By which I mean I came up with a pitch for an article about Star Trek, but the market I wrote it for no longer exists. Still, it’s a fun premise so I’m going to finish it up, after which I’ll either shop it somewhere or put it up here.
When I was 12, I was pretty sick. To the extent that my life since then has essentially been a bonus, really. In fact, last summer was the 20th anniversary of when I stopped being sick, which is something that helped kickstart the mental process that led to this whole “Daily Scribbling” lark. Still, that’s not hugely relevant. What is relevant is that one of the things they had to do to diagnose me was extract some of my spinal fluid. This called for an anaesthetic that would totally paralyse me, so that I wouldn’t move around while they inserted a needle between my vertebrae. The anaesthetic they used was ketamine.
I’ve never understood why ketamine is used recreationally by people. My experience of it remains possibly the single most unpleasant experience of my life. A sickening minty taste at the back of my throat, followed by what I’m told was five minutes of unconsciousness, but which felt like several hours of concentrated nightmares, followed by something possibly even worse. Waking up. I don’t know how ketamine acts on the brain, but my experience was that while I was awake, the part of my brain capable of recognising patterns was not. Words were just sounds, and faces were just shapes. If that doesn’t sound that bad, try this. When someone is talking on television, mute the sound. Now turn your head upside down, and stare at their lips. Trust me, it’s a pretty offputting site. Now pair that with violent nausea and a loss of fine motor skills, and you’ll see why I might find it hard to believe people do that for fun.
The point of this is as context for today’s scribbling, where I deliberately re-evoked that memory to help me write from the perspective of someone waking up with brain damage. And the point of this post is to convince myself that I’m not cheapening that, that I have…earned the right to write this scene. I think I have. I think that I’m writing from personal experience does that. But I’m going to have to think about it some more.
So rather than get into the total recreation of a conclusion to the first novel, I decided to plunge ahead with the first draft of the cyberpsychic story. Still no idea where I am going with it, but got the second chapter plotted out and started, which is good. Trying a new thing – mindmap on a chapter by chapter basis, seems to work reasonably well for when the mind races ahead of the pen.
Today was getting the last pictures for the OTI submission, giving it one last round of revision, and then sending it off. Now I can get back to either murders or cyberpsychics. (Not sure which yet.)
By which I mean I sourced three more pictures for my Overthinking It submission. I did also rearrange the opening a bit to lead into the premise a bit better though. Now all I need to do is track down or create a banner image and I am all set.
Not going to make a habit of this, but yesterday’s post seems to have been et by my computer, so here we go. Yesterday was finishing the first draft of an OTI pitch reading far too much into a sweary song about horses and girls. Then they got back to me asking me to write a couple of thousand words about it and wing it over, so that was today. Still need to get pictures and give it one last read before I send it, though.
Just wrote another thousand words or so to finish off the stuff I wrote on the flight back. It’s definitely the first chapter of something. Not sure what yet. Psychic powers and voodoo mixed with computer science, perhaps. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Scribbling yesterday and today consisted of around 3000 words scribbled during the redeye flight that ate my night. I think it’s the best stuff I’ve written in ages, but to be fair I have been awake for 23 hours or so. It’s about airports and voodoo, and will appear somewhere in some form at some point. Still not entirely sure if it’s a short story or the opening chapter of a novel.
Now with more action and confusion, and plenty of individual scenes I can lift. Also a note to have a much less cheesy final line.
Another day, another bumper, another consideration of totally redoing them all to be real quotes that aren’t tied to chemistry. I blame Fred Hoyle.
Daily Scribbling 