The Errant Soul

The main thing to have achieved this weekend was the latest re-write of the novel ms Working Title: Donald Benton: Superdork.

Strangely, I don’t seem to have finished rewriting it.  I was meant to rewrite the delusion sections over the weekend.  But somehow, I’ve only been working on it for the last three hours, and some of that I spent making and eating dinner and some just staring into space, so I’ve only actually re-done the first chapter/story.  Well, actually I was daydreaming various scenarios that happen to not be the story I’m currently writing, but sort of spun off from it.  I suppose at least they count as taking breaks from the computer.

I did manage to trap The Slayer again and continue to babble at him about the story, so he now knows everything that happens in it practically word for word without actually having read a single sentence. 

And socialising while constructively discussing writing, inspiration and other such ideas is a good enough reason not to have been working on the writing, because I was working on the writing, just mentally rather than physically. 

I’m more worried that I seem to have done nothing else with the week.

I started tidying the room last Monday and I think it’s actually messier now than it was.  And I’m supposed to be enrolling to do a computer course so I can get a job, but the course is during the day so I won’t be able to do both it and a job.  I can’t decide what to do.  Mainly because I’ve given it no thought whatever.

I can’t believe how long it has been since I worked.  I don’t remember last year at all.  I deliberately took time off at the start of 2010 to focus on the writing, and I got loads done while I lived in that nasty scum hole down in the city, too depressed and scared to do anything else.  Outside there were thugs who beat each other up in the middle of the road, inside there was a ghost. 

Yet, even though I can remember just feeling so utterly flat and alone all the time, I wrote about three novels in five months.   But then another seven months went past, this time in lovely, refreshing, soul reviving suburbia, and I was much happier and didn’t feel depressed or lonely any more, and I know I’ve been writing, but it’s all been rewriting, editing, transforming etc, and no actual brand new projects so it’s hard to actually see my progress, even though I know it must be there. 

Still, I’m actually confident with what I’m doing here, with Working Title: Donald Benton: Superdork.  I really must get a ‘person I babble at’ for all my writing.  It’s extraordinary how not only can that outside source mirror my own thoughts and themes back at me with a clarity I previously fogged, but just defining the problems I face, even without resolving them, helps me so much in getting through them.  Because now I know the enemy.

Not that I consider my writing to be the enemy.  It’s more like I have to rescue it from the enemy that’s entwining it.  Yes, being a writer is some kind of heroic rescue mission, and not just me selfishly entertaining myself.  That’s me scrabbling for some self-worth in life. 

This reminds me.  I hate Toy Story 3.  I felt as if my life had drained away when I saw it at the cinema.  And today I had a nice defining rant about why.

SPOLIER.  At the end, Andy is leaving for university and taking Woody with him.  Woody decides instead to stay with a little girl he met during the film.  Woody leaves Andy. 

Ignoring that this completely undermines every ounce and inch of Woody’s character previously set up in the first two films (in which he will never ever abandon Andy even if it means he won’t be played with any more), my problem with this ending is this:

Toys give unconditional love.  Friends and lovers come and go, pets must be fed and looked after, parents are full of expectations, but toys ask nothing at all.  They are your first love, yet their being/personality/life is created entirely from you.  You are the one that instils in them this love that they give you.  They are your own self-love reflected back; they are inexorably a part of you, giving you confidence in your own life.  So the idea that your favourite toy could abandon you is the one thing in all existence that will always love you not doing so; it is losing part of your own being that was there from the very beginning.  For a toy to choose to leave its owner, is for that owner to lose their soul.

The very concept chills and terrifies me.