If I Weren't Underage, I'd Be Drinking While Writing This

For the first time in my life, I have the sudden really strong desire to talk to someone. About anything.
Strange, really - I'm not the kind of person who chats on the phone with her friends. I never used to chat at all unless by pure social necessity. And yet here I am, having a conversation with an assembly of lights on a computer screen that spell out, "Lonely and Trying to Grow Up."



Things are happening, and none of them are as dramatic or exciting or fulfilling as I thought they would be. I am failing at being superb. It makes me feel like a failure at everything.
In a sense I am. Sun Road is failing. I am at 21,000 words and have been there for five days, and March is basically done. Spring Break is not the productive source of all my great successes that I had bargained everything on for it to be. I can see it in my story habits - I jump from section to section, Sun Road to cartoon script to short story to poem to fanfiction to blurb, restless, burning with a desperate need to get something done, but confused as to what, lost as to where, forgotten as to how. God I need to calm down.

Two pages of my novel a day. That's all I ask of myself.
I beg this of myself. Have prayed it for two months now.
And I've managed one page a day at most.

Habit is a strong force. Back in November, I could do this - I sat myself down for two to three hours every day, just writing. But now I can't bring myself to focus for more than one hour at a time. I've spent too long fooling my minutes and hours and days away. Now, when it counts, when my life is a series of open doors that will no longer wait considerately for me to reach them before closing, when I haven't a moment to spare, I have gotten into the habit of failure.

I need to talk to someone about all this. I've never needed that before. I don't talk about myself. I talk about the weather, I talk about school, I talk about how beautiful life is and that we should all look forward to what tomorrow holds. I don't speak of my despairs.

The hopeful side of me says that this is a good sign. I don't use books to run away from myself anymore. I can't. There is far, far too much I need to say, and not enough time to listen to all the others say their parts. I have my own self to write down.

I could laugh at myself. The rest of the world assumes that all my stress originates in schoolwork, and college researching, when really these are only the messy brightly-colored sideshows to the greatest, blackest exhibition of my soul. All I can think about is how I need to write and how I can't write. My world is so small, yet so terrible and vast. It's the world within my mind.

Too many...

This Is Fantasy

This is a world made up of nostalgia and wishful thinking.
It is built upon sand, on the shores of the waters of time. Seagull cries hover in the salt-scented air, like the calls of a lover from the other side of the Milky Way, and they leave you breathless just by listening. It is built upon rock, one stone at a time, piled high to form a castle. Ivy vines creep across the walls, and a stray wind picks them up and brushes them against your hair, and it makes you wonder if it was meant to be a caress. It is built upon earth, rich earth, with water flowing deep beneath, a source of life which the trees have reached with their ancient roots and have grown strong by. The sunlight is warm, and you can sleep here, in the damp mystic light of a world forgotten.
It cannot be touched.
You may listen, you may feel, you may see. You may reach out a hand towards the surface of the pond. But touch it - and the world beneath disappears.

Under the streetlights and a faint sliver of a clouded moon, a child crouches beside a puddle. A car has just run through it, and the reflection in the puddle is shuddering, scattered in the ripples.
The dancing speckles of lights grow larger.
They begin to reassemble. The pieces touch, change places, join together.
In a minute, the waters are calm.
The child smiles at the image of a bright noonday sun on the ground. All of a sudden, it's warm here.

Report 42

Words written yesterday: 941. Total words: 17,282. Words left: 32,718. Days left: 17.

Words per day to finish on time: 1,925.

Progress clip: “You have memorized the vocabulary,” the Lord mused. “That will serve you well. There are matters below the surface of this world, however, that cannot be spoken with the common tongue. Sit down.”

((read Sun Road here))

Report 41

Words written yesterday: 812. Total words: 16,447. Words left: 33,553. Days left: 18.

Words per day to finish on time: 1,865.

Progress clip: Whatever the case, he needed to keep an eye out for her. The woman was dangerous. She could tell that every word he had spoken was a complete and utter lie.

((read Sun Road here))

Report 40

Words written yesterday: 840. Total words: 15,571. Words left: 34,429. Days left: 19.

Words per day to finish on time: 1,813.

Progress clip: “I am Sandy Rockfell of The Fortune Gazette, and I would like to ask a question, Your Nobility,” she said in a loud, full voice that could have made a lion cower. “If you please,” she added.

((read Sun Road here))

DEFIANCE and Report 39

I am a failure at organizing my life, and thus my mother has taken it upon herself to remove this burden from upon me. She has forbidden me from writing my novel until the end of the school year. It is a perfectly reasonable decision: I have other responsibilities, namely staying at the top of the school, making full use of the painfully expensive college prep thing she's signed me into, and doing well in the upcoming AP's. And besides, being the untalented, immature, and overall far too naive creature that I am, the novel is bound to suck ass anyways.

Well screw that.

You see, I knew from Report 1 (With the Dedication of a Barnacle) that Sun Road would probably never be accepted by a publishing company; and that, even if it were, it would be painful to see that unprofessional block of ink on paper bashfully occupying two inches on the shelves of a bookstore, doomed to gather dust and then be shipped off to some unfortunate library packed with the souls that never sold. I am not a genius, I'm only smart enough to know that Sun Road is not particularly interesting, or beautiful. I've had my doubts of whether this was all worth my time.

But if I don't finish it now, I never will. And I have decided that that reality would hurt more than losing two hours of sleep every night fumbling with crappy ideas and loosely strung words.

It's probably stupid. I do a lot of stupid things, after all. Most of my problems I've invented myself. But besides untalented, immature, and naive, I am also sappy and romantic and very slightly clinically depressed on occasion.
The last thing I need is to break my own promise to myself after over a month of going strong.

