Into Action

Have you ever had that feeling where you're tense for whatever reason?

Then, have you ever had some fleeting, hopeful thought skip through your mind — and you suddenly feel light?

I want to understand those! I want to harness those! It's some kinda quiet magic — like hope magic. Typically, the thoughts are hard to snag, hard to remember. It is usually something simple like thinking, "I might get to do a book-signing some day."

I don't know! But I need to harness them.

Holy moly. I still never write enough. It's true: I'm trying to get a few things set up before I engage beast-mode (AKA writing-ALL-the-things-mode). I truly and sincerely did say to myself that I would let proper writing linger for a time. However, I think I've been avoiding it more than I needed to. Regardless, it always nags me.

There is always too much to say! That is largely why I need to write fiction books: there are too many thoughts and feelings, so I just need to send wild creatures on wild adventures in wild settings.

DUUUUDES! I'm telling you! Some of my best story ideas have come from random, rambling sketches! Seven Colors — which is going to be freaking amazing if I do say so myself — came from realizing that a lot of my sketches had a similar theme.

Even though I have been dreaming of Tetraearth forever, my sketches have made it more and more tangible. I originally thought it would just be five books: one for each element and one to tie it all together. Lately, I've been feeling like it has to be a ridiculously long series: a lengthy epic of its own for each element. Whatever the case, the dreams have been unfolding with the help of random sketches.

Time Knight came from a sketch of sorts.

The Menagerie — or at least that's what I'm calling it at the moment — is starting to spark in my heart. It was just a lonely sketch. Eventually, finally, I decided to add more, and — BOOM — it's becoming its own story.

I appreciate Stephen King's comment: "Stories are found things, like fossils in the ground. … Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered, pre-existing world."

In other words, you don't write grand stories; you just find them. King goes onto say that the writer's work, then, is not so much to write but rather to be careful as they extract the fossil. If you're careless, you extract a weak story. If you're careful, you reach hearts.

I seem to spend more time talking about how much I want to write than just plain writing.

It's an intimidating process. Or maybe a weighty process. It's definitely an arduous process. It requires a level of meditative focus. It really does. We have so many thoughts and feelings cluttering our minds. We're pulled away from the now, pulled out of reality and into fretting. Writing stories — painting stories — requires you to come back into a sort of stasis. It's like shifting gears: to get from 1 to 2, the stick pauses briefly in neutral.

So yeah, I haven't made my pocket of focus yet. I catch snippets of it here and there, but I have to choose it and wrest it into action.