Summertime

I decided to take the summer off from college. First thing on my list to accomplish during my summer break was Dorian two which has been at the copyright office a month now. I’m hoping the certificate will come through in a couple more weeks. Then I can get Dorian 2 live and order my own copy! I’ll be so excited to hold that in my hands after the long struggle to get it published!

Second thing was the flu. I’ve been struggling for the last several weeks to recover from that. In addition, I was sick and injured for a good part of last year as well so my house is cluttered to the extreme. That became a fixation of mine, to clean it up and get it looking much better. Having a clean house is nice when people come over but it’s also a mental thing too. I find my mind is less cluttered when my surroundings are under control. Some clutter can be fine. When it starts to resemble an episode of Hoarders, it’s time for an intervention.

Third, I’ve been writing on a specific challenge lately and enjoying it even if it has become more difficult than expected. On those rare occasions, there are those characters you create and they just seem to have a life of their own. They move along at whatever the author tells them to be about. One of those is Ori. I wrote a story about his grandmother who was struggling to raise him and his sister after her daughter and son die. She meets someone and that someone changes their lives, opening doors for the two children which would never have opened otherwise.

Ori is a good character. He’s young, has so much potential, and makes certain choices that, while they don’t seem to be always the best choices for him, all work out to not only show who he is inside but also boost his ability to believe in himself. So I decided after finding a story line I really liked, to write this story of how he has to confront this awful specter from his past. When I was done with that, I was just so in love with him and had unintentionally planned out all these things which were in his future and could happen to him. Because I was having so many issues, had been ill and had injured my leg and had mobility issies, I decided to just keep going and detail every moment of his life from the end of that original story I wrote.

You can certainly read into this that I was having extreme challenges with the injury and illness and desperately needed a distraction in my life just then. Ori provided that with absolute grace and beauty. He was just the thing to focus on while I was allowing myself time to heal. The challenge as I saw it was to write about every single thing that happened to him, almost like a journal or a soap opera. I thought it might be fun but it actually taught me a few things about writing in general.

As a kind of experiment, detailing every moment of a life can be a bit boring. No one wants to sit in the bathroom with someone. However, it is during those routine moments that we as people make decisions which eventually lead us to change the course of our lives. I know fiction makes a big deal of the “A-Ha!” moment when Jack or Jill suddenly decides to go to law school. Those moments don’t always happen around others but occur in some random routine place while doing dishes or laundry or making the bed.

The next realization I had was that to have a good and beautiful life do require some conflict and adversity. The two seem undesirable yet provide the impetus for us to grow and become. So Ori had to have some of that. I didn’t want a superhero. I wanted a real person who does extraordinary things without always understanding how he managed to do them. That’s every person I’ve ever met! Moms who do the impossible and wonder that they made it.

Additionally, to relate the course of a life in a series of really routine, ‘I gotta go to work’ sketches, became something of an issue. What should the character do? I, for one, come home and watch a lot of TV and eat and play with my laptop. That is not at all exciting. Not one bit. I sleep. I gripe about chores. All the usual things. But to do this with a character was so much fun on one hand and also challenging to make it something that can lead to another thing because, in fiction, one thing does lead to another.

So I’m on book seven of this. Yes. I have produced over twelve hundred pages of this. It’s really got my creativity going and it has taught me to write every day again. Creativity is a juice that doesn’t flow on command. Following Ori through his days, his work life, his relationship and how it grows and changes with time has been interesting in that it forced me to be more creative about what content to put into Ori’s days. I don’t want it to just be all the terrible things that confront him in every moment. I want it to be realistic. We all have challenges. We all have celebrations of accomplishment. The idea is that there is a story in there somewhere if we can just pull it out. Sometimes, finding the string of that story is really difficult but so worth it, not just for the reader but for the author too.

Will I publish all of this? Unlikely. What I can do is to pull out the valuable content and compose that into something I want to publish. There is a new venue out there, Kindle Vella. I don’t know how popular it is yet but I had considered that could be a venue for something like this. Really, Ori is just such an amazing character because he just keeps going along wherever I take him. Not all my characters can do that. But to have a character to experiment with has been so entertaining. It’s made my days brighter and I hope it will make my writing more enjoyable.