I'm going to do this.

(...but I'm revising the plot to be simpler and shorter. Doesn't hurt to be realistic, after all.)

Words written in the past five days: 0. Total words: 14,087. Words left: 35,913. Days left: 20.

Words per day to finish on time: 1,796.

((read Sun Road here))

fml

they tell you to care, that there is this invisible intangible monster called your future that you have to feed and nurture and prepare for from the second you were born, they tell you that you're ruining your life and god they're right, but what can you do when life right now is so so sweet and you're a simple-minded spoiled bitch and all you want to do is lie in a field of flowers and soak up the sun while it lasts?

children are supposed to love adventure. love progress. love possibilities. love what the future holds in store for them.

i am afraid.

so i hide, and love others' adventures, others' progress, others' futures and presents and pasts, love everything but the things that pertain to myself, and before i know it i have broken trust and broken hope and everyone sees me as a lost creature in the night--

--for here is a blindfold i have fallen in love with, and i would rather trip and slowly bleed out on the road than to stop wearing it.




((why? i cannot answer why. i look into my own soul and see a leaf in the wind, and i cannot answer what compels the wind to blow, only that the leaf follows, and is joyful, for the leaf does not know why either. and i see the teardrops on the windowpane and wish i could wipe them clean but bloodstains are difficult to extract, you see, and the scars will stay forever as i sigh and apologize and promise to do better but this feeble leaf is always failing, always failing, always failing, to the end of its days, to the time when the insects have seized it and have picked its fresh green health to the bone.))

Report 34

I was gloriously unproductive yet satisfied yesterday. Mainly because I finished the last 200 words of Chapter 1. And celebrated so much I lost all will to start Chapter 2.
But now I get to introduce JUDE!!!! My lovely character pet who has a sucky life and a sucky death and is overall a kind of sucky person! I am a sadist when it comes to fiction, it seems! Sorry Jude and Ashfire! (Wait they're both guys...oh-oh dear...good thing I haven't read Fifty Shades of Grey...)

Well now. One chapter down, 10 chapters to go. Oh what I do to myself.

Words written yesterday: about 1,000? Total words: 14,087. Words left: 35,913. Days left: 25.

Words per day to finish on time: 1,437.

Progress clip: “Honestly, I couldn’t be happier with my life.”

((read Sun Road here))

Report 33

Have courage, have strength; have joy within your heart.

Pacing is an...interesting thing. You can't quite grasp it just by writing short stories; you have to write a novel. And all the ebbs and flows and movements and pauses you have to build slowly, you have to breathe life into the plot and characters and carry the reader forward as organically as possible, and you realize that, well shit, books are hard to write, after all.

Words written yesterday: 1,400. Total words: 13,338. Words left: 36,662. Days left: 26.

Words per day to finish on time: 1,411.

Progress clip: An explosion of light and color seared across her vision—the next instant saw the heat and the wild pain. 

((read Sun Road here))

Report 32

It's almost miraculous how easily I can get under my mother's skin.

Words written yesterday: 860 and an intense amount of reorganizing (again). Total words: 12,037. Words left: 37,963. Days left: 27.

Words per day to finish on time: 1,407.

Progress clip: "I owe you my deepest gratitude."

That's right, Sermon. Learn to say "thank you." Then all you have left is to say "I'm sorry" and you'll have become a decent human being.

((read Sun Road here))

Report 31

Words written yesterday: 419. Total words: 11,413. Words left: 38,587. Days left: 28.

Words per day to finish on time: 1,379.

Progress clip: Rhea contemplated this. He had asked very nicely, after all.
            “Okay,” she finally said. “I can battle the dragon later, I guess."

((read Sun Road here))

Report 30

http://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking.html
I cried.

Words written yesterday: 1,026 (sort of). Total words: 11,187. Words left: 38,813. Days left: 29.

Words per day to finish on time: 1,339.

Progress clip: “A dragon. I am here to slay the dragon.”

            Of course. Jacky Marauder would throw up a stout green fist at that. She would be clamoring to go out and battle it for gold, as would the Six Swamp Sisters, and maybe even the Burrower, too. 

The Hobbit movie was the definition of adventure, in my humble opinion. I would've liked more words on that theme, but I suppose hobbling short people chopping off the heads of batlike nethercreatures will suffice.

((read Sun Road here))

Report 29

Words written yesterday: 590. Total words: 10,631. Words left: 39,369. (Augh, I do not like that number.) Days left: 30.

Words per day to finish on time: 1,313.

Progress report: “Why him? What did he do?”

            “I’ve no idea—and that is exactly the issue! The boy is the most mysterious creature I have yet encountered. Living in the Ash Fields, attacking men, searching for the Glades—he can’t possibly have an honest conscience.”

Standish Sermon and his usual mentality when it comes to good and evil. Using tv tropes terminology, the man's a Well-Intentioned Extremist and a Fundamentalist, and he fits Knight Templar to a button. My characters are so original, aren't they.

((read Sun Road here))

Report 28

First day of March, and life is clipping along at the pace of a whoppermungous killer whale. Discipline, I need to maintain discipline. Ugh. All those books and manga and anime about perseverance and determination and willpower, and yet, ironically, I lose all my perseverance and determination and willpower for the sake of reading them. Inspiration is funny at times.

Words written yesterday: 246. Total words: 10, 143. Words left: 39,857. Days left: 31.

Words per day to finish on time: 1,286.

The number keeps going up and up...*cries*.

Progress clip: “Mister, can I knock you out?”
            Standish Sermon choked on air. “Are you playing me as a fool? What in the nation compelled you to ask me that?”

(gotta love Rhea.)

((read Sun Road here))