The Secretary Will Disavow Any Knowledge

A Kept Boy by poisontaster. (CWRPS AU, primarily Jeffrey Dean Morgan/Jensen Ackles)
A Kept Boy is an RPS AU involving slavery, abuse (adult and child) in all forms (verbal, physical, mental), inequalities of power, and dark, adult concepts regarding same. At heart, it's a love story, but it goes through some bad, dark places to get there. Be warned, if any of these are not your cup of tea. This is in no way a true story. Other stories in this universe/vein can be found at whatwekeep. Banner by the generous and talented bloodquartz.

Started: July 10, 2008
Ended: < TBD >
Current completed chapters: 55
Current Word Count: 111,540

Cast of Characters

( Chapter listing & outtakes )

My mother passed early yesterday morning. If I am absent from LJ for a little while, this is why.

Going to Chicago again. Things with my mom are worse and I can't not be there. I'll post when I can, but I don't know when that will be.

For those of you who write, you know that point in a story where you just want to scream at it: "Why won't you just do what I tell you??"

Yeah.

There were going to be 75 chapters. Yeah, not so much.

Getting rid of Mary-Louise, finding out about Bodhi, Jensen's mom…I was totes going to be able to cover those in a single chapter each. Ha. Yeah, not so much.

I can't even begin to dissect how many scenes there are that I thought were going to go one way and, somewhere in transition, took a left at Albuquerque when they should've taken a right.

Don't get me wrong. To date, La Muse hasn't led me wrong in these unexpected detours. I think the stories that have resulted have always ended up being stronger and better than my original conceptions. As well, it's a pretty common writerly phenomenon.

That just doesn't make it any less annoying when it happens. And it doesn't make me feel any less like a maidservant trying to get her mistress into a dress that's entirely too small for her, fingers wrapped in the laces, foot planted firmly in her back and heaving for all I'm worth.

I know where I want to go. I know that. But the scenarios that have evolved have done so in a way that makes it impossible to resolve them as quickly as I first thought I'd be able to. Which means I then end up adding things, trying to course correct and bring them back around to where I think they should be (which doesn't always work) and that means I generally hit up at a point where the two ends don't meet and I'm at a loss how to bring them back together.

I just wrote myself off a cliff. I'm at a loss how to bring the ends back together.

And I'll figure it out. I always do. The boys at the brain farm are always working. But having built up so much momentum in the last couple scenes, it does feel a bit like slamming face-first into a screen door and falling on my ass (I speak from sad, pathetic experience, here). And there's always that initial panicky reaction of, Oh crap. Where do I go from here?

Me and the boys on the farm have some musing to do.

Fandom: CWRPS
Pairing: Jeff/Jensen, Jared/Jensen
Rating: Adult
Warnings: Slavefic AU. Sexual, mental and physical abuse of adults and minors. Dark themes, adult concepts and language.
Disclaimer: This is in no way a true story.
Word Count: 2,900
AN: Master list of previous chapters found here. Cast of characters can be found here. Banner by the lovely and generous bloodquartz. Podfic version read by the amazing superstitiousme (found here, courtesy of the very kind general_jinjur). And don't forget the other really awesome stories to be found at whatwekeep.

---

( It's beautiful here. )

I was putting together what new material I have for Appetite and I was really pretty shocked at how little it comes out to be, when assembled. Part of the reason for this is that there are two scenes that I've spent a lot of words on, but it was all writing and rewriting them, trying to find the "right" take for them. So there's verbiage, but most of it is garbage. Or…if not garbage, than discards and it's a real struggle for me to be Zen about this and say that it will come when it comes and accept that with equanimity. There are some stories I can bull my way through. I used to be better at bulling my way through a stubborn story. But now it's a talent that seems to have deserted me and, as usual, I'm not sure how to recover it.

