I Wonder if Durga Would Lend Me Her Arms

My thoughts are so heavy of late, and I find it hard to lift and arrange them. It's like lifting steel ingots when you have osteogenesis imperfecta. My bones haven't snapped beneath the weight of them yet, but my arms tremble with the effort. Just the thought of bending to them makes me want to curl in on myself and sleep. I'm not angry at the world right now, or ill, or contemplating which of the knives in the silverware drawer would best slit my throat; in fact, my outlook on the future and my abilities to determine its course has never been brighter. I know my world can be more than what it is and isn't as limited as I once thought it to be, though there will always be obstacles, many of them brutally stupid and unfair. So, it's not a lack of desire or optimism that plagues me. I have those in spades, but I lack focus. I can't decide what to do with my time. I'll sit down to write and fulminate for hours on what the subject should be, and then, if I am fortunate enough to decide on the subject, I am filled, not with pleasure at the prospect of creation, but dread at all the mental energy that creation must needs require. I imagine, not the pride at the finished project, but the long hours of empty pages and one-fingered pecking that must come before. I used to bull my way through the torpor, but more often, I have succumbed to it.

It is a cyclic phenomenon that has occurred with increasing frequency and severity over the past year, and I'm beginning to wonder if I'm experiencing hormone fluctuations or entering perimenopause. While I'm still quite libidinous by most standards, my sex drive has waned, and I no longer spend most of my days suppressing the impulse to mount anything remotely phallic. I experience a surge of libido and activity level in the two weeks before my cycle, am crabby and emotional during, and spend the ten days following it twiddling my thumbs and staring dumbly at the television or computer screen. It could also be anemia or a nutritional imbalance, but given the regularity of the pattern, I rather suspect my hormones are to blame.

I have been ficcing, however, and the as-yet-untitled Calliope interstitial on which I have been toiling has taken an unexpected turn. I had intended it as a short fluff piece in which Calliope marvels at her good fortune and wrinkles her nose at Richard's smoking habit, but once Calliope got the horse, she seized the reins and put the spurs to it, and now they've gone haring off in a darker, more bittersweet direction by far. I'm just going to follow for now, and when the dust settles and the horse is spent and lathered and wanting for a draught, I'll see if it's worth the telling. Stampeding horses can be disastrous, yes, but some of the best rides come when you just hang onto the saddle and let that pony run. SLS, for example, happened because I sat down and recorded the movie in my head.

Speaking of which, I logged into my FAP account for the first time in 1,384 days last night. Now that the canon is completely closed, I'm tempted to dust off SLS and finish it. I know most of its readers have rightly given up for dead after five years of inertia, but when the writing was good, it was better than sex, and maybe the lack of fannish attention will give me the freedom to finish it without dozens of well-meaning readers banging down my door to post the next part NOW or harangue me for my failure to make it DH-compliant. I'm ashamed to admit that I morphed into Alec Guinness for a while and began to actively resent the story because it was all anyone wanted to read from me, and I was bubbling with new ideas and giddy love for a new fandom.

If I were to resume it, I would have to do a complete rereading of the existing fifty-three chapters in order to recall the minor details of the Hogwarts I envisioned and committed to electronic paper. Still, the idea is tempting. When you commit four hundred thousand words to something, it's a shame not to see it through. And yet, I am undecided. I have so many ideas inside my head, competing for my limited energy, so many scraps of unfinished tapestries. Flack's father, frozen over a barbecue grill as he watches his son watch Rebecca. Dean trying desperately to rouse Sam from an unnatural sleep. A disfigured Tommy Dowd fucking a sex doll just to remember what it feels like. Patrick Jane watching Dr. Steiner die over his hemlock tea. Gil Grissom groping for his precious remove as he examines the bent, bloody crutches of Greg Sanders' missing wife. Charlie Eppes watching Rebecca Flack stretch to her loom and thinking she looks too sharp for human skin. Some have been waiting for years, scenes forever paused, and while I do not want them to be lost, I don't want to neglect the ones that are brightest now, for fear that they, too, will degrade and grow yellow and warped and brittle.

And new ideas take root every day. Like the one I had last night after the Haven S2 premiere about Sam Flack being an FBI agent who gets sucked into Haven's mad orbit and thinking her straitlaced brother would never understand. Except that he totally would, because he's married to a witch, and his son is probably one, too, and when your wife accidentally lets off a Patronus during sex, well... And what if Haven is a colony for witches and wizards whose magic has gone out of control, and Audrey Parker is an empathic Healer whose memory was modified. And the reverend is a creepy religious zealot from a Muggle order that discovered the existence of magic, and he's convinced that these people are of the devil.

See? You see why I don't need this? I need three brains to contain it all and fifty hours in a day and twenty pairs of hands to keep up with it all, and if I'm going to be a freak, why can't I be a useful freak who types two hundred words a minute?

