Five links, laughing at myself

Links:
- A brief essay by Margaret Atwood on science fiction.
- 1978 Dating Game winner turns out to be serial killer/rapist. Because 1970s Game Shows weren’t creepy enough.
- Lupa writes about racism in non-indigenous shamanism.
- Death Bear may be the most beautiful idea I’ve encountered in a while.
- A long, but really interesting article about making teachers more effective.

So tonight, I got a ton of good writing in. The bulk of it was novel related, and really satisfying except in one regard: I scared myself near-shitless doing it.

The problem is that I’m really quite good at locking onto my own phobias and visualizing the thing itself. Case in point: last night we had to move a truck out of our yard. The truck was on a slight incline, and I spent part of the day trying to imagine how we’d manage it. At one point, I imagined that I might have to help by pushing it. This in turn led to me imagining the most disastrous scenario possible, which involved my own hideous crushing death and the truck crashing, uncontrolled in through the fence into our back yard.

Believe me, you haven’t lived until you’ve quite clearly imagined what it’s like to have your skull crack open. It’s an experience.

So tonight, I was writing out a story from the point of view of my protagonist about how one of his phobias (which has something in common with one of my own fears, though it isn’t identical) is really quite rational from his point of view. Fertile, wonderful ground, and I’ll almost certainly have to keep at least part of that scene when I begin working on my proper draft. But damn if by the end of my two hours I wasn’t sitting there with my heart trying to crawl up out of my throat so that it could run screaming because I was too frozen to do it myself.

That’s a good feeling at the end of the day, but in the moment? I was considering finding a night light.

And they say to write what you know…

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com