I woke up at almost ten today feeling artistically hungover from my writing binge last night. I don’t remember what I wrote. I don’t know what I ate, if at all, or who I spoke with. It’s all a blur, because around eleven Shift took over.

We both have the same capacity for creativity. We share an artistic mind, but it’s like she and I are two totally separate consciousnesses. I call her Shift for short—think of it as an affectionate pet name, a way of embracing the red-headed step child personality that has infected me. Her title is really Nightshift, because that’s when she takes over.

I can only write for so long. I get tired. Shift…Ithinkshe eventually gets tired, but she’s the one who can push until 3am writing dang fine prose. She also sometimes burns me. Literally. I’ve got two scars she gave me trying to get things out of the oven. If you ever see me, you can ask me about them. One was on the day I started NaNoWriMo, the other the night I finished Ruslaka. But I digress.

I love this part of the morning. I get to through open the door, breathe fresh air, do my exercises and find out what Shift left for me and/or did to me. If she’s being thoughtful, she leaves a note. This doesn’t happen often; it’s only when she accomplishes something I wouldn’t otherwise notice in the morning or if she kept me up particularly late. She’s always gives me instructions for what to do the next day when this happens, so I can continue her work the way she always continues mine. It’s a vicious cycle of joy and words and sleeplessness.

As much as I hate her when I realize I’ve only got four hours of sleep or whatever, I kind of love her too. I embrace her. We wrote about 3,000 words yesterday. That’s a good number. Finished one chapter and wrote another entire one. We are on a deadline, and if I didn’t work with all of my personalities—who I recognize are little more than quirks of my mind, not clinical problems or psychological entities—I’d never get anything done. It takes all of us, and that’s what being an artist is.

So, yeah, sometimes I lose time, but it usually comes back to me once I find out what I had been doing. Shift happens.

Over three thousand words so far today, and the night is young. I thought I’d do a quick blog to tell you one of the strangest things I have to deal with.

I’m writing a chapter right now that I’ve been outlining for years. I know how this chapter is supposed to go. A man sits outside a coffee shop as part of an intense plan to stalk his ex-girlfriend for strictly professional reasons (Hooray for black market industries and workers!) Anyways, it’s a super short chapter. One guy. A couple of cups of coffee. A few plot details get related to you while he thinks about everything. When she leaves the electronics store, he gets up and follows her from an inconspicuous distance. End scene.

Right before I started this chapter (about two hours ago…I’m now two thousand words into it) I realized that it didn’t happen like that. Something else had to happen. It had to be completely different. It had to be a big chapter, with plenty of action that didn’t contradict anything else in that carefully construct plot I’ve crafted together like a glue-and-macaroni reconstruction of the Eiffel Tower.

After months of outlining, ten minutes of rethinking and two hours of writing determines that this is actually a chapter where he breaks into his employer’s home, watches a live-stream play, makes popcorn, and then calls an emotionally distraught man who he’s trying to swindle out of his inheritance.

Lady Gaga’s “You and I” has been on loop for all of this two hour stretch.

No exgirlfriend. No stalking. No cofee. Just break-ins, mind-game phone calls, and pop-corn. (I know popcorn isn’t hyphenated…but I was kind of on a roll.)

Writing is weird.

A lot of people marvel at how much I outline. I can quote my final chapter before I start on page one. I always start at the beginning, too. I’m very methodical that way. I also sit on ideas for about 1-4 years before I start writing, too. There’s nothing particularly artistic or bohemian about the way my stories get written. The one concern that continually gets brought up is “but what if the story needs to go in another direction?”

People have this idea that novels change and grow, shift and develop as you write them…that the further along you are the more you discover about the characters and plot, shaping the way the novel needs to be written and what you need to write. Those people, they’re right. Novels do have a life of their own. Books are strange entities that grow like children—that is to say, in all directions at once.

Stories are different. Stories don’t change.

When I come up with an idea, it’s pure fiction. It’s this fanciful cluster of fantastic daydreams without an ounce of truth in it. When I sit down to write it, that’s when I get to put part of myself into it. Writing is therapeutic, because I get to carry my secrets to you through these little fictional envoys. The story remains the same. So-and-so gets lost in a jungle in chapter five, the queen disappears and then returns in chapter thirteen, the color of the wallpaper in his home is green. These details don’t change.

But a lot can happen while you write a novel.

You get your heart broken, you break a heart, you watch a friend sink into depression, you ride roller-coasters, you watch fireworks, you get escorted backstage by your actor friends. All sorts of things happen to you that you desperately want to put into a novel, to share with the world.

So here’s the secret: the story doesn’t change, but what it’s aboutchanges. It’s all in how you tell it. The events remain the same and those two or four years of outlining still hold true, but everything else changes: the theme, the tone, the message.