On the other hand, I feel like AKB is going like gangbusters. Which is awesome and I am thankful for that, but, at the same time, it's hard not to feel like my success with AKB and that all my excitement and creativity going toward it is detracting from my other goals. And while a part of me doesn't want it to end, the glimmering of the end on the horizon is also a relief. Of course, it also brings up a certain morbid curiosity about what, exactly, will take its place as the object of my obsession. And, of course, the fear that nothing will.

In my current spate of 'trashy' reading, I'm reading LKH's Skin Trade and I realized a big part of the many, many things that bother me about the Anita Blake books (and their [de]evolution over time) is the distinct lack of femaleness.

( A little more about that. Not specifically spoilery. )

Another thing that I really want to write about, but haven't quite figured out how to talk about it without potentially offending people, is mini_nanowrimo. On the one hand, I understand that it, like anything writing related, is a tool and what people get out of it and how they use it and what it means to them is entirely individual. I can't dispute that. I can't argue with that.

But, at the same time, I confess to a certain (un-modly, personal) frustration when people either miss a day of writing or miss a day of posting and decide to pack it up and give up on the challenge entirely. I mean…I get the disappointment of not meeting the goals that you've set for yourself. Boy howdy, do I get that! And I do understand the impulse that, if you cannot be perfect, you'd rather be nothing at all.

But I also feel like it's a childish impulse, in its way. The older I get (and the theoretically wiser) the more I think less and care less about perfection and care and think more about perseverance.

The way we do one thing is the way we do everything. In this life, we make mistakes, we fail. We fail in so many ways. Some failure is inevitable. And, generally speaking, we don't have the option of packing it in, taking our ball and going home. Generally, we have to stick it out, strap it on and clean up our messes. And I find a certain grace in that. Much more grace, in some ways, than the people who do manage some level of perfection, because it takes guts to faceplant and then get up again and move on. I feel like we spend so much time trying to self-talk ourselves and everyone else into not making any mistakes, to being perfect and we spend none of that time teaching ourselves or each other how to recover from those inevitable failures. Or that a failure doesn't need to be the end of everything. And that a failure in one part doesn't equal complete catastrophe.

( Some more thoughts on the matter. (The opinions within are those of poisontaster, and do not represent the comm as a whole or in part.) )

I was putting together what new material I have for Appetite and I was really pretty shocked at how little it comes out to be, when assembled. Part of the reason for this is that there are two scenes that I've spent a lot of words on, but it was all writing and rewriting them, trying to find the "right" take for them. So there's verbiage, but most of it is garbage. Or…if not garbage, than discards and it's a real struggle for me to be Zen about this and say that it will come when it comes and accept that with equanimity. There are some stories I can bull my way through. I used to be better at bulling my way through a stubborn story. But now it's a talent that seems to have deserted me and, as usual, I'm not sure how to recover it.

On the other hand, I feel like AKB is going like gangbusters. Which is awesome and I am thankful for that, but, at the same time, it's hard not to feel like my success with AKB and that all my excitement and creativity going toward it is detracting from my other goals. And while a part of me doesn't want it to end, the glimmering of the end on the horizon is also a relief. Of course, it also brings up a certain morbid curiosity about what, exactly, will take its place as the object of my obsession. And, of course, the fear that nothing will.

In my current spate of 'trashy' reading, I'm reading LKH's Skin Trade and I realized a big part of the many, many things that bother me about the Anita Blake books (and their [de]evolution over time) is the distinct lack of femaleness.

( A little more about that. Not specifically spoilery. )

Another thing that I really want to write about, but haven't quite figured out how to talk about it without potentially offending people, is mini_nanowrimo. On the one hand, I understand that it, like anything writing related, is a tool and what people get out of it and how they use it and what it means to them is entirely individual. I can't dispute that. I can't argue with that.

But, at the same time, I confess to a certain (un-modly, personal) frustration when people either miss a day of writing or miss a day of posting and decide to pack it up and give up on the challenge entirely. I mean…I get the disappointment of not meeting the goals that you've set for yourself. Boy howdy, do I get that! And I do understand the impulse that, if you cannot be perfect, you'd rather be nothing at all.

