life in the subjunctive mode

‘I feel,’ she says.
‘What do you feel?’ he asks her.
‘I don’t know,’ she says.

( Violet's relationship with Kai in under 300 words )

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Primavera is my favorite piece of music right now. (Just ignore the obligatory 'What a shame that the world has degenerated to the point that people would rather listen to Justin Bieber/hip hop/Disney Channel/other strawman than this beautiful music. I am a special highbrow snowflake, and everyone else is a sick fuck' top comments, because music is Serious Business.)

In other news, I just want to write lots of Sherlock fanfic, what is wrong with meeeee. This has never, ever happened to me, and it is really distressing! I mean I could, you know, just finish the damn story that I was working on, because I have rarely been so thrilled by my own handiwork before, and I think that then I might be able to focus on important things like finishing my damn novel. It needs to be typed by June so that I can take advantage of Createspace's free offer things, and then I will have free copies! One copy out of which to edit the everliving fuck, one copy to admire from afar, and IDK what I will do with the other three? Maybe I can get away with only ordering two. But the point is that the story must be finished and ordered in time. I suppose it's a good sign that even though I haven't worked on it much in a month, I still don't think it's a stupid idea. I'm still very fond of every character, even the ones that are terrible people(read: everyone except for Tanwen and Aisa). And I'm fond of their story arcs. I am just so totally encapsulated by feelings that I cannot write anything but fluff. (And depression. Also a mitigating factor, it's not fun to write depressing things when you are depressed.)

I'm done! The final copy has been printed out and dropped off in my professor's mailbox, and now I can hide this story from myself, come back to it in a few months, and cringe, wondering how I ever let this thing see the light of day. Oh well. I'm sick of it, so it is time to let it fly free. Run away, little friend, and never come back!

And now I really don't have any reason to be in the library except to type up my novel. Damn.

EDIT: rereading this for the first time since handing it in. Oh boy does it ever need work. Not major work, but I still somehow ended up in the habit of overstating everything. And the end needs a lot more expansion and time devoted to the Problem of Will than it actually gets. I'll have to add that to my list of things to work on literarily once I get everything together.
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Title: This Is Not the End
Characters: Kai Williams
Rating: PG?
Length: ~6,300 words

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( This is not the end. )

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This is the first story I've written to completion, had critiqued, and revised. I should probably feel accomplishment. I still don't feel like it's done. Oh well.

( Super-Meta Second-Person Rough Draft )

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Coming along much better than the first. I'm actually seeing somewhere to go with this. It's basically a story about someone become a writer, first by using writing as a crutch to fight off the world, then by using it as a way to let someone in. First his world gets taken over by a bunch of characters, transforming his inner world into something completely different. Then he realizes that this is helping him, and he uses it to keep from becoming depressed and killing himself. Then he starts to find a way to use his characters, working at the antique store, and Sebastian finally convinces him to put his paintings on display. Then Violet comes in with her family, and sees the paintings, and he opens up to her, and he has a friend. And then his characters recede into the background, because he doesn't need them as desperately anymore.

So yes, basically I'm writing a fictionalized, surreal autobiography about my relationship with writing. That's why I need to write this in second person. It's something I need to write, to express, what I need to tell people, but it can't be me, it's got to be a character or else I'll get too emotionally close. I'm using experience to guide my story, not using my story to record my experience.

The prompt was to write something about an object that your character has with them at all times. In first person. I'm lucky we didn't have to turn this in today, seeing as I wrote it at midnight this morning and it's craaaaaap. I'm going to do a different version of it so that I don't have to read dialogue aloud; it'll solve the awkward and potentially insulting problem of me having to pretend to have a stammer when reading Kai's lines.

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( the keys to the store and all that pizzazz )

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I'm having a bit of a surreal day. Not sure why. I didn't even realize it until I walked out of Fiction Writing class and saw one of my friends in passing and was very startled to see someone who said hello to me ... which is weird, because I was talking to another guy five minutes previously, and I spent half an hour talking to my dad and sister before lunch ...  but somehow those didn't count. Weird and Kai-like, hm ...

My assignment for tomorrow is to write a letter from my character, in order to better develop that character's voice. My first attempt was kind of crap, so I took a different tact and wrote about the process of him writing the letter, what he was doing, etc. Later, it occurred to me that this was not the assignment at all, so I emailed my professor to make sure it was unusable and did the assignment properly. I still consider it a success; at this point in time I fail to see any writing completed and self-revised as a waste of time.

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( Letter-writing assignment, take 1 )

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However, I'm very glad that I did redo the assignment. The first rendition helped me understand his thought processes; the second time around, I got to develop the character as someone who does live in a world with other people, however much he might deny it, and I think it makes him a more grounded, realistic character than the previous exercise. (It also shows off his sense of humor, which is creepy but well-intentioned, and which is important because he's not a solemn character. At all. He's just bad at displaying his emotions in real life.) And I was kind of surprised that he did care so much about his sister, and that he liked her fiance well enough to joke with him and talk to him about something like Macchi-Macchi. I have to remind myself that the depressing, borderline pathetic dropout guy who works at an antique shop and lives with his aunt and uncle - that is not how Kai sees himself. Kai sees himself as the fantastic Spook Master.

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( Letter-writing exercise, take 2 )