Music plays a big role in how I shape ideas, moments, or feelings I want a scene to evoke. Sometimes songs get stuck in my head until I write something out for it.

Jewel - Drive To You

I know it's cheesy but I like it. The song gives me such a feeling of an open-road breeze, a loud engine and illumination by headlights. I want to use this in the background for a scene from an alternative project idea I'm tinkering with- a kind of either novelization or screenplay that turns Tail of the Dragon into an American version of Initial D. Not exactly fan fiction, but more an homage. Because I am, after all, an 86 owner and fanboy amongst many other things.

I see this song working one of two ways in a scene. Two lead characters, opposite genders and potential love interests, spend an evening into the late night touge-chasing each other for fun down a mountain pass in their respective cars. Or one is finally on the way across the mountain pass or on a long distance drive to finally tell the other how they feel. Something like that.

It might be a useless side project, but it's fun to outline scenes for. Gives me a break from space.

Speaking of space...

Foo Fighters - Best Of You

I keep filling in things in the outline on Gravity's Reach and the subsequent books. I have approximately 150 pages of actual rough draft narration and another 70 of outline for scenes and pacing. There are scenes I can't wait to write. I jump around a little. Writing chronologically now is difficult. I've been stuck at this one point for a few days, filling in background for the characters introduced and getting firmer grips on motivation and mindset for them. But I'm at a point where a lead character is at a moment of rare non-hurry and I'm trying to figure out where they're going on a night they can't sleep. What would they do, what would they learn? What would advance the world-building and the plot?

What do people that aren't me do when they can't sleep?

Bruce Hornsby - Every Little Kiss

I know why I can't sleep. There are several reasons. Some I can do things about, some I have to wait out. I don't handle that anxiety in a way I like, how do others do it differently?

The story excites me when I look at the overall narrative moments and what I think I can say. But I worry it's gonna be shit. I worry I'm gonna spin my wheels. I worry I'll never finish. I worry you won't like it.

I worry a lot.

I'd removed myself from Facebook back in August in part because of worry about focusing and finishing. There were other reasons. I don't miss it often. I feel like it showed me how artificial a lot of human connection can be now. We don't talk to each other anymore. We shout into the void (much as I'm doing now, except more publicly) looking for some kind of artificial positive feedback and validation that we exist.

I want to contrast that kind of thinner kind of connection and networking against real bonds formed between physical people who go through things together that bind them in deeper levels.

Charlie Puth - We Don't Talk Anymore (ft Selena Gomez)

That's why I write this here instead of anywhere else. Right now, I figure people have to know where to look, and so far no one has looked. It's still for me. One day I'll share it when I am ready to publish.

I want a draft done in one year. It'll take two. I want this published before I turn 38.

How did I get so old so quick? How did I let so much time go by before I figured out this is what I wanted to do? And... can I do this? Is this for real or is this another thing to not take seriously?

Fuel - Shimmer

I want to be taken seriously. I want to do something real and good.

Don't we all?

There was another blog here. It wasn't any good. This ideally will be more focused. Probably, hopefully, years before anyone actually finds it. I once had a blog, long time ago. Maybe this part is the continuation of that.

This is the point in my life I get serious about writing. I may be absolute shit at it. I may be absolutely delusional to think I have one story anyone would want to read.

I'm 34, and finally want more. There are all these amazing stories coming out in video and text format. I just want to tell one that people will want to read, maybe see. Maybe it's a sci fi saga about society and consequence, maybe it's a YA novel about cars and growing up... maybe it's absolute crap, a kind of fanfiction-trite homage to all the stories I've loved growing up, and there have been many.

I hope I finish this. I've been holding it in for so long. I don't know why I've been waiting.

My goal is to have a first full draft finished by this time next year. Not a publishable draft, but at least something I can get sourced out for people to read.

This will serve as some kind of outlet, hopefully to get momentum moving to transition over to drafting, so when I'm here, typically I'm coming into or going out of the story... if that makes sense.

Maybe this is a stupid dream. I might be waisting my time. I want to see if I can succeed at something, maybe that's even just finishing the draft. I've never been good with long-term commitments... in my head anyway. I've owned one car over twenty years now, had the same roommates and day job for almost a decade.

We're all good people. But it's like all three of us have been waiting our lives away. Maybe... and this might be foolish, but maybe this is our way out. Maybe I have a good story inside me that someone would publish, someone would buy. I could find some momentum, pull them along with me. Our lives aren't bad. We're quite lucky, yet there's this emptiness.

Different backstories, same result. We're all here, now what do we do about it?

So I'll write. I bounce between nothing to say and everything to say. Whatever it is, I hope it is substantial and constructive.

I want to find out if I can finish what I start.

-TR

11.14.17 - Blog Post #2

10.30.17 - Blog Post #1 (reboot 1)