Crickets, why do I do this to myself? I stopped writing Catherine's Wheel in chapter 3 because I was weary of Tobyn's routine and didn't really like where it was going. I started over on Knight of Sorrows and stalled a bit in chapter 11. I then started Requiem and its various components. How many things can I be writing at once? It would be so much easier if I had no mentally-draining day job to occupy my mind and wear me down during the week.

I finally got back to Tristan and company last night and cleaned up the things in chapter 11 that were giving me issues. Hopefully now I can continue. I'm still not ready to go back to Tobyn and friends, so CW will be sitting for a while. And Requiem? God only knows where that came from, or where it will be going.

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I sometimes feel possessed by my stories. Images start playing in my mind's eye, and I start losing track of where I am. I hear the things the characters hear, see what they see, smell the things they smell. Maybe it's a very particular brand of schizophrenia. I don't know. I only know that I can't get back to "real real" until I devote at least a little of what I'm seeing to the page. Yesterday, I was overcome by one of those scenes and a nameless person whose emotions reached out and squeezed my insides until they nearly bled. I had to write it down, snow showers and all. I was so "into it" that I was honestly surprised that there was no snow on the ground when I emerged from whatever writerly fugue state I go into.

Am I crazy? Maybe. But maybe I don't want a cure. My best writing is done this way, when it takes control and I'm just along for the ride.

For the record, the scene I wrote has no home, and I don't know if it ever will have one. I don't even know who the characters are, or why they're in the sad situation they're in, or anything. Maybe it'll come back and I'll be able to answer my questions. Maybe it will stay the way it is, like so many other partial pieces that litter my computer memory.

It's a mystery.