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?