It would appear that I found my motivation, which has been MIA since the end of last year.
The key was answering some questions for an interview I’d agreed to do several weeks ago, but never finished because I was doing other stuff. I knew it had to be done, though, so part of my brain was constantly working on it, while other parts of my brain checked in on its progress, and bugged me to give it the attention it deserved.
If I think of my brain as a computer (and what geek doesn’t, really?) it was like my CPU was maxed out and my machine load was in the double digits, because of this process. Once I closed down everything else and let it finish, performance returned to normal.
With my CPU back to normal, a ton of creative ideas started popping up, so to shake off the cobwebs and stretch the muscles that haven’t moved very much in over a month, I wrote a new ficlet. It got the job done for me, creatively, and it would be okay on its own, but became worthy of mentioning on my blog when two other ficlet writers did sequels. Mine is called A Godawful Small Affair:
“I want to move to Mars, and open up a bar,” Gregor said.
Matti inhaled deeply, and let a cloud of pale blue smoke surround his head.
“What would you call it?” Matti said.
“Moonage Daydream.” Gregor said.
Check it out, and be sure to read both sequels. I think they’re great, and illustrate exactly why Ficlets is such a great place to take creative risks: I didn’t much care about these characters when I wrote mine, but after reading the sequels and seeing my rough sketches develop some shading and depth, I want to know what happens next. I may even write it myself, once I get my "real" work done.
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I have to admit I’m curious as to what happens next. Thanks for putting up the link on your blog. I actually clicked through yesterday from Twitter, but there wasn’t the sequals then.
~~TARA~~
I’d never heard of Ficlets, yet I spent an hour reading stories yesterday. I also forewarded it to my brother and friend Ian [the guy who was in Iraq… you met his wife], since this was something right up their alley! Thanks for the link.
Oh, also, this was just sent to my mailbox.
Gross Wil. Gross. 😉 http://www.doubleviking.com/videos/tag/weird/page0.html/7844.html
I thought this post was going to be about the fantastic TV show “Life on Mars,” which wrapped up its run on BBC America a couple weeks ago.
You see? Here you are influencing us all to go to the other site and read your story, where of course we have to go read the sequels by other people, read their other stories, and it goes on from there. And sign up if we want to make comments.
Your endorsement does mean a lot.
Ficlets on Mars
For a while now, under that Writing header in the sidebar, its said that Ive been messing around with fiction again. Thats true. At least, its true insofar as Ive done a lot of note-taking and ide…
Thanks for the indirect mention, Wil. I rode your coat-tails onto the front page as the featured Ficlet!
Perfect analogy about your brain being like a CPU. I’ve had so many projects on the go since December, and I have to flit back and forth on them to keep all clients satisfied. Lately gone are the times when I could give my full attention to a project at a time, and move to the next. But it is like major multi-tasking to the point of crashing the CPU. I’ve been mired down in programming (and dammit, I’m not a programmer), so it’d feel elating to actually do some design like I normally do. But I always feel that other stuff nagging at the back of my CPU, and I’d love to get it out of the way and feel free to do the design stuff. So maybe this weekend I should do just that. A system restart.
I will forever be grateful to you for highlighting Ficlets here. So, thank you. 🙂
I’ll have you know that “Life on Mars” has been playing through my head all day after reading this post. I suppose it’s okay as that was a great ficlet and it’s exciting to see where it goes. Just saying… David Bowie… in my head… all day. 🙂 It was awesome.
Hi, Wil. Have you ever considered/toyed around with machinima tools that allow you to take this sort of conceptual short fiction to the next level? Something like iClone or Moviestorm?
I’m not a shill for either outfit, but I am curious considering the creative streak that you have and your love of all things “geek.”
Thanks for the link to ficlets. After looking at it some hours ago, I myself am now a published author!!
I didn’t know where to start, so my story was initally inspired by ‘The fifteenth’, but ended up a bit too generic to be a sequel or prequel.
http://ficlets.com/stories/19893
And as my first story, it is a galaxy far far away from being worthy of yours.
But one day I’ll get there, one day . . .
Oh, man, David Bowie. Excellent. Thanks for the ficlets link, looks excellent.
And here I thought I was the only one geeky enough to think that way. :^) Except that I tend to further divide the concept into foreground and background processes with a sort of moveable divider between the two sides.
Like all CPUs, my brain has only so much computing power. If there’s something my brain/CPU is working (usually unpleasant) that requires more effort than I really want to devote to it, it gets relegated to the status of “background process.” Unfortunately, as the background process(es) grow in number and complexity, the amount of resources for foreground procs gets further and further squeezed. If it gets bad enough, mental paralysis the usual result until either the offending process is killed or finally runs to completion. (It’s always SUCH a relief after that.)
Anyway, just wanted to chuck my $0.02 in. Hopefully it wasn’t the Lamest Inaugural Post Ever…