I Wonder if Durga Would Lend Me Her Arms

My thoughts are so heavy of late, and I find it hard to lift and arrange them. It's like lifting steel ingots when you have osteogenesis imperfecta. My bones haven't snapped beneath the weight of them yet, but my arms tremble with the effort. Just the thought of bending to them makes me want to curl in on myself and sleep. I'm not angry at the world right now, or ill, or contemplating which of the knives in the silverware drawer would best slit my throat; in fact, my outlook on the future and my abilities to determine its course has never been brighter. I know my world can be more than what it is and isn't as limited as I once thought it to be, though there will always be obstacles, many of them brutally stupid and unfair. So, it's not a lack of desire or optimism that plagues me. I have those in spades, but I lack focus. I can't decide what to do with my time. I'll sit down to write and fulminate for hours on what the subject should be, and then, if I am fortunate enough to decide on the subject, I am filled, not with pleasure at the prospect of creation, but dread at all the mental energy that creation must needs require. I imagine, not the pride at the finished project, but the long hours of empty pages and one-fingered pecking that must come before. I used to bull my way through the torpor, but more often, I have succumbed to it.

It is a cyclic phenomenon that has occurred with increasing frequency and severity over the past year, and I'm beginning to wonder if I'm experiencing hormone fluctuations or entering perimenopause. While I'm still quite libidinous by most standards, my sex drive has waned, and I no longer spend most of my days suppressing the impulse to mount anything remotely phallic. I experience a surge of libido and activity level in the two weeks before my cycle, am crabby and emotional during, and spend the ten days following it twiddling my thumbs and staring dumbly at the television or computer screen. It could also be anemia or a nutritional imbalance, but given the regularity of the pattern, I rather suspect my hormones are to blame.

I have been ficcing, however, and the as-yet-untitled Calliope interstitial on which I have been toiling has taken an unexpected turn. I had intended it as a short fluff piece in which Calliope marvels at her good fortune and wrinkles her nose at Richard's smoking habit, but once Calliope got the horse, she seized the reins and put the spurs to it, and now they've gone haring off in a darker, more bittersweet direction by far. I'm just going to follow for now, and when the dust settles and the horse is spent and lathered and wanting for a draught, I'll see if it's worth the telling. Stampeding horses can be disastrous, yes, but some of the best rides come when you just hang onto the saddle and let that pony run. SLS, for example, happened because I sat down and recorded the movie in my head.

Speaking of which, I logged into my FAP account for the first time in 1,384 days last night. Now that the canon is completely closed, I'm tempted to dust off SLS and finish it. I know most of its readers have rightly given up for dead after five years of inertia, but when the writing was good, it was better than sex, and maybe the lack of fannish attention will give me the freedom to finish it without dozens of well-meaning readers banging down my door to post the next part NOW or harangue me for my failure to make it DH-compliant. I'm ashamed to admit that I morphed into Alec Guinness for a while and began to actively resent the story because it was all anyone wanted to read from me, and I was bubbling with new ideas and giddy love for a new fandom.

If I were to resume it, I would have to do a complete rereading of the existing fifty-three chapters in order to recall the minor details of the Hogwarts I envisioned and committed to electronic paper. Still, the idea is tempting. When you commit four hundred thousand words to something, it's a shame not to see it through. And yet, I am undecided. I have so many ideas inside my head, competing for my limited energy, so many scraps of unfinished tapestries. Flack's father, frozen over a barbecue grill as he watches his son watch Rebecca. Dean trying desperately to rouse Sam from an unnatural sleep. A disfigured Tommy Dowd fucking a sex doll just to remember what it feels like. Patrick Jane watching Dr. Steiner die over his hemlock tea. Gil Grissom groping for his precious remove as he examines the bent, bloody crutches of Greg Sanders' missing wife. Charlie Eppes watching Rebecca Flack stretch to her loom and thinking she looks too sharp for human skin. Some have been waiting for years, scenes forever paused, and while I do not want them to be lost, I don't want to neglect the ones that are brightest now, for fear that they, too, will degrade and grow yellow and warped and brittle.

And new ideas take root every day. Like the one I had last night after the Haven S2 premiere about Sam Flack being an FBI agent who gets sucked into Haven's mad orbit and thinking her straitlaced brother would never understand. Except that he totally would, because he's married to a witch, and his son is probably one, too, and when your wife accidentally lets off a Patronus during sex, well... And what if Haven is a colony for witches and wizards whose magic has gone out of control, and Audrey Parker is an empathic Healer whose memory was modified. And the reverend is a creepy religious zealot from a Muggle order that discovered the existence of magic, and he's convinced that these people are of the devil.

See? You see why I don't need this? I need three brains to contain it all and fifty hours in a day and twenty pairs of hands to keep up with it all, and if I'm going to be a freak, why can't I be a useful freak who types two hundred words a minute?