But I also feel like it's a childish impulse, in its way. The older I get (and the theoretically wiser) the more I think less and care less about perfection and care and think more about perseverance.

The way we do one thing is the way we do everything. In this life, we make mistakes, we fail. We fail in so many ways. Some failure is inevitable. And, generally speaking, we don't have the option of packing it in, taking our ball and going home. Generally, we have to stick it out, strap it on and clean up our messes. And I find a certain grace in that. Much more grace, in some ways, than the people who do manage some level of perfection, because it takes guts to faceplant and then get up again and move on. I feel like we spend so much time trying to self-talk ourselves and everyone else into not making any mistakes, to being perfect and we spend none of that time teaching ourselves or each other how to recover from those inevitable failures. Or that a failure doesn't need to be the end of everything. And that a failure in one part doesn't equal complete catastrophe.

( Some more thoughts on the matter. (The opinions within are those of poisontaster, and do not represent the comm as a whole or in part.) )

Fandom: CWRPS
Pairing: Jeff/Jensen, Jared/Jensen
Rating: Adult
Warnings: Slavefic AU. Sexual, mental and physical abuse of adults and minors. Dark themes, adult concepts and language.
Disclaimer: This is in no way a true story.
Word Count: 2,234
AN: Master list of previous chapters found here. Cast of characters can be found here. Banner by the lovely and generous bloodquartz. Podfic version read by the amazing superstitiousme (found here, courtesy of the very kind general_jinjur). And don't forget the other really awesome stories to be found at whatwekeep.

---

( This is coming out all wrong again, isn't it? )

Back in Frederick. It's a strange day when that feels like a relief. Things are not good with my mom, but I also don't really want to talk about it, especially on this LJ, which has a different focus than my personal LJ. However: I would like to thank all of you for your support, prayers and kind wishes.

While mooching around the hospital, I managed to finish two books: a re-read of Stephen King's Misery, which is one of my absolute favorite books and Charlaine Harris's new book, Grave Secret. I also managed to hit my mini_nanowrimo word count every day--mostly out of sheer stubbornness, I admit, not to mention the long hours of nothing much to do. Of course, now that I'm trying to think about it, I hardly remember what I was working on.

I know I'm about a thousand words into the next piece of AKB, but I'm unsure about how I feel about it. I was about 5 or 6 hundred words in when I realized/I thought/I decided I was using the wrong POV character. And I'm still a little undecided about whether I can make it work with the POV I started in or whether I'm going to have to scrap it all and start over. It's one of those scenes where I wish I could convincingly have it both ways and cram both POVs into a single, unbroken scene.

I worked some on Appetite, thankfully. If things in the real world go the way they seem like they're going to, I'm going to need to get even MORE serious about putting myself out there. I still feel so ambivalent about it all, though. I feel like I've lost some essential spark of knowing these characters. They feel like caricatures of themselves and I don't know how to get around that to the honest place.

Trine has been turning up in the mental hopper at unexpected moments. I think that realizing what kind of tack I was going to take with this story really broke some things loose, though, to be fair, it's more in the prewriting stages than in the actual writing. But I have what looks like the beginning and that's not nothing.

I really need to get onboard with my Yuletide story. I couldn't manage to read my entire flist from the point I went AWOL to now, but even reading the purgated "do or die" version of it, it seems like the mods did a superlative job of matching this year. ...I wish I felt the same. And now I'm trying to think about how to talk about this without giving too much away, but let's leave it at this: the fandom is great. The mods did (and do) a great job. I just don't do well when people give me a "Oh, write anything!" prompt with no greater direction. In the world of fandom, I'm a niche, midlist writer and I feel like what interests me, in terms of storytelling, is not going to be what interests the average reader. So there's that. I also need to reaquaint myself with the source material quick, fast and in a hurry.

