Why is there an Elephant Riding A Motorcycle?

I'm not answering that question, and I never want it to be asked of me.

There are things that I love about NaNoWriMo, and there are things that I hate. I approach it a little differently to the official stance on how we should be writing (if such a thing could be said to exist). While I'm writing, deciding on the rules as I go and have all the freedom to write whatever I damn well please, I won't jump out of the rules of my worlds. It isn't that I'm incapable of it, but I just refuse to do it out of principle. My written world might have things that could be considered anachronisms in our own history, but they fit within the rules of that world.

What I loathe about NaNo, is the write-ANYTHING approach, though the main instigator for this is the NaNo dares. As a disclaimer, I don't loathe the people who write the dares, and neither am I adverse to spontaneity. I started using an absolutely awesome app (tm... I think it needs a tm anyway. And why arent they iApps or something redundant like that? someone ask iSteve?)... an awesome app called The Brainstormer. Not just any Brainstormer, and definitely not Brainstormer Who. It's like a convenient version of cutting up lots of cardboard, putting random words on each card, and fishing them out to form random sentences.

Guess who discovered that AFTER cutting up lots of cardboard and putting random words on each card? Yup. That said, it's awesome, and gives me a means to randomly throw a custom list of adjectives, nouns and verbs together, which gives potential ideas that could fit inside my world.

But if the daily dare is "Have An Elephant Ride A Motorcycle", well fuck that.

I want something at the end, where I can read through it (or more likely, someone else can), and not get lost with random abstractions that only detach the reader from the world that they're experiencing. You may as well have a dare that asks you to remind the reader that they're reading a novel, and none of it is real.

I'm not saying I could never write something that involved an Elephant Riding A Motorcycle, but it would be a world pre-established where that kind of thing could happen. In such a setting, I'd imagine that a surprisingly sane serial killer would be equally as incongruous. Things belong in their own worlds. You don't see MY alternate self coming into this dimension and messing around with her giant claws and lightblooms.

By the way, you're reading my blog.

Addition:

Link to The Brainstormer app mentioned above.

Breathe

There's days where I think the world is all sunshine and roses; the kind where a walk in the pouring rain can't convince me things aren't bright and bubbly. There's days where I'm sure something bad is going to happen, or at least, that nothing good will. They're crushing days, but I've seen some rough ones over the years.

Then there's days like today.

I'm exhausted - seriously so, but it isn't just that weariness. I feel numb.

It's something that comes and goes with me, but I can't help but see the futility of what I do. I can paddle up or down, but I'll never change the course of the river I'm floating on. If I'm confident or scattered, it doesn't seem to make a difference. If I try or don't, I always end up somewhere in between, as though any choice is just an illusion. It doesn't help being right so often, though it'd be nice if it was about the good things too.

If I feel like something bad's going to happen, I invariably fall flat on my face. If I'm sure that things might be different, that maybe things might start going my way because I'm feeling particularly optimistic that day... I fall flat on my face. The only time I'm ever right about good things, is when I change my mind later and learn in hindsight that I was actually on to something. Sometimes I'll feel like I ought to do something, like it's predestined for me to try, and I'll choose not to - I'll purposely self-sabotage, because sometimes I can't stand the futility of it. At those times, I'll have a cold feeling wash over me, lying somewhere beneath my skin. It's like standing in front of an open freezer, yet when I touch my skin, it isn't cold at all.

That feeling of wrongness is there with me today. Maybe because I'm writing this. Maybe just getting out of bed this morning was the wrong thing to do.

Usually when I get this feeling, I panic. I scramble together to do the things it feels I'm supposed to, trying to catch up to the destiny of a minute ago. Ordinarily I would, but I'm so mentally exhausted.

A lot of it is surely the pressure I'm putting on myself. I need to make changes, but due to my situation it feels like my buffer for mistakes is non-existent. If I make a wrong choice now, there could be no coming back from it. Given time I'm sure I can make the changes I need, but it feels like there's a huge lack of it... time... also. Please cross your fingers on my behalf.