I jammed a pen into the palm of my hand this afternoon, accidentally, while I was fishing it out from under the desk at work. For a second or two I thought I'd punched a hole in my skin. Instead, I had an effaceable scar, a slash of ink pointing at the divot that has since vanished.
I'd like to the think that all the frustration of the past few weeks--my sleeping instead of writing, my running away to RenFest every weekend instead of writing, my vivid nightmares instead of writing--has struck.
Instead, I'll have to blame the clumsiness on my slow adjustment to my schedule and my general lack of coordination.
Why, if I am so jealous of the vanished space (time) in which to write, am I playing City of Heroes again? Especially now, with only a month or so left until the entire game shuts down? That, too, has to do with writing.
I am chasing a particular kind of space in my brain within the game. COH has always been a cheat for evoking that kind of Saturday morning, cartoony dreaminess. I don't care about the exaggerations of violence and romance that pop through the average novel. I'm looking for the kind of suspension that a great poem or a flowing Tolkien passage gives me, the kind of sunlight-on-the-grass, bicycle-on-the-sidewalk, you-are-air, sunlight, and world-in-miniature feeling that I used to get just from being in motion. That rambling sense that you could find a passable wonder just over there just before your safe return.
For whatever graphical reason, COH sparks that in my head. It is, perhaps, a cheat; however, it is a cheat that gives me a sense of breathing room where formerly I had none and a good excuse to blast frustrations at the same time.
Perhaps I am too anxious a person to be a brave writer. Safety and suspension are great for swimming and biking but not so much for sustaining a plot. I would never jam a pen into the hand of my characters and they are the poorer for it.
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