Really, America? Again?

 I don't think I have anything useful I can say. I certainly don't have any insights on how this could have happened, or what the next four years are going to be like. My heart goes out to all the people who will be harmed - the trans folk, the disabled people, the people of colour, the women, the immigrants, the poor, the otherwise marginalised. Yes, even those that voted for him. I'm a strong believer in people's faces not being eaten by leopards even if they did vote for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party. 

I really should have stayed off the social internet today, but among all the despair there were reminders that there are still communities that care deeply and therein lies hope. I just spent the last hour or so listening to John Green read and line edit his forthcoming book "Everything is Tuberculosis" on a youtube livestream while reading the chat. I might blog tomorrow about my struggles to find online community, but for now I'll just say that generally the people that crop up in those livestream chats seem to be caring and thoughtful, and that does help restore my faith in humanity a little. All we have is each other, after all. 

Story ideas that aren't going anywhere

An incomplete list of ideas and hooks, both old and new, that I just can't seem to make into anything.

• Swarm of drones rescue someone lost at sea, told from the point of view of one drone (inspired by this skeet)
• A pair of black shoes are found abandoned by the cemetery gates
• "The Reality Generator is malfunctioning."
• A person has several lives of very different people in very different universes that they switch between whenever they fall asleep.
• Middle aged man struggles to cope in the aftermath of his wife's sudden death (a screenplay for some reason)
• Boy finds a hidden staircase in his grandparents' attic that takes him to an infinitely large library filled with fantastical residents
• PhD student recovering from breakdown house sits for their uncle, various magical things happen (like a doll that makes wishes come true)
• Former teen superheroes try to find a place in society, then aliens invade
• A sister tried to look after her younger brother in the aftermath of a war where society has pretty much collapsed
• Twenty-something spends weekend at sprawling family estate with highly dysfunctional family and tries to rescue his niece
• Werewolves running society so they can keep humans under control, small pockets of resistance try and fight back

The last one is probably the furthest along (19478 words!) but hasn't been touched in years. Some of these I'd forgotten all about until I delved into the files. There are other snippets of writing that I don't  remember doing and have no idea what the intent was. As an example, one file named "vampire" contains only the following: 

                The sun was still an hour or so from setting and the air was starting to get cool. I had time to kill before meeting my parents for dinner and was feeling restless. I just started walking, trying to stick to the side streets away from the crowds.

I'm guessing the person meets a vampire? Is a vampire? Who knows.

I start way, way more stories than I finish, and my inability to plan may be to blame. But if I outline a plot I know where the story is going and it becomes 100% less interesting to me immediately. I think that's why I love GMing so much instead - I can have ideas about what's going on in the world, set up a cool scenario, but what actually happens isn't all down to me and often ends up going in directions I would never have thought of. My players do the writing for me. 

Struggling already

 I knew this "blog every day" thing would be a challenge, I just didn't expect to run out of ideas four days in. There's still a couple of short story ideas spinning around my head but I can't quite get them in focus enough to write them down. 

Today generally has been a bit of a blur - took the dog for a six month check-up at vet and was filled with anxiety all the way there. He's an old dog now, and I