You ever have that moment when you look in the mirror and go, “Jesus, man. What is wrong with you?” No, I don’t mean like after you eat a fifty piece McNugget meal and suffer from the shame diarrhea.
It’s kinda like that scene in Orange Is The New Black. Crazy Eyes had started writing an erotic novel and it was getting passed around to all the inmates and a few of the guards. There was a part where a woman’s clitoris became a caterpillar and transformed into a sex butterfly. You know the writers of that just had to have a mirror moment.
My mirror moments are a little more round about. I have a hard time writing a happy ending. I went over a lot of my short trunk stories and even poured over the outlines for some of my projects. Maybe not tragedy all around, but bittersweet seems to be my flavor. I remember when I once gave my beta reader a rough sample of a story segment I was working on. It was to be the next three chapters in a story she’d already said she loved.
I got back a big red, “What the hell is wrong with you?”
That kinda sparked me to have some deep introspection. It didn’t really help though. See, I don’t write from the beginning. What that spark comes it always seems to be from the finale, the ending. I see that clear as a day, and I work backwards from there. It just so happens that a lot of the endings are a bit more realistic than fantasy normally is.
Sometimes you don’t get the parade and the gratitude of a kingdom. Sometimes you just survive.
I don’t mean to be depressing, dear reader, nor do I want you to get the idea it is all Game of Thrones over here. I can only hope to be that good.
Stay frosty.
