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I am so sick of snow I could cry.
Getting home after work wasn't too bad (I left after 8 hours instead of staying 8.5, so I that was a half hour "early".) The snow definitely started picking up on the drive, though. The worst of the storm is supposed to dump an inch per hour near the city, and two inches per hour up in the foothills. I live and work in between, so... yuck. I am very much not looking forward to going in tomorrow.
I also woke up stupid early (for me at least) because the wind was so loud, though that did mean I got to appreciate (from afar) the nice morning fog we had. Although I then felt weirdly like... inspired? this morning? Not sure why, but I had little snippets of context-less dialogue occurring to me as I went through my morning routine. It's a small thing, but it was nice.
When I was a weird undiagnosed ADHD kid/teen who lived a 15-20 minute drive from my friends, I spent a LOT of afternoons and evenings wandering around my backyard just... reciting dialogue or narration from stories I made up. Maybe I'd act out some one-sided fight scenes with a nice sturdy stick or dried rose vine. Sometimes it was whole epic things beginning to end, spanning days or weeks; sometimes the same scene over and over as I refined it; sometimes little tiny bits of conversation that didn't connect to anything else. (And on bad-weather days, I'd do the same in my room.)
Some of them were proto-fanfic, before I knew what that was. Sometimes it was a "file off the serial numbers" version of a show or a book I'd enjoyed. Some of them were original creations, or based around some very simple little bit of inspiration. A lot was tropey mary-sue-y stuff, but I loved it.
I tried to write some of them down, but writing it (by hand or typing) was so SLOW, I couldn't ever keep up with my thoughts or my attention, and I'd get easily frustrated when I couldn't find the words as easily as I did when talking to myself. What made it to paper never matched what was in my head, the dialogue and description clunky and awkward. It wasn't fun (even though this was when I started to be a vaguely-"aspiring" writer), and so I would rather do more of the playacting than the writing, because that WAS fun. [I DID commit to writing down quick little summaries of each idea that I messed with, and those are STILL the word docs, migrated between many computers, I use for my story and fic ideas.]
Part of my reluctance to write stories down was also me being self-conscious, I'm sure: I had already internalized, even as a kid of 12 or 13, that "aspiring novelist" was a cliche worthy of mockery, and was very aware that I should be embarrassed to say something like that about myself, because I'd never be successful at it.
Part of me would give a lot to have committed some of my playing around to tape recorder, since I didn't write it down, but part of me is also glad I didn't. That would have probably made me self-conscious about that, too.
Midway through high school my parents split up, and our house with the amazing backyard (seriously, just the best backyard a half-acre could be) got sold, and my time was suddenly split between two townhomes with teeny little patios instead. At the same time, my friendships strengthened, and the newfound geographic closeness meant I had more of a social life. All that combined meant I kind of quit that type of thing, or at least spent much less time on it than I used to. (Though I also started actually writing my embarrassing fanfic; it's a trade-off.)
Later on, I'd work through plots and dialogue while walking across campus to class, or when doing repetitive work tasks.
But I don't have physically repetitive tasks that allow my mind to wander anymore at this job, so I don't have that built-in time to work on things.
Anyway, the little snippets of dialogue in my head this morning while brushing my teeth and making toast "felt" like the imaginative play that I used to do when I was a kid, and it was neat, even if it was fleeting.
Getting home after work wasn't too bad (I left after 8 hours instead of staying 8.5, so I that was a half hour "early".) The snow definitely started picking up on the drive, though. The worst of the storm is supposed to dump an inch per hour near the city, and two inches per hour up in the foothills. I live and work in between, so... yuck. I am very much not looking forward to going in tomorrow.
I also woke up stupid early (for me at least) because the wind was so loud, though that did mean I got to appreciate (from afar) the nice morning fog we had. Although I then felt weirdly like... inspired? this morning? Not sure why, but I had little snippets of context-less dialogue occurring to me as I went through my morning routine. It's a small thing, but it was nice.
When I was a weird undiagnosed ADHD kid/teen who lived a 15-20 minute drive from my friends, I spent a LOT of afternoons and evenings wandering around my backyard just... reciting dialogue or narration from stories I made up. Maybe I'd act out some one-sided fight scenes with a nice sturdy stick or dried rose vine. Sometimes it was whole epic things beginning to end, spanning days or weeks; sometimes the same scene over and over as I refined it; sometimes little tiny bits of conversation that didn't connect to anything else. (And on bad-weather days, I'd do the same in my room.)
Some of them were proto-fanfic, before I knew what that was. Sometimes it was a "file off the serial numbers" version of a show or a book I'd enjoyed. Some of them were original creations, or based around some very simple little bit of inspiration. A lot was tropey mary-sue-y stuff, but I loved it.
I tried to write some of them down, but writing it (by hand or typing) was so SLOW, I couldn't ever keep up with my thoughts or my attention, and I'd get easily frustrated when I couldn't find the words as easily as I did when talking to myself. What made it to paper never matched what was in my head, the dialogue and description clunky and awkward. It wasn't fun (even though this was when I started to be a vaguely-"aspiring" writer), and so I would rather do more of the playacting than the writing, because that WAS fun. [I DID commit to writing down quick little summaries of each idea that I messed with, and those are STILL the word docs, migrated between many computers, I use for my story and fic ideas.]
Part of my reluctance to write stories down was also me being self-conscious, I'm sure: I had already internalized, even as a kid of 12 or 13, that "aspiring novelist" was a cliche worthy of mockery, and was very aware that I should be embarrassed to say something like that about myself, because I'd never be successful at it.
Part of me would give a lot to have committed some of my playing around to tape recorder, since I didn't write it down, but part of me is also glad I didn't. That would have probably made me self-conscious about that, too.
Midway through high school my parents split up, and our house with the amazing backyard (seriously, just the best backyard a half-acre could be) got sold, and my time was suddenly split between two townhomes with teeny little patios instead. At the same time, my friendships strengthened, and the newfound geographic closeness meant I had more of a social life. All that combined meant I kind of quit that type of thing, or at least spent much less time on it than I used to. (Though I also started actually writing my embarrassing fanfic; it's a trade-off.)
Later on, I'd work through plots and dialogue while walking across campus to class, or when doing repetitive work tasks.
But I don't have physically repetitive tasks that allow my mind to wander anymore at this job, so I don't have that built-in time to work on things.
Anyway, the little snippets of dialogue in my head this morning while brushing my teeth and making toast "felt" like the imaginative play that I used to do when I was a kid, and it was neat, even if it was fleeting.