Here's an interesting question: at what point do you give up on a book you're reading? I've had Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in my "currently-reading" queue for months now, but the truth is that, despite my deep love of zombies, I'm not finding it funny or entertaining enough to hold my interest. So should I give up on it entirely and acknowledge that I'm probably never going to care enough to sludge through it, or should I persist, in the idea that I've started it and now I should press on through to the end? What do you do? If you start a book, do you feel obligated to finish it or do you discard it easily the minute it ceases to keep your interest?

Back in Frederick. It's a strange day when that feels like a relief. Things are not good with my mom, but I also don't really want to talk about it, especially on this LJ, which has a different focus than my personal LJ. However: I would like to thank all of you for your support, prayers and kind wishes.

While mooching around the hospital, I managed to finish two books: a re-read of Stephen King's Misery, which is one of my absolute favorite books and Charlaine Harris's new book, Grave Secret. I also managed to hit my mini_nanowrimo word count every day--mostly out of sheer stubbornness, I admit, not to mention the long hours of nothing much to do. Of course, now that I'm trying to think about it, I hardly remember what I was working on.

I know I'm about a thousand words into the next piece of AKB, but I'm unsure about how I feel about it. I was about 5 or 6 hundred words in when I realized/I thought/I decided I was using the wrong POV character. And I'm still a little undecided about whether I can make it work with the POV I started in or whether I'm going to have to scrap it all and start over. It's one of those scenes where I wish I could convincingly have it both ways and cram both POVs into a single, unbroken scene.

I worked some on Appetite, thankfully. If things in the real world go the way they seem like they're going to, I'm going to need to get even MORE serious about putting myself out there. I still feel so ambivalent about it all, though. I feel like I've lost some essential spark of knowing these characters. They feel like caricatures of themselves and I don't know how to get around that to the honest place.

Trine has been turning up in the mental hopper at unexpected moments. I think that realizing what kind of tack I was going to take with this story really broke some things loose, though, to be fair, it's more in the prewriting stages than in the actual writing. But I have what looks like the beginning and that's not nothing.

I really need to get onboard with my Yuletide story. I couldn't manage to read my entire flist from the point I went AWOL to now, but even reading the purgated "do or die" version of it, it seems like the mods did a superlative job of matching this year. ...I wish I felt the same. And now I'm trying to think about how to talk about this without giving too much away, but let's leave it at this: the fandom is great. The mods did (and do) a great job. I just don't do well when people give me a "Oh, write anything!" prompt with no greater direction. In the world of fandom, I'm a niche, midlist writer and I feel like what interests me, in terms of storytelling, is not going to be what interests the average reader. So there's that. I also need to reaquaint myself with the source material quick, fast and in a hurry.

Here's an interesting question: at what point do you give up on a book you're reading? I've had Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in my "currently-reading" queue for months now, but the truth is that, despite my deep love of zombies, I'm not finding it funny or entertaining enough to hold my interest. So should I give up on it entirely and acknowledge that I'm probably never going to care enough to sludge through it, or should I persist, in the idea that I've started it and now I should press on through to the end? What do you do? If you start a book, do you feel obligated to finish it or do you discard it easily the minute it ceases to keep your interest?

Okay. So here's the story.

As many of you know (but probably not all), my mother has cancer. She hasn't been well for a while and today, she got admitted to the hospital for pneumonia. It's not dire or lifethreatening, but I'm going home to Chicago to visit for the next few days. I don't know what kind of internet access or internet time I'm going to have. I'm probably not going to have time to visit my peeps in Chicago, much as I'd like to. So I'm probably/possibly going to be incommunicado for a bit. I love you all and I know y'all love me, but I gotta deal with some crap.

Be excellent to each other.

Watching my lazy, long-haired cat make one of his lacksidaisical periodic attempts to groom himself is pretty hilarious.

Feeling pretty disgruntled today. No good reasons, but sometimes you don't need one. Maybe it's just because I woke up from nightmares about buying a house full of swarming earthworms. *shudders* Just a couple nights ago, I had a dream about a giant demi-god eel. Oh, yes, it's been a barrel of monkeys in my head as of late.

