Sometimes, I worry myself when I write. Usually, I think this is a good sign. If I can write a scene, or a chapter, and it makes me feel gross or makes me cringe, I can at least hope that it will give the same feeling to readers. While I don't necessarily like to write these scenes, I think sometimes they're important to the story, if for no other reason than to express the pure evil of the character they're attached to.
If you can't tell, I've written one of those scenes this morning, and it's fresh on my mind. In a way, things like that give me hope that I am actually good at this writing thing. I'm my harshest critic, and if I can give myself the creeps with writing that came from my own head, the impact to readers should be even more vibrant. In the first book, Fall Winds Blow, there's a scene where the main character, the victim, is being tortured. She has a finger broken. When I wrote that, I felt the pain as if it were my own. There was another scene involving chicken nuggets that was equally as disturbing. Someone came up to me after reading it and told me it stuck with them specifically. At the time, I appreciated the compliment. However, it also makes me wonder about the response to things like that. Will people think I'm literally insane? Will they think that these things are in my brain all the time? Will they equate me with this character I've created and the things that they might do? I hope not. I hope people understand that, as a writer, sometimes you have to put yourself in situations that you'd never dream of in real life. At the same time, you do somewhat have to visualize them to be able to get the words on paper. I think that's why I have this icky feeling about it. Either way, I hope that if you're reading this, you understand the separation between myself and the story, and that when you read the novel, you keep that in mind.
In other life news, I've been working on myself this month. After my problematic mental health issues in February and March, my April was spent ordering delivery for dinner every night and trying to relax as much as possible to regain my composure. It worked, but at the cost of feeling like garbage every day and wasting a ton of money that wasn't needed. So, I've made a goal of starting to cook more. So far, May has been the month of home cooked meals. I've worked in kitchens before, and I have the most basic knowledge of how to cook, but as a single man living on my own, it's tough to find things that are either portioned correctly or work well as leftovers. I've started this journey as a way to get real food into my body and additionally find ways to meal prep without actually doing it. As such, I've started making slow cooker meals twice a week. Most slow cooker recipes are some type of soup, stew, or chili, and those all lend themselves to reheating over the course of a week. To cover my bases, I also bought a set of cookware for other uses when I decide to branch out to real meals, but for now we're starting slow.
Another fun bit of news, I bought a couch finally! When I first moved out of my roommates house and into my own small apartment, I barely had room for the few pieces of furniture I owned already, much less a full couch. I settled on buying a "dorm room style" floor couch. If you're confused about what that is, it's basically a small foam pad with a ratchet style lawn chair back, that looks like a very small couch. I never really used it as a couch, or at all for the most part, and when I moved to this new apartment I dropped it in the living room and haven't touched it since. As the weather gets nicer and I spend more time writing, the side effect is that I want to spend more time reading and enjoying the fresh air as well. As it stands, I don't have a good place for that currently. I could read on my bed but that ends up in naps more often than not, and doesn't give me the view from the balcony that I crave. I could sit in the writing chair, or at the kitchen table, but neither of those are comfortable for an extended period. So, since I haven't had a use for my savings in a while, I decided to finally take the plunge and get a real, honest to God couch.
All in all, I guess I can say that I'm doing well. I feel like I've hit a specific milestone in my life, and that I'm slowly changing into someone that I never expected to be but also always dreamed of being. That probably doesn't make sense to you, because it doesn't really make sense to me. Either way, it's happening. I don't know if it's for better or worse, but only time will tell on that. Trading video games for books, DoorDash for cooking, and the feeling of loneliness for the appreciation of isolation. Either I'm growing into accepting myself for who I am, or I'm so far gone that I've given up. I like to think it's the former, it's a lot more fun that way.
-Dave
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