This has been one of the crazier weeks I'd had as far as my writing and my subconsicous.
Everything kicking off with probably one of the strangest, out of sorts dreams I'd ever had... and the first to deserve an R-rating.
Pretty insane stuff... no nudity cuz I shirk about it in real life, but let's say there was a lot of "adult content"... an impending sex scene, but my subconscious wasn't "generous" enough to keep the focus on that particular detail... before things got super racy and hot, it had been all done already.
Wow... I'd come such a long way as to what I'm comfortable with in the past year, particularly when it comes to my writing, testing the waters... but maybe it's a little demented, a little sad, that I have no experience in relationships aside from this one guy who asked me out through Facebook and let's just say the feelings weren't mutual... yet I'd written some racy stuff recently. It's a good exercise for me, but nothing I feel comfortable with anyone seeing just yet... unless they're my closest friends that I trust to open myself up to (maybe 3 people).
Anyway, after seeing a couple of posts about stuff on Writer's Digest forums, I decided that I was going to go through all the stories I'd written... note the ones that fall into the category of my so-called "specialty"... Romantasy was my thing when I was between high school and college, not so much now. Trying to break into the real world has made it difficult to create fantasies other than ones that involve a few certain celebrities as my muses.
And pretty much noting next to each one how good they are (as in how much editing needs to be done), how publishable they are (if people who read them will enjoy them as well), what they're about (obviously) and so on, so forth.
I'd had a couple of glasses of wine tonight, so I'm a little intoxicated at the moment... nothing super serious, but have a little bit of a headache. I'll try to make this a entry a quickie.
[temporary title] 4 years
genre: teenage angst/drama
questionable content: depression, domestic abuse, suicide attempt
I wrote this starting October of '02 with two sources of inspiration: my research of the soap "All my Children" (which I later became a die-hard fan of until the very end), specifically JR Chandler as a teenager, and a teen's suicide at my school plus reasons that would drive me to the same extremes if it were me.
It was one of the few, if not the only story, I outlined beforehand. Using JR's checkered history as a weak guideline (the only elements that made it to 'print' were his appearance, the divorce of his parents- which his mom being the one cheating, and just his overall troubled psyche), I added bits and pieces of events that'd happen during the course of the years.
There were conflicts between him and his older (of 2) stepbrother(s) [bullying], him and his mother (kinda the same friction that occurred between JR and Dixie after she cheated with David Hayward, but I didn't have a full grasp of what their relationship was like until watching the show), him and his stepdad [domestic abuse], and within himself...
His brother going away to college was a catalyst that started all of this, which is kinda strange... as if Sean was the only reason why his and Jamie's parents were together this long...
The stepbrother relationship was pretty weak, I admit... with his stepmom being very one-sided about the whole thing (taking Jamie's side instead of her own son's... that's kinda of a red flag too).
The stepdad was abusive because he had a very hardcore attitude, wanted to mold Jamie into what he thought a man should be, including getting on his case about his grades... which obviously started slipping because the abuse made it difficult for him to concentrate...
At the time, grades were a pretty difficult/stressful thing for me and once or twice, I rather wouldn't exist anymore than fail.
The tragic flaw of the whole story was that I put so much emphasis, so much time into putting together the ultimate 'suicide attempt' scene and all of the mental psycho-babble that followed. There were a lot of scenes that were otherwise put together but had no real flow to them... I found them boring to write that I dreaded having to reread them, and you know how they say that if you're not enjoying your work, nobody else will.
I tried to change things so it'd be a first person narrative... Jamie being at a group therapy session as part of his senior project, but it's almost all narration... he just took over the whole session, telling them his life's story... and there's almost no objection from the other people he's in the session with.
There are a million ways to just redo the whole thing... considering how much "Less than Zero" affected me, I could turn him into a drug addict and he nearly dies from an overdose... but I'd already kinda visited that territory already in another story. I don't think I can revisit that area again without completely losing my mind.
What I could do is just make it a novella/short story where there's the majority of the focus is on the climax.
It's all very up in the air. I'd had to just leave it hanging like this with me more or less regretting how I'd treated this material. I guess it got really warped when I was trying to plug the holes so people wouldn't think I'm super depressed cuz how else would I have written something like this? And it is depressing, but there is truth in its message.
