Stop whining and write...

So, everyone who has ever read this blog knows that the reason it exists is to motivate me to keep writing and that's been working less well of late...

I could make excuses and I'm sure everyone would be very understanding and say soothing kind words of encouragement, when what you really need to say to me is "Stop whining you lazy bitch and pick up a pen, for God's sake!"... And even then there's no guarantee that it would get me writing any more than I am...

Sometimes the motivation has to come from within... And sometimes it needs to be a strange inspiring mix of both external encouragement and internal drive/guilt/obsession etc.

In the last week I have realised just how talented and driven some of my friends are. Their creations aren't going to cure cancer or feed the starving but they will change the world in small ways, intimate nudges of reality which entertain and inspire. They create because they want to and it makes them happy and one of them reminded me this week that it's okay to create things just for yourself...

A lot of what I write I write for my own entertainment and mental health. Sometimes stories or ideas become almost obsessions, like a hermit crab has crawled into your skull and starts trying to take your brain shell where it wants to go all of the time. And once that idea is there, the only way you're going to get anything else done is to scoop the f***er out and boil it onto a page.

I have a whole world of stories like that.

I realised during last NaNoWriMo that almost everything I write is in the same universe. I realised this when in a totally unrelated story, one of my other significant characters turned up, totally out of the blue. I hadn't expected it or planned it and suddenly there he was, drunk on the doorstep and really screwing up the plotline.

And suddenly a lot of things made sense. I haven't just been telling stories, I've been subconsciously creating a world. And it really has gone past the point where I should be writing this world. Sharing this world. It's gone past the point where I have to leave behind the notion that I could stop writing and it wouldn't change who I am and I need to accept that there's a world inside my head that needs to be let out to howl at the moon.

I need to stop seeing writing as a hobby and knuckle down and accept that it is part of who I am and that if I'm not writing, the world doesn't seem right.

So, forgive me for this brain fart on a screen - it's just me processing and cornering my creative self so that I have no option than to write. Because it's fun. Because it's want I really want to be doing. Because I'm letting myself down if I don't.

So, thanks have to go to Damian for making me give him this blog address and spurring me into doing something with it! Damian is incredibly talented - check out Beached Rockets Issue 0, in quality comic shops around the UK. And thanks to Frankie, John, Pip and Rowan who write and remind me I should be doing the same.

And because I should, here's something I wrote last week, raw, unedited and chronologically almost the first wordage for the world inside my head... Forgive the lack of formatting, technical errors are occurring...

* * * * *

He'd heard rumours of course. Drunken words over spilt beer, a collector, books trapping the spirits of the dead. And when she died... Died by her own hand, the book on the bedside table, pages open and drifting as if in a breeze when the only thing breezing in the room was his ragged breath as he sobbed and screamed, clinging to her, his fingers deep in her blood, in her cooling flesh.
He heard the rumours and remembered. He remembered her funeral and the way her family looked at him as he stood there in black leather, sunglasses and hair covering the red scratches around his eyes, the lines freshly dug into his skin by screaming and crying and ranting. He remembered standing outside her home as her relatives cleared it all into a removals truck, bin bags and cardboard boxes.
He remembered the book lying on top of a collection of novels with pink covers and happy fuzzy endings. He remembered the book disappearing behind the closed door of a small white van bearing the logo of a national charity on the side.
He remembered all of those things in the midst of overlapping shouted conversations in the Angel in Highgate, the air thick with released frustration and sweat, in the moment when Buxton said, "Christ, I didn't tell you that I met him last week? The book guy, the one who used to do that stage stuff, the one with the, you know, the books.."
Raven stopped staring into his drink and watched Buxton's hands flailing through the air.
"What?"
"The book guy! Whatsisname...the one with all the ghost books, Harry summit..." He rolled his fingers through the air, trying to stir up the information from beneath the booze and years of hardly paying attention to anything other than Top Gear. He snapped his fingers and pointed right into Raven's face.
"Harry Parker Prentis! The man with the ghost library! He came into the Glass Jaw last week, big suitcase rolling along behind him, man looked like shit, I can tell you, face was all haggard and he looked like he hadn't slept for a year... Jeez, I always thought it was bullshit, y'know, myth, but there he was, real as you. Man didn't look like a legend, I can tell you..."
Raven watched Buxton's lips moving but his words had blurred into the background, a low whine smothering everything, his heart and mind caught at the edge of static, the energy building in his fingertips. He pulled his hand from around the pint but not quickly enough. A thrum of energy slipped from his fingertips and onto the glass and it popped like a lightbulb, spilling beer across the already sticky table and onto the floor.
A rumble of laughter and hooting trickled through the pub almost covering the chime of glass as it bounced to the floor. But beneath the laughter there were pockets of silence and Raven felt eyes upon him. He looked around the crowd, ignoring the grinning faces, the flushed cheeks and the friday night glamour and found three, no four, intense expressions. Wariness poised over empty hands, waiting for the attack.
He raised his own hands slowly, palms outward, empty and relaxed, waiting for the jeering to die down and the crowd to return to their conversations and alcohol. Raven felt the gazes slip from him and sighed lowering his hands. Buxton glanced wide-eyed around the pub and leaned in towards Raven conspiratorially.
"You pissing off the wrong people? What happened man? You seem...off?"
Raven flicked broken glass onto the floor and kicked it under the table with a boot.
"You saw him? Parker Prentis? The medium with the library of trapped spirits?"
Buxton looked offended. "What? You think I'm lying? Have I ever lied to you? Have I?"
Raven looked at Buxton, his eyes cold, memories flittering across their gleam. Buxton shrugged.
"Okay, so there was that one time, or maybe twice, but I had your back anyway, so what does it matter...but this Parker guy...he was right there. He's real Raven. The fucker is as large as life..."
Raven stared at Buxton in silence, chewing over the man's words and adding the pinch of salt required due to his reputation. He sighed, leaning forward and resting the edges of his hands on the table, fingers intermeshed.
"Tell me everything you know."