Missing

"There's been another disappearance."

Smallish town - not too big, not so small everyone knows everyone. GI-sized would do. Over the course of a hot, sweaty summer, random people start disappearing. First it was the homeless man who lived under a bridge just outside of town. He was only missed because he would his daily rounds around the south end of town looking for cans to recycle and had made a few acquaintances on his rounds - people he would nod and smile at as he walked by, shopkeepers and the like. They noticed he stopped coming by but didn't think much of it figuring he'd probably just moved on.

Next person to disappear was a junior high student. A girl who walked home every day. She didn't have far to walk really, a few blocks, but on the last day of school she left the school and never arrived at home. There was a panic, a lot of new coverage and pleas for help or info but as the days turned into weeks and others began disappearing, her family began to lose hope and media attention always seemed to turn to the latest disappearance.

Two weeks after the student, a young man, 22-ish, goes missing on his way to his job at a construction site. He's relatively new in town. He came with his girlfriend who wanted to move closer to her family. He was going to propose the night of his disappearance.

The police have no leads. Absolutely no evidence at all to give them any kind of clue as to what happened. But while they treat both missing person cases very seriously, they haven't yet decided to tie the cases together. Instead they treat them as separate but coincidental cases.

Until the next person goes missing. This time it's an older man, mid-late 40s. A prominent real estate agent. He was on his way to show a house. The buyers waited as long as they could before they began calling the office to ask after him. Some confusion ensues as they try to retrace his steps. His wife is called and when it's established he's gone missing, she freaks out because she's been following the news on the other missing cases. She raises a huge stink with the cops and it catalyzes them into... I don't know but somehow the missing agent makes them realize they've got a serial kidnapper/s on their hands. But there has been no ransom demands. Nothing. everyone's distraught and frustrated.

Throughout the summer, periodically another person goes missing. And there's no apparent common thing to connect all of the cases. It's so random. By August and with 3 or 4 more missing cases to add to the count, the Police chief resigns under public pressure who deem him ineffectual.

But where I'm going with this... or where I WANT to go is eventually we come to the missing people who've all been snatched, drugged, and left in an abandoned but locked down asylum. Before you say a word, I've never seen any of the Saw movies. There's no psycho chasing these folks. Just a crazy asylum escapee who misses the former residents. Or something. I may have to give up on the asylum thing. I don't think I can work it into the missing persons thing. I just love the site opacity.us so much and I'm fascinated by his images of abandoned places. I want to work up a story for them.

But then GI currently has a young man who's gone missing and the story is just weird to me which got me thinking about a town like GI where random people just go missing. I thought about it to creep myself out a little but I haven't gotten to the point of where they disappeared to and how it all gets solved.

Anyway, this feels nice. Some ideas are kicking around the noggin and that is of the good.

Twice now I've written a few paragraphs in this big empty box and twice now I've deleted what I wrote. Funny how you get words out, a beginning, a bit of characterization and then, on a whim and with the push of a button, it's gone, as if it never existed. Just like that, Sam the girl who's lover had just been killed and Unnamed Character #2 who was in the middle of dumpster-diving and being jealous of people who threw perfectly good pizzas away are gone.

Weird.

I began this a few minutes ago with no direction or any idea of what I wanted to write - I only felt a compulsion to write *something* and those two characters emerged from the old noggin. Then I got to thinking that a) I don't want to write about love and loss, and b) neither do I want to write about a poor homeless waif struggling on the mean streets.

God I'd kill for a decent story idea. Can't focus. Part of me wants to write some mindless fanfic just to get back into practice. Part of me wants to not use fanfic as a crutch and just get serious about it already. Wonder if a freewrite would be helpful.

Oh hell I'll give it a go. The following babble is a result of 10 minutes of uninterrupted trains of thoughts and streams of consciousness. Feel free to skip it because my brain's pretty weird.

Aaaand go.

SO I want to write. Always wanted to churn out something wicked and delicious and that makes readers go 'guh' after they read it. But never felt like I could pull it off. I always feel unfocused. I've written fanfic in the past. Years ago in fact and only in a specific genre which I will not name here for fear that it's still out there on the net somewhere, floating and lost. And I'll say it. I was good. I had actual fans. Complete strangers would email me and tell me they loved my writing. People who had no connection to me, no reason to "be nice" because they knew me or whatever. Fanfic is dangerous in a way because it can totally feed a writer's ego. I became SUCH the feedback whore. I loved it and the more I got the more I wrote. And when I sort of grew away from that fandom and stopped writing fanfic, the feedback was the hardest thing to give up. So I started this blog oh so long ago in the hopes it would encourage m to write my own stuff instead of using established characters and putting them into whatever dark situations my mind could come up with. Tried nanowrimo, felt like too much work gave up on it. Couldn't get a workable story. that's always been my problem. Following a story through to conclusion. Mom used to write out elaborate character sketches. She filled notebooks with them and story ideas would be written in the margins of notebooks. I don't do that. That's what this blog was supposed to be really. My launching pad. And so, when the itch comes back to write I'll have a place to scratch it. I have stuff I have to get past though. See previous post about fears and obstacles that make me give up. And I have to condition myself to actually use this place for crap like this that will only be interesting to me to read. Know it's out there in blogland for anyone to stumble across but with all the noise out there, I hardly think this will draw attention.

Ok not quite ten minutes but I stopped because It ain't helping and this laptop keyboard is teh suck.

I'm giving myself an exercise though. I'm taking an hour, shutting off the XM, shutting my bedroom door, asking the kid to keep the cat away from me and I'm going to pour out as many story ideas i can think of in here no matter how lame and then sift through the muck and see if anything's viable. Will do this later today.

Long time

Thought I'd forgotten about this blog. Nope. Just have been completely idea-less for well over a year now. How sad is that? I do get vague, half-formed story ideas once in a while, but nothing ever comes of them. Either I don't pursue because I'm basically lazy, or there's just nothing to them.

So I can bitch and moan all I like about how "someday" I'll write my novel. But when it comes to actually doing it, I get hit with silly things like 'practicalities' and no story ideas. Practicalities like, I don't have the first clue how one goes about getting a book published. It seems like hard work. Pour your blood sweat and tears into your work of art, and package it up and bundle it off to publishing houses and hope it doesn't get lost in the mountain of other wannabe's works of art waiting to be read? Do you have to have an agent? How does one get an agent if one is, how shall we say, poor?

Do you go with the route that seems to be popular right now which is starting a blog about something quirky, get it popular, hope it gets noticed by the right people and wake up one morning with an offer to publish a novel based on your blogs?

See, these are the things that pummel my brain just when I think I've hit on a fantastic idea and the lazy part of my brain just says, "Oh fuck it. Too much work." And I give up.

Someday I will reconcile those parts of my brain and maybe get something accomplished. Someday. Until then, the lonely stragglers who stumble on this pathetic blog will just have to stumble onto the next one.