Teenage suicide or suicide in general is not something to be taken lightly...
the new title could be (4 years later... the anatomy of teenage suicide)
Nina & the Voice in the Wind (aka: Jonas's story)genre: YA romantasy
"fantas"tic content: reincarnation, magic, sorcerery, pegasuses, dragons, physical embodiments of nature's elements
This blog has more or less been constructed to promote and start a platform for this story in particular. THE one story I must see published first. For more information, see the previous entries.
Current pitfall is trying to map out the relationships between my characters... I've been thinking lately that Jonas's overreaction to the reiteration of the fact he doesn't know what happened to his parents... that might be a little too much for this particular scene... I don't think he has it in his personality, but then again, he needs to have some fight in him about SOMETHING. I might have made him a little too nice :-P
Orion & The Ocean Odyssesy (aka: Orion's story)genre: YA fantasy (with a few hints of romance)
magical content: reincarnation, fauns, centaurs, Greek gods & goddesses, telepathy, sea dragons, mermaids
I haven't discussed this story too much at all, if not ever on this blog. I haven't modified the document since 2005, but I may have read it once within the last 3 years. I have the feeling that over time, the neglect has really shown. I'm probably gonna look back on it and think a lot of is UBER-cheesy.
Orion is a soul that has been through a couple of lives already. He was a faun in his first life and as they're a weak species, he didn't live past his 10th year. With the aid of Athena and Aphrodite, Zeus reincarnates Orion as a centaur. In this life, he falls in love with Penelope. During the day when the centaurs chose their mates for life, a love recentangle forms. Well, not really... Misty is a flirty character that wants Orion for herself, but feels inferior compared to Penelope's beauty. Penelope was with Adam, but she broke up with him a little while ago... that whole story. Except that he discovers and makes it known that Orion was reborn as a centaur.
After the goddesses give them their blessing as a mated pair, Orion finds himself on a neverending journey to find his place in the world. It's something that more or less robs him of his life. Zeus still believes Orion is meant for so much more, but reincarnates him to his final life without any assistance.
In the present, Orion and Penelope are together, been friends for their whole lives. The only stipulation: he's bound to a wheelchair after his nerves were damaged in a car accident and he's always felt subconscious of that. That yearning in his past life is still with him, however.
On a vacation, Orion takes a snorkeling trip (I know, doesn't quite make sense, why would they let him go if he doesn't have use of his legs? accomodations or not) where he nearly drowns. Instead, he wakes up to find himself transformed into a merman. Misty's reincarnation made the transformation to save his life.
A great deal of time is spent yearning to return to Penelope (btw, her name was one of the few I picked out specificially for this purpose... because of the story of The Odyssesy... Orion was just a mythological name, I didn't know the story of Orion until long after the fact... not even close and it is a tragic one), but he slowly discovers his destiny lies with the merpeople. Along the way, he aids the white diamond sea dragon Oceana defeat her counterpart, Dragoonas, a black diamond dragon under the control of Adam... who happens to be the twin brother of Gemini, the queen of the mermaid realm
I wrote this story maybe 5 months after Jonas's completion... I wanted to dabble in the same areas of dragons, reincarnations and I just had a thing for mermaids at the time... felt like a good idea, but I dunno if my writing style held up after all these years
sequel to Jonas's story-- Ceceila & the black rose
something about a dream I had, featuring a girl that ultimately became Ceceila (yep, in addition to the fact Jonas didn't know until recently what happened to his parents, but that he had a twin sister that has explicably disappeared)
The story took me a good 2 years to write, apparently... it started where it did... me picking up where the other story left off, making Jonas a bit stronger when it comes to his social anxiety. He has a dream about his sister, which he knows to be true... no idea where she is, but she needs his help. For his senior project, he volunteers at a homeless shelter and helps integrate a group of teens into his high school... here he meets Ceceila, oddly enough going on for months without any idea of who she was, but coming to care for her like a sister. She also happens to fall into a relationship with Eric, who gets a second chance in this story... I felt bad for giving him a raw deal in the story I'm working on now.
The story stalled for a good couple months... maybe 2-3... after that "date" gone horribly wrong... I had no desire to write anything romantic after that kiss that just didn't feel right... blaeck...
when "Phantom of the Opera" became a huge thing for me, I used it as part of the storyline... cuz the Phantom (at least the way Joel Schumaker did it) and Jonas had their similarities...
