Until We Have Faces

I nearly forgot to write a post this week, as my days off have been spent playing with larger scale murder than usual. I just got the game Plague Inc: Evolved on my computer and I'm trying to wipe out humanity with fungal spores. Mankind is surprisingly resilient.

So anyway, writing and stuff.

Camp NaNoWriMo starts on Monday. I'm super excited. Yeah, I realize I've been struggling with this dumb story for months, but I'm starting to feel it again. I've got my main character back in my head. He had become kind of nebulous and faceless (I’ll get into that in a second) and it was hard to actually get him to be in the scenes. But he has coalesced back into a solid form, and is behaving like a human (or nearly human) again.

Faces. I'm bad at them. Like, really bad. I don't know if I've ever mentioned this before, but I have a hell of a time holding them in my brain. Say I met you for the first time, and we talked for ten minutes, and then parted ways. Then we met again an hour later. If you had something distinctive, like pink hair or a funny t-shirt, I would realize that you were the same person. But if you put on a hat or changed your shirt, I wouldn't necessarily recognize you from before, because the second you walked away, I forgot what you looked like. Don't feel bad though, because I also forget what I look like.

I think this is part of why I have to cast my characters with actual people with actual faces. I can't hold a fabricated face in my brain, so I can't get them to act like real people, they're just mushy-faced simulacra. I need a picture to refer to so that I can be like, "Oh that's right, you've got those devious eyebrows."

So I recently started watching a show again, that I had previously been watching when I first wrote Cold Blooded, and wouldn't you know it, Des got his face back. And now I have so many thoughts and ideas. I'm like mentally writing fan fiction of my own story, just running random scenarios that have no place in the novel but give me some insight into the characters and the world. And it's great.

Sometimes this whole process just drags and I start to hate it. It stops being fun, and I don't want to do it. And then sometimes I'm full of ideas and excited to sit down and write. So guess what I'm going to do.

I'll see you next week, when we'll see if I've actually written anything.

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Title Source: Red - Until We Have Faces