I put all this pressure on myself, then I start to hate the project I'm working on because I have to work on it.

I know, I know, if you want to be a "real" writer, you have to treat it like a job and write all the time, on a schedule. But see, I have a job. Writing is supposed to be fun, it's supposed to be my escape. Yeah, sure, I want to get something published one day, but not at the cost of despising the finished story for all it put me through.

That said, I have had several thoughts about this rom-com, and the sorts of things I'd like to see happen.

Going Home

I woke up with a thought in my head about an industrial revolution. I have no idea what that pertains to, but I have a feeling it was a holdover from a thought from yesterday. This is why you write things down, folks.

In other, more writing related news, I'm… writing a romantic comedy. It goes against everything I stand for, but there it is. I wrote six pages of it the other day, just trying to get the setup out of the way. See, there's a particular situation the characters have to be in, where most of the action happens, and I needed to get them there. So the beginning is a little awkward and kind of "why would you make that foolish decision" but I can fix it later.

I know I said a few weeks ago that if I wrote this rom-com, I wasn't going to blog about it. But now I am, because frankly, I don't have anything else to talk about. I don't want to talk too much about the overall plot, because I'm afraid it's going to sound stupid, and then I won't want to write it anymore. Which would suck, because it's shaping up to be a fun little story.

Utter Nonsense

What if each thing you ate had to have at least one ingredient in common with the thing you ate before it?

What does that have to do with anything? Not a damn thing. These are just the sorts of things I think at 1 or 2 in the morning.

I was going to write this post Friday night so that it would be up on Saturday, but by the time I got home, with a terrible headache, that just wasn't going to happen. So here we are. I'm doing my best. Or, well, probably not my best, but safe to say, not my worst.

Mostly, I'm getting distracted by the internet lately. It happens.

No Turning Back

So I didn't write a post on Saturday. You might have noticed. I only noticed at 12:30am on Monday.

Now, normally, I'd write a post, backdate it, and pretend it was there the whole time. But not today. Today I thought I'd just move on and start writing Wednesday's post.

And here we are.

I intended to spend 30 hours revising my story in April. I did not. I thought it would be easy. It was not. Sure, that's just one hour a day, but I'm lazy and not particularly motivated. I want the book to be done, and be good, but it's so god damn hard getting there. Since, you know, I'm lacking 60% of my plot. And everything I do write is crap.

On the bright side, at the very, very end of Camp NaNo, I may have finally figured out the most important, most burning question in my revision notes: Where the fuck are they going?

I realized, it's not the final destination that matters. I mean, yes, they should have a plan, maybe they're going to… St. Louis or something. But that's not what's so important. That's not why they keep going.