I don't care what anyone says, I loved the 2004 version of the movie... it made The Phantom seem more human, if not an equally appealing "love interest"... though I gotta admit... a 40/50 year old man being in love with a 16-year old girl... that's kinda creepy (the book says that she's 16, no joke)
The ending kinda went array... Ceceila thought Jonas chose Nina over her and she completely goes dark side on him... Eric is the raw end of the deal again, he starts to turn to the dark side as well... it kinda came out like the last Lord of the Rings movie... neverending battle of good and evil... it got very spiritual/theological at the end where, in his mind, Jonas was trapped undergound by Hades, who'd been trying to bring him down using Nightariel... then after escaping, Jonas meets Zeus and learns of Orion's existence (in my first draft, the two of them met, but I'm not sure if any mention of Orion is still in the story)...
and [spoiler alert], Eric is actually Jonas's friend, Johnny... the guy that supposedly freaked out so much after seeing Jonas's powers first hand that he had to switch schools to get away from him... a lot of that was hype... he moved because his father got transferred elsewhere so he had to go to another school district
I think I was in a lull for a while during that period... I was just starting to write the sequel...
for a while, I think I was going back and forth between Jonas and Orion... until my senior year... well, the year before that, I wrote a story about being in a relationship with this actor I fell in love with at our school... it's also a little improbable. Becoming close friends with his inner circle for one thing... and in real life, he's gay, so there'd be nothing happening between us anyway... It's one of two stories I'm kinda afraid for people to see because they might draw up similarities between this and reality
The other story was inspired by Lindsay Lohan's "Speak" album... the songs were really powerful in some places that different scenes would come to mind... it was like an album fic, but after a while, the songs had little connection to what happened in the story
Rebel Diana
genre: sci-fi/romance
magical content: ...
not even close... the only outlandish thing about the plot can be explained simply as an expression of multiple personality disorder... "One life to live" was huge about that (I only saw it in the previews, never watched the show)...
my character, Diana, has a crush on this really popular guy in the performing arts program... she's jealous that he has friends with more access to him than she does, plus the fact he has a girlfriend... this other personality she has wants to help her achieve her goal and temporary assumes control of her thoughts and actions...
a lot of it really is fantasy because I can't see this happening in real life... a guy slowly falling for a girl who is suddenly much more outgoing than she used to be, and ends up being spell-bound by her that he leaves little time for the rest of his friends and dumps his current girlfriend...
then the other personality, who I called Rebel Diana, starts to regret her decisions to assume control and whatever else was a consequence of that... and it just went horribly array after a while. I doubt anyone who reads it will believe any of it... it just seems very one-sided and contrived...
I found out maybe a couple months after completing the story: my inspiration for the love interest came out that fall...
geesh, I sure know how to pick 'em, huh... I crush on the guys I literally have no chance with... well, not all of them... but whatever... I'm very supportive of the homosexual/bisexual crowd
Ghost of Leogenre: sci-fi/romance
I tried to sum up the magical content of this short story, but I guess I just didn't want to sound crazy...
The story starts at midnight... a young man with a ghostly light appears in the bedroom of Tricia, our heroine, he says that he misses her or is sorry for something, wanting to reunite with her... heck, I don't even remember.
It was a story that gathered dust for a while, since college was starting and I just didn't have the ample inspiration to keep going with it...
Leo comes back into Tricia's life, which is a shattered life... after a car accident that killed her parents, she has no recollection of life before the age she's at now, 16/17... part due to the accident, but part was repression... because her boyfriend died in the accident... somehow Leo manages to take on physical form to reunite with her, she remembers her past... and there's a little bit of dark magic, talk of Indian burial grounds... Leo having to save the day again, but this time, he won't be coming back...
Overall, I decided I was going to commit a cop-out... resolve the story really quickly with some outrageous circumstances... and the ending/epilogue is almost exactly like "Just like Heaven"... the setting on the roof anyway... great movie, by the way
You know something... I'm getting kinda tired... it's getting kinda late... I'll post this and finish up sometime tomorrow. I'm sure all of this is more than enough to think about, in case anyone is brave and patient enough to stay with me to this point.
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