My emotions have been all over the place lately.
I think it's because I lost my jogging mo-jo. Ever since we moved here, we've gone jogging only that one time. Each morning, I wake up and think, today you will jog. And then I think of the strange, new neighborhood, even though it's a nice neighborhood, and all the strange people that might be watching, and the cars that might almost run me over because I get caught up, and the fact that I haven't jogged now for two weeks, and so will suck at it, and lots of other things, and I don't go.
Swimming sort of off sets this, but it's just not as steady and disciplined an exercise routine.
But Keith has come up with a solution. When we get reimbursed for our moving expenses and all caught up and all that, we will buy a treadmill or other jogging machine/device and put it out by the pool. That way, I can jog for half an hour in the cool morning air, all by my shy self.
In the meantime, I'm just sloppy with anxiety, the anxiety I normally sweat out and the anxiety left over from moving. It lingers.
I'm still working on all four stories. The Ceallach story is over one hundred thousand words. No kidding. I wrote that. Sometimes I have to sit back and just let it sink in. It's almost three hundred pages long.
I'm not sure how much of it I'll keep though. For instance, Ceallach had a little breakdown in the last scene. I know, right? But what you don't know, because I never share those scenes, is that he's actually a fairly vulnerable and sometimes insecure person, though maybe hints of it comes through, as it should. I don't like cast iron heroes.
For some reason, trauma from his past came up into the present and had to be dealt with. Both of them are dealing with a lot of aftermath. The second and third sections are so intense and the respite from horrible or strange or unpleasant things happening are so short, that they simply don't have time to really process how it's affecting them.
Now, they must. So this forth section is turning out to be chock full of internal conflicts, as opposed to the external conflicts that dominated the rest of the story.
But I like that, about my stories. It annoys me when I read a story that doesn't illuminate what it really feels like to experience something fantastical, something breathtaking, something terrifying. Frequently, I have noticed over the years, in some stories, the characters just adjust- go through some initial identity struggle until they take up their predestined fate and forward they go.
I want to know what it feels like, you know? I want to know the nitty-gritty. So I try to write that stuff out in my own stories, since I'm as much a reader of my own story as anyone else, when I'm first writing it. But this last scene might be a bit much. It might cause the reader to wonder just what genre they're reading; is it a psychological drama, a fantasy adventure, or a romance novel? Like, what the heck?
And just because I know that something is true for a character does not mean that it must be revealed in the story. After all, I could, if I wished, write out their entire lives, but I'm trying to write a story, not a biography.
