Day 19 and I didn't do it yesterday

So I realized around 1pm that I forgot to blog. I wasn't about to drag myself up and write because I was so exhausted after working so hard the night before. Last night was a little better since I didn't have to drag ten times my weight or more around all of creation.

I get inspired by the strangest things sometimes. A passage in a book, a ripple in a lake, even a sudden thunderstorm. I'd really like a thunderstorm about now, but it's too cold for thunder and lightning. It sucks. I want spring to come to have those huge storms that make the creative juices just course through everything like shimmering gold wires. It's exhilarating.

I was greatly inspired by Inkheart. Not so much by City of Bones that I'm reading right now. Almost done with it, too. I picked up Sweep to read after it. It's about magic and witches and something akin to modern Wicca. I'm trying not to set the bar too high, being Wiccan myself. I know how easy it is to make those books seem really over-the-top.

Anyway. Inkheart. I know my current project is something I'd like to write, but then I think about my origins of that desire. Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, Margaret Weis and Tracey Hickman's Dragonlance trilogy (which later had another one added on). Interview with the Vampire, the Vampire Lestat ... Dragons of - Autumn Twilight, Winter Night, Spring Dawning and later, Summer Flame. The book that I have line up has none of those things in it. No vampires (which is the current fad -- STILL), elves, dwarves, mages, knights, kings and queens, epic battles. Where is all of that? Where did it all go to?

Maybe I need to set aside Sweep and read up on those long-lost inspirations. Re-read the Vampire Chronicles that I own and purchase those I don't. Read that trilogy since I recently got them at a library book sale. My annotated chronicles, all three in a collector's edition cover, was destroyed. Not on purpose, so I'm not really angry about it.

I forgot my headphones downstairs. Damn.

All this planning... I need to write and write and then plan out the things behind the writing. That seems to work better for me. I can't just sit and plan it out or I'll get so enmeshed in the background that I won't want to write the story. It starts to sound boring. I have my husband upon whom I might bounce ideas but ... I don't know. I trust his opinion and I know he'll tell me if something doesn't work, but his personality is reserved when it comes to that kind of thing simply because I can get rather defensive. And I know I do. I just don't really know how to graciously accept criticism. But I have no idea where I'd get a writing buddy or whatever. A girl with the same interests as me. A girl that can be so brutally honest and shoot me down when I try to defend what I did and why I did it that way.

So I'm going to try that. When I first started writing, way back in 5th grade, I never planned anything and I wrote an entire trilogy a la RL Stine's Fear Street novels. Not the greatest thing, but I thought it was the best! The most important thing was that I finished it. And I haven't finished anything since. I've taken English classes and Creative Writing classes and that inner critic woke up and hasn't slept since the school bell first toned for Grammar.

How do I shut her up? How do I tell her that I don't want her around right now, that I want to just write and I'll come to her when I'm damned good and ready? It's not that easy for me. Not when everything was great and good and just the same as everyone else's?

What do I do? I'm not really sure. I just don't know.

SHUT UP, CRITIC. I DON'T NEED YOU RIGHT NOW. Let my creative juices flow like a squeezed tomato. Let them gush out in erratic patterns so the bowl of my mind can pick them up and swirl them into something delicious by adding the spice of dialogue!