I never know what a story is about when I start it. I never know what demons I’m going to need to exorcise and trap in it. If I did, I’d just do yoga and meditate on what’s troubling me. No, I write stories to find out what they need to tell me. It’s like speaking in the third person, using passive construction, explaining to someone “…so I have this ‘friend’ who has a problem…” I just let go. Whatever I’m writing is the story, not me. Only once I disown it like that can I come to terms with what I’m facing inside.

It always surprises me what I find in my stories, even years later. It’s like a house of mirrors, reading your own work. It shows the reality of your life distorted to the emotional extremes you remember it in. I never set out with a “message.” I look for meaning afterwards, sometimes even reading into my own work in an attempt to find out what I needed to tell myself.

I suppose I could just get an Ouija Board, but that doesn’t seem like it’d be as fun for you guys, now does it?

That might just be the most beautiful love scene I ever wrote. I think that’s my favorite kiss. Ever.

Maybe no one else will like it as much as I do, but it touched me because it came from a place I didn’t know I had inside of me. It is a memory that was so distant it had become fiction.

I just wrote about my first kiss.

Years ago I forgot my first kiss. All of them. Any first kiss in any sense of the term. I remember playing a game of spin the bottle in junior high, but I don’t remember what I kissed (and let’s face it, boys at that age are a ‘what’ not a ‘who.’) I had a boyfriend for about three weeks approximately three years after that, but I’m not sure when our first kiss was. All our kisses sort of blurred together in a dispassionate jumble of memories. I keep meaning to remember my next first kiss, but I always get caught up in a moment so pointless, so devoid of emotion, that there is nothing left of it in my head by the time it’s over.

I’d forgotten about the first first kiss.

In all my nights recalling and remembering, I never thought back to that one kiss, the first time my tongue met another in an expression of love. I can see it clearly, now that I’ve written about it, but I had forgotten it. It was so long ago, and yet I can relive it like it was yesterday.

There wasn’t tongue in the kiss I just wrote about…but everything else about it was exactly what my memory tells me it was. The hesitations, the excitement, the anticipation, the strange, startling awe of love…There aren’t a lot of emotions entwined with that memory; there’s just the one memory of one strong, dedicated love.

It was a kiss that said, “I love you, and I want to do something to prove it.” So we kissed, and now my characters have kissed in that same youthful, naive way.

I’d like to tell you that my first kiss was in the privacy of a bedroom I had snuck off too in the middle of an adolescent party…that it was some goofy, teenage thing that I did spur of the moment after thinking about this boy for far too long during Math-class daydreams. Fortunately for my own writing, it wasn’t so cliche.

It’s funny how I could tell you the name of every child in my second grade class, but before this moment I couldn’t recall my first kiss. I think it’s because my first kiss was the kind of kiss that nobody remembers.

It was a kiss of real love. It was a gesture so powerful, that nobody who’s ever had that sort of kiss would like to remember it. Wouldn’t we all prefer to think that we were foolish and young, incapable of loving like we can now that we’re so much more adult? I’d like to think that, but I suppose it doesn’t work that way.

I don’t mean to say that my kiss was so inherently unique that nobody else in all of history has had a kiss like it…but it kind of was. It was a strange love that I grew out of the way I grew out of “playing house.” It was so right at the time, but there’s really no use to remembering just how it went. Maybe you had a kiss like this too, but if you did I’m sure you’ve forgotten it in the same way.

It was a Peter Pan kiss. I feel that if I had only hung onto it, I never would have grown up into a world where relationships were more complicated. And to think! three thousand miles away is a beautiful soul who probably doesn’t even remember that we ever kissed—let alone remember that first kiss. At the time, we didn’t even refer to it as a kiss. It was what it was, an expression of love. Nothing more. Easy to forget once you’ve left the love behind.

I can’t help but wonder what would have happened had I held on. It feels like a mistake to have let go…so I will whisper to my characters and I will tell them,

“Don’t let go.”

It’s recently been brought to my attention that I have a blog. As troublesome as it is, I think it only fair to update it, for fear you should think I died quietly in my place of residence and my cats proceeded to gnaw at my carcass.

Don’t worry. I don’t have cats.

You may have noticed the title. You may have assumed this would be some motivating musings about what it is to never give up and always be a winner. It’s not. In fact, it’s actually some rather demotivating musings.

If you’re easily demotivated, I recommend you desist immediately and go find something else on tumblr to look at. There’s quite a lot on tumblr, you know. You could probably find a humorous picture of a cat. After all, most cats are never presented with the opportunity to gnaw on deceased individuals.

The problem with doing something you love is that if you do it enough, eventually it will change. I don’t have to tell you what a wretched and loathsome thing change is; you’ve certainly experienced it yourself when you move from a familiar, old house to a new, inhospitably clean house. Or when a new school year is starting; one minute you find yourself standing peaceably beside your locker, the next you find yourself being pummeled by upper classmen. That is an example of change. Perhaps you have even experienced change when you discover that the grocer no longer carries your favorite moonseed-berry jelly because such gelatinous goodness is no longer produced or legally distributed in your country.

