Muses and Movement

I wake up daily with the intention to write. Daily, I write down what I ate and how I feel in a composition book, I write posts on forums, emails, comments and things on Facebook, text messages, silly notes to my fiancé...

But I don't work on my story.

Perhaps I'm distracting myself with television, reading on my Kindle, surfing the net on my phone, etc... I don't deal well with silence. I'm not one of those people who needs absolute silence to create. In fact, my best work seems to be born in the midst of chaos, noise , and multitasking.

In high school and through my college courses I always studied and wrote papers and stories with music blaring or the television on and a billion instant messages pinging in the background. In all that chaos, I made art.

Now, it seems the television has grown interesting enough to distract me. The sounds of children playing, teenagers giggling as they walk past the paper thin walls of the glorified tin can that is my house, vehicles driving through the trailer park or pulling into my shared driveway, and the occasional earthquake or catfight are enough to cause me to leap out of my seat in the throes of a mild panic attack if I don't have the television streaming dribble into my living room to blame the sounds on. Blaring music just isn't enough. Even now the creaking doors of my neighbor's little green pickup just made me jump.

I suppose it doesn't help that silence doesn't seem to exist in my little trailer park near the airport. Of course, if it did, I'd likely start imagining sounds to frighten me and waste hours trying to find television programming or music capable of drowning out the scary sounds in my head.

Perhaps I've list the ability to focus through the chaos. Perhaps my story isn't interesting enough for me to push everything else to the background. Perhaps it's time I stop whining long enough to give my muse a chance to speak; maybe I'm drowning her out.

Welcome, Potential Someday Readers

So here's the plan. I'll write the novel, you'll read about the process (and perhaps read some snippets here too) here, then we'll see about some beta readers, make some editing, blurbs, and cover art happen, then publish to Kindle at least... If the novel turns out to be decent.

I'm brand new at this. I've never written anything more than a short story, but I have a mad love for words and my brain is just about bursting with ideas, so I figure it's time to start making a body of work. Maybe I'll come up with some short stories along the way to novel #1, but I tend to think in novel length and am much too addicted to extreme character development (Thank you, years of theatre) to be at all confident in my ability to write a whole story in a couple dozen pages.

The idea here is to take you, dear reader, along with me on the journey from wannabe to real deal... Or from zero to author... Something like that. I'll gladly accept suggestions for anything and everything here too.

As it stands I'm a whole 1500 words into what I think will turn into a paranormal romance set in the Alaskan bush with a working title of Sleeping Lady Story. I don't know if this will turn out to be a novella, a longer than average short story, a full length novel, or even a series or serial. I started it with no plan in mind whatsoever; not generally the brightest thing to do when one decides they'd like to write a novel, but the hero and heroine (at least their basic natures) popped into my head along with a rather pretty opening scene and I was overwhelmed with the need to write, so I jumped right in. So far, it's going incredibly slowly, but well when I can be bothered to write.

In any case, welcome to my mind! And thank you muchly for taking the time to read this.