AKB is slowly rolling its way around to its end and, though it still occasionally gives me a panicky pang in my gut to finish something I've been working on so long (and that still has such potential), I'm feeling pretty good about it. Mostly things are falling the way I wanted them to, the way I envisioned them all this time, and that feels good. Mostly, the reactions are just what I hoped for, and that feels good too. And I've enjoyed the conversations it's inspired, the way it's made me think about what I'm doing inside and outside the story.

Appetite, on the other hand, feels like a source of such huge frustrations. My love for the story is so deep and incredible. It's been just about a year since I started writing it and it's still so incredibly present in my life. The obsession isn't quite as deep as that with AKB, but it's close.

And it's hard to say whether it's hard to find the words because I'm not as invested or whether I'm not as invested because the words are so grudging to come...but either way, the words are not coming and a month that I was theoretically supposed to be devoting to Appetite is...not working out that way.

More than that, I don't have a good feel for what's not working. I mean...a lot of times when I feel like I'm veering off course, I can take a good, hard look at it and at least come up with a hypothesis (generally correct) about what to do. And this time, I have no feel for it. It looks good on paper, it looks good to my advisory committee and the only advice that I--or anyone else--can come up with is to just keep forging forward. But that requires words. And words are what I most emphatically do not have.

But the alternative is to accept (temporary) defeat. To stop trying to squeeze these words out and move on to something else, something not so hard. And...I'm not quite ready to do that, either.

Maybe I'm just spinning wheels waiting for my yuletide assignment to magically appear in my inbox.

Watching my lazy, long-haired cat make one of his lacksidaisical periodic attempts to groom himself is pretty hilarious.

Feeling pretty disgruntled today. No good reasons, but sometimes you don't need one. Maybe it's just because I woke up from nightmares about buying a house full of swarming earthworms. *shudders* Just a couple nights ago, I had a dream about a giant demi-god eel. Oh, yes, it's been a barrel of monkeys in my head as of late.

AKB is slowly rolling its way around to its end and, though it still occasionally gives me a panicky pang in my gut to finish something I've been working on so long (and that still has such potential), I'm feeling pretty good about it. Mostly things are falling the way I wanted them to, the way I envisioned them all this time, and that feels good. Mostly, the reactions are just what I hoped for, and that feels good too. And I've enjoyed the conversations it's inspired, the way it's made me think about what I'm doing inside and outside the story.

Appetite, on the other hand, feels like a source of such huge frustrations. My love for the story is so deep and incredible. It's been just about a year since I started writing it and it's still so incredibly present in my life. The obsession isn't quite as deep as that with AKB, but it's close.

And it's hard to say whether it's hard to find the words because I'm not as invested or whether I'm not as invested because the words are so grudging to come...but either way, the words are not coming and a month that I was theoretically supposed to be devoting to Appetite is...not working out that way.

More than that, I don't have a good feel for what's not working. I mean...a lot of times when I feel like I'm veering off course, I can take a good, hard look at it and at least come up with a hypothesis (generally correct) about what to do. And this time, I have no feel for it. It looks good on paper, it looks good to my advisory committee and the only advice that I--or anyone else--can come up with is to just keep forging forward. But that requires words. And words are what I most emphatically do not have.

But the alternative is to accept (temporary) defeat. To stop trying to squeeze these words out and move on to something else, something not so hard. And...I'm not quite ready to do that, either.

Maybe I'm just spinning wheels waiting for my yuletide assignment to magically appear in my inbox.

Fandom: CWRPS
Pairing: Jeff/Jensen; reference to Jensen/Tom Cruise
Rating: Adult
Warnings: Slavefic AU. Reference to underage, dub-con sex. Dark themes, adult concepts and language.
Disclaimer: This is in no way a true story.
Word Count: 913
AN: This is an outtake from the A Kept Boy universe; it takes place six years in the future from the end of the main arc. Written to amuse myself. Mildly spoilery. Familiarity is suggested.