However, there is a worse change than the change from moonseed-berry to grape jelly. It is the sort of change that happens slowly, so gradually you almost miss your opportunity to resent it all together. This is the manner in which my writing has changed.

I’ve become a much slower writer. No longer can I churn out rich fantastic tales as they occur to me, rather I must wait at the mercy of my muses. I no longer have the zesty energy it take to stare at a computer screen for eight or nine hours. What a shame it is too, that I no longer want to spend such onerously long intervals clicking at my keyboard. Yes, I’m afraid something has most certainly changed. I’m beginning to question whether or not I actually ought to be a professional writer.

I’m lying to you, of course. I’d like to ease you into this troublesome news. Now that you have come to terms with the possibility that I might be giving up my aspirations of becoming a professional writer, I will tell you the truth: I am giving up my aspirations of becoming a professional writer.

After much critical thought, I’ve reached the conclusion that this artistic hogwash simply is not for me. It’s a good deal of stress that my life would simply be easier without. If you think about it, I’m sure you’ll realize I’m right. It would be one thing if when I tried my best I was certain of failure, but that’s not the way the world works. If I try my best and put my heart, soul, pancreas, and various other vital organs into the task there is a tremendous probability I will succeed. What then? More stress! More trying! It just goes on, and on, and on until you overwork yourself and die of pancreatic cancer.

I’m wise to this now, and I don’t intend to continue on the frivolous, stressful course I was on. I will retreat like a hermit crab into his shell, back to the arbitrary notions of what writing meant to me when I started doing it. Selfishly, I will go back to writing strictly for my own pleasure. I will peacefully file my stories away in the cellar with my stockpiled stash Moonseed-berry jelly where they will not disturb any agents, editors, or—worst of all—publishers.

I think you’ll agree, it’s much better this way. There needn’t be any of this hassle associated with actually trying to achieve or succeed. Though immature and ignoble, I will write what I want to write and how I want to write it without any regard as to whether or not it will bring me any success. After all, there are so many metrics of success, how can I possibly hope to meet any of them when armed with nothing more than a ream or two of paper and some tiny splatterings of ink?

I hope you will draw similarly smart conclusions from these musings of mine, but I cannot be held accountable for how your reasoning ability cognitively processes my words….nor do I care. At this point I leave you, resolved to retire to my cellar for the next eight or nine hours with nothing more than my grim imagination and much yet-to-be-jellied toast.

If all goes as planned,

I will emerge with nothing.

This world’s really changed,

If feels so frighteningly foreign

The way things stay the same

For the first time since I have been born.

But one short year ago,

I knew how I was meant to feel;

When everything in life

Was right, but none of it was real.

Once this time of the year

Meant solitary perfection:

A time for me to unwind,

Resigned to quiet reflection.

Now I come to a place

That—short ages ago—was home.

Wish I wasn’t lonely.

Wish that I could just be alone.

I’m just going to ramble. I hear that’s what you do on blogs.

First of all, I’m reading about a billion things. The Sandman series has me gripped, Brain Rules is wonderfully informative, The Picture of Dorian Gray is just sitting by my bed, and Epictetus are nothing short of enlightening.

My writing…editing Maritime Law is my priority right now. I want it readable when my number one reader comes to town this weekend. Someone finally has to put their eyes on this piece. I love it, but I ought to get a second opinion. After that’s taken care of, there’s the question of Starlight, Starbright, the romantic comedy play that remains stuck in Act II as well as Madness in the Method my horror novella about insanity and Victorian psychology. Neither of those have seen any attention since summer, and my bright idea to start fresh with Love, Give, Live left me at 14,000 words of “I’ll get back to that.” Not to mention I’ll need to polish Welcome Back To The Looking Glass for the aforementioned reader who’s coming to town.

Oh, and it’s not like I just got a dance cane and top hat to distract me. Those dance routines are so much more fun than being productive. Plus, I’m back with Antulio (my tall, dark, and handsome…upright, black piano) so we’ve been making musical love quite a bit downstairs.

There’s some major conflicts surrounding this “career” I want to launch, to put it simply I just have too many decisions and too many opportunities to worry. I feel like I should just relax a bit, but I’m beginning to see how much footwork is required to get off of the ground.

There’s this whole thing called exercise that is basically composed of everything that isn’t writing, editing, or playing piano. I need to do that, too. You throw on top of that all sorts of normal-people stuff like bathing and cleaning, and suddenly I just feel overwhelmed. Plus, whenever I try to do something serious, love poems seem to seep out of my fingers. That’s a problem.

I don’t know what I should be focusing on. I really don’t.