WRITTING A SMORGASBORD

What does it mean when your writing tends to weave from one extreme to the next?

Are you bipolar, or confused?

Or maybe it’s the exact opposite – and you’re just extremely well rounded.

I like to think its the later!

Lots of writers like to stick with one genre. Others, like me, can’t seem to make up their mind on a favorite, so we go with what I like to call ‘mood creations’. I have a few documents that I bounce around in, every writing session gets to be different, unique and moody.

It’s okay to bounce from one manuscript to another, it really is. I tell myself this all the time, and then I sit back in my messy mind and imagine other writers doing the same. Whether they really do or not remains a mystery, but I’ve painted the picture as such so I’ll not be swayed.

Some I picture in Pajamas, with a steaming cup of coffee next to a tattered old laptop and they’re viciously typing away some aggression and rage into their work of horror. Others I picture all proper like, with well manicured finger nails and their backs as straight as their well dusted desktop. They’re placing details into a well plotted romance, as close as one can get to copy and pasting from a separate plot doc. Either way, I imagine them all just as lost in mixed manuscripts as myself, and then trading places with one another on the regular. Each writing session a unique challenge, bringing something new to the table.

ANYWAY – TODAY I’M WORKING ON A GHOST STORY, AND I FUCKING LOVE IT!!

Here’s a quote, or a tinny little taste as it may:

****What I don’t tell Cara, is that I learned this the hard way. I looked up a few years ago, and the lingering young girl I spotted has stuck with me ever since. I’ll never forget the day. When she looked back at me, I didn’t avert my gaze in the slightest. At first I thought I’d made her upset. She glowered, flared her nostrils and then took a step at me. It felt like a warning, but I stared right into her face anyway. Her glossy eyes locked with mine. The eerie familiarity of them gnawing away at my rib cage. To look away wasn’t an option; I didn’t know what she would do or where she would go if I glanced in another direction. So, I didn’t move my eyes at all, I just looked. And I looked and looked, for what seemed like a lifetime.

I remember the way I had rubbed my shaking hands down the daisy print that was sewn into the front of my romper, and I stared. I had bitten the inside of my cheek until I could taste the rusty twinge of blood from the meaty inside of it, and I’d held my breath. Nonetheless, I kept my eyes open. Too busy with the sudden, and very strange battle of acknowledgement between girl and ghost, it took me some time to notice our likenesses. I notice now, every time I see her, which is quite regularly to be frank.***