Dawning Creates…What?
Where I have been….what have I been doing….who am I these days?
When I started this blog my bio had that line in it – Dawning Creates what? And as can be seen in the amount of time since the last post in April, not a whole hell of a lot lately. My job has been exhausting for months and the last thing I feel like doing in the evening or on the weekend is more thinking. I have been purposely distracting myself with other things to cope with stress and feelings of insecurity and inadequacy in my professional life and hell, the less thinking the better lately. Which is unfortunate since writing has always been something that is a release and where I feel in control. So, here I am with a pounding headache thinking in typed words but much the same as all of my other creative endeavours recently, I have started writing this a dozen times and stopped.
Start and stop is my theme. I have started and stopped a story about 6 times and finally decided to abandon it, not feeling it and changing the first, the only 4 pages too many times to truly enjoy writing it. Then it happened while watching Castle Rock – a story idea began to form. Nothing like or related to Castle Rock but an idea came into my head prompted by a scene in the first episode (pretty sure it was) when Molly Strand is looking at a missing poster of Henry Deaver and it’s almost like she becomes mesmerized by the image of the boy, lost in the ink and paper image. And with that, a story popped into my muddled mind. It’s slow going as the stress hasn’t abated, yet, but it is actually developing and I wrote in the café while waiting for breakfast yesterday morning and had to force myself to stop and leave. That 15 minutes energized me. I need to embrace that spark before it slips away again. When I write and write something that I truly enjoy and feel invested in the characters, their lives and the awful things I make them do – I am contented, I feel lighter and it helped to begin the day on a high note; if only it could have stayed that way.
It is rare that an idea will stick around long enough to become a story for me. The Stand (the book) and now Castle Rock have had the briefest, seemingly minor scenes that have brought forth a writing prompt for me. The Stand helped me to create Private Louis Henning for ‘A Good Solider’ from a snippet of the book about soldiers killing civilians. Now Castle Rock has prompted me to meet 2 new characters – a lovely couple touched by something preternatural and driven to hurt the one they love – each other.
Aside from a new story, new characters, Halloween is coming! Much like past years, I will attempt to watch and review horror movies, horror TV and horror writing. There are a fair amount of horror flicks I haven’t seen and my list has already started.
Dawning Creates once again.
Dawning Creates 