---

( Don't say it's nothing. )

So. As so often occurs, while I want my text to stand on its own, I also have a lot of thought about what's happening at this moment in the story that I want to parse out and dissect, if only for my own peace of mind. Specifically, I want to talk about Robin.

( This is just so unexpected! )

Fandom: CWRPS
Pairing: Jeff/Jensen, Jared/Jensen
Rating: Adult
Warnings: Slavefic AU. Sexual, mental and physical abuse of adults and minors. Dark themes, adult concepts and language.
Disclaimer: This is in no way a true story.
Word Count: 2,644
AN: Master list of previous chapters found here. Cast of characters can be found here. Banner by the lovely and generous bloodquartz. Podfic version read by the amazing superstitiousme (found here, courtesy of the very kind general_jinjur). And don't forget the other really awesome stories to be found at whatwekeep.

---

( Sometimes there's nothing you can do. )

AKB 73: 300 words

Appetite: 259 words

Sometimes my youngest cat likes to plant herself right in front of the door of our apartment. My guess on the matter is that she thinks by doing so, she can prevent us from leaving. Which is both cute and sad.

The last few days have been bad writing days; I'm hoping this is a trend that does NOT continue. You know, I look forward so much to November--NaNo and Thanksgiving--and, at the same time, I always forget how incredibly STRESSFUL November is, invariably. Not even just with those two polestars; it's like November is some kind of freaky magnet for misfortune and frustration, the full moon month of the year.

Anyway. I don't know whether it's because I'm deliberately and consciously trying to work on more than one project at a time or a fundamental fault elsewhere, but I feel like I'm struggling with everything I write so much. The analogy I gave merepersiflage yesterday was trying to follow a bad radio signal, one that keeps fading in and out between curtains of static. There was a brief period of a few paragraphs where I had the voice for Gabe (Appetite) and it felt good and right and then it was gone again and now I can't quite get it back. I know what's supposed to be happening now, but when it comes to actually writing it out, it's an epic battle.

And I'm not really competitive in most arenas, but it's sometimes doubly hard when I'm entering word counts for mini_nanowrimo and I see that people have written 2 or 4 (or more) thousand words that day, while I was grudging out my 500. And some of it is jealousy and some of it is regret because there was a time when *I* could do that and some of it is a nagging sense of failure.

Which I AM trying not to dwell on, believe it or not.

I am starting to wonder if I'm ever going to have the time and ability to do a regular NaNo again, though, as long as I'm tied to mini_nanowrimo. It's a great idea and I very much don't want to see it fail, but it is also INCREDIBLY time-consuming (even with my co-mods taking up an incredible amount of work, omg, thank you, y'all!) and I do sometimes feel resentful that it's taking up so much of my very slender, very precious free time, when I could be using it to write myself. While my writing 'ambitions' (and I use that word laughingly) are erratic and ever-changing and don't necessarily involve publication, I am very jealous and protective of that time. Whether for fun or money, writing is such an important avocation to me. I can't and won't give it up.

AKB 73: 300 words

Appetite: 259 words

Sometimes my youngest cat likes to plant herself right in front of the door of our apartment. My guess on the matter is that she thinks by doing so, she can prevent us from leaving. Which is both cute and sad.

The last few days have been bad writing days; I'm hoping this is a trend that does NOT continue. You know, I look forward so much to November--NaNo and Thanksgiving--and, at the same time, I always forget how incredibly STRESSFUL November is, invariably. Not even just with those two polestars; it's like November is some kind of freaky magnet for misfortune and frustration, the full moon month of the year.

Anyway. I don't know whether it's because I'm deliberately and consciously trying to work on more than one project at a time or a fundamental fault elsewhere, but I feel like I'm struggling with everything I write so much. The analogy I gave merepersiflage yesterday was trying to follow a bad radio signal, one that keeps fading in and out between curtains of static. There was a brief period of a few paragraphs where I had the voice for Gabe (Appetite) and it felt good and right and then it was gone again and now I can't quite get it back. I know what's supposed to be happening now, but when it comes to actually writing it out, it's an epic battle.

And I'm not really competitive in most arenas, but it's sometimes doubly hard when I'm entering word counts for mini_nanowrimo and I see that people have written 2 or 4 (or more) thousand words that day, while I was grudging out my 500. And some of it is jealousy and some of it is regret because there was a time when *I* could do that and some of it is a nagging sense of failure.

Which I AM trying not to dwell on, believe it or not.

I am starting to wonder if I'm ever going to have the time and ability to do a regular NaNo again, though, as long as I'm tied to mini_nanowrimo. It's a great idea and I very much don't want to see it fail, but it is also INCREDIBLY time-consuming (even with my co-mods taking up an incredible amount of work, omg, thank you, y'all!) and I do sometimes feel resentful that it's taking up so much of my very slender, very precious free time, when I could be using it to write myself. While my writing 'ambitions' (and I use that word laughingly) are erratic and ever-changing and don't necessarily involve publication, I am very jealous and protective of that time. Whether for fun or money, writing is such an important avocation to me. I can't and won't give it up.

All my mini_nanowrimo peeps; please note that there's an important announcement on the comm. Anyone who has forgotten to post on a given day so far has a ONE TIME chance to recoup. If you would, spread the word.

Yesterday was a bad day and a bad day for writing. I made my word count, but I've been trying to do double or triple that every day and yesterday I wasn't even close.

On the other hand, the words I wrote were on Appetite, which pleases me. I don't want to let AKB stagnate all month (and there's no worry about that) but Appetite is really my focus. Or I would prefer it was my focus. I've been flitting between three different projects, really.

Started AKB 73 today. Writing for four year olds is HARD, yo.

I'm struggling with Appetite. I'm making new words, I don't hate the words I'm making (for the most part) but at the same time, I feel like I've lost some essential grasp of their characters that I had before and I feel like I lost the window into their world and I'm pressed against the wrong side of the glass, trying to peek through.

I'm doing this thing with my body right now where I feel like I don't know how to fit in it any more. I feel uncomfortable in whatever position I sit in and it's like I don't have any muscle memory for what my body "normally" likes to do, so I'm trying to fake it, but it's not working. It's really messing up my back and my neck and shoulders. And writing Appetite right now is a little like that. I'm HERE and I'm in the body, but I don't remember how it's supposed to move or sit or anything. There's no muscle memory.

...I suspect that made no sense to anyone but me. What can I say? I've had a rough week.

All my mini_nanowrimo peeps; please note that there's an important announcement on the comm. Anyone who has forgotten to post on a given day so far has a ONE TIME chance to recoup. If you would, spread the word.

Yesterday was a bad day and a bad day for writing. I made my word count, but I've been trying to do double or triple that every day and yesterday I wasn't even close.

On the other hand, the words I wrote were on Appetite, which pleases me. I don't want to let AKB stagnate all month (and there's no worry about that) but Appetite is really my focus. Or I would prefer it was my focus. I've been flitting between three different projects, really.

Started AKB 73 today. Writing for four year olds is HARD, yo.

I'm struggling with Appetite. I'm making new words, I don't hate the words I'm making (for the most part) but at the same time, I feel like I've lost some essential grasp of their characters that I had before and I feel like I lost the window into their world and I'm pressed against the wrong side of the glass, trying to peek through.

I'm doing this thing with my body right now where I feel like I don't know how to fit in it any more. I feel uncomfortable in whatever position I sit in and it's like I don't have any muscle memory for what my body "normally" likes to do, so I'm trying to fake it, but it's not working. It's really messing up my back and my neck and shoulders. And writing Appetite right now is a little like that. I'm HERE and I'm in the body, but I don't remember how it's supposed to move or sit or anything. There's no muscle memory.

...I suspect that made no sense to anyone but me. What can I say? I've had a rough week.