“I felt he found my letters and read each one out loud…”

Obviously this post’s title comes from the Roberta Flack classic “Killing Me Softly.”  I find that this song has a lot to do with the emotional process of writing.  Just like a couple of posts back, I think as writers we tend to put a bit of ourselves into our work. 

At the same time though, I think that when we are working through a lot of stuff in our own lives it becomes harder for us to write.  We have too much of our emotions going on to sort out the thoughts of anyone else that we are creating.  I know that for me personally it’s harder to write when I’ve got so much going on.

With that having been said up to tonight I had only written one poem and all the posts on this blog this year.  Two whole months and not much to show for it.  Last year I had a stellar year and each month kept cranking out good work.  This year I’ve had a hard time getting back into the groove.  It’s been hard to sort out my own emotions to get to the good writing.

But I’m glad to say that I, in a sense, forced myself to write tonight.  And not just this blog post.  I did something small that I could submit today.  Since not many people read this, most of  you already know about twitter and the fact that twitter has fiction markets.  That’s what I chose to submit to tonight.

I’ve been published twice last year at @Tweetthemeat.  Most weeks of the year they have themes and this week’s theme was voodoo.  I sat down and cranked some creativity and let it loose.

Tonight’s journey was not about whether or not I’m going to have another publication success.  It was more about getting back into the groove, which I did.

What kind of steps have you taken to get yourself back on track?

For a Moment You Could Not Recall the Color of His Eyes

So this blog title takes itself from the amazing song “The Windmills of Your Mind,” by french pop icon Michel Legrand.  It was written for the movie The Thomas Crown Affair. 

I’ve been sick for about five days now, and have had the most fantastical dreams.  I’m not talking about the typical Gossip Girl dreams that most people have where the people that they already know get connected in regular fashions replaying some sort of drama out that normally doesn’t happen.  I’m talking strangeness.

“Like a circle in a spiral or a wheel within a wheel.  Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning wheel.  Like a snowball on a mountain or a carnival balloon, or a carousel that’s turning running rings around the moon.  Like a clocks whose hands are sweeping past the minutes on its face, and the world is like an apple whirling silently in space.  Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind.”  – lyrics from “The Windmills of Your Mind” by Alan and Marilyn Bergman

It all goes round and round, inside itself and out.  Just like the lyrics from the song.  As my fever rose, pixels blew into images and scenes played out upon the landscape.  I was trying to uncover mysteries and looking for different ways to break down scenarios.  Homicides with paper plates and property theft of buttons, everything tied together.  Nothing seemed out of place.  Like a circle in a spiral, and so forth.

So, how often have you not been able to recall the color of his eyes?

“Begin my studies with this paper and this pencil; and I’m working through the grammar of my fears”

What exactly would be the grammar of your fears?  This post’s title come from the song “Language or the Kiss” by the Indigo Girls, from their Swamp Ophelia album.

I’ve long thought that as writers we put ourselves into our writing.  Not just that we create worlds, but we inhabit those places.  A part of us is in every structure and every story arc.  And I’m not just talking about non-fiction writers who obviously fill their experiences into their writing.  I’m talking about fiction and poetry writers.

I know that I find myself constantly sticking in things about my life within the walls of stories that I’ve written.  Some authors stick to familiar ground when writing and set all of their stories in areas that they’ve lived.  Other writers add significant historical events into their stories that impacted their lives.  Then you have the authors that name characters and places after people they know.

Finally you come to people like me.  I take all the quirky things in my life fill my landscapes with them.  My character’s oddities are sometimes taken from my world.  In one story I had a character who had a game that she had to do to fall asleep every night.  She would think of a topic, and then start at the letter A and come up with something for each letter until she hit Z.  If she couldn’t fall asleep she would then pick another topic, and start it all over again.

That’s my quirk.  I’ve always had a hard time unwinding when I try to go to sleep and my mind won’t shut off.  Instead of thinking about the millions of things going on in my life and not being able to get to sleep I created that little “game” to get to sleep at night.  It’s different and somewhat off-beat, so I ended up giving that same trait to one of my characters.

I wonder how much of themselves other author’s put into their writing?  Am I just so quirky that I can’t keep it contained?  What part of you has seeped into your stories?

No One’s Picking Up the Phone, Guess it’s Me and Me

I know it’s an odd way to start off my blog, and actually the header is a song quote from Tori Amos’ “Hey Jupiter” off her Boys for Pele cd.  I plan on using song quotes for all my headers (at least for a while).  Why you ask?  For me I think music is one of the first things that I connected to the writing world when I was growing up.  I always listened to music, and had the radio playing all the time.  Music lyrics were the first form of poetry that I encountered.  The stories that unfolded fascinated me, and sent my mind into spinning oceans and underground caverns.  I saw worlds that didn’t exist in my suburban life.  While neighbors were walking dogs and my parents were fighting I got caught up in the singer/songwriters of the late seventies and the dystopian steam-punkish worlds of the new wave artists of the early eighties.

This actually leads into one of the biggest debates with many writers – to have music playing while writing or not.  Some people need complete silence and others need constant noise.  I am of the smallest lot, not only do I need music playing, but I need music with lyrics.  I get transported into some strange temporal vortex, and worlds start to form at the edge of my mind.  It’s as if I’m in a zombie trance from a black and white horror flick.  (Think along the lines of the 1943 flick I Walked With a Zombie).  Words just start to flow, and time disappears, and eventually I snap out of it and stare at the screen.  A poem or story sits staring back.

As of late, I’ve been in a creative funk, and haven’t had much come out.  Then again I haven’t listened to much music lately.  Hopefully I will get myself back on track and have submissions ready to go out soon.

How many of you out there listen to music with lyrics?  Or is no one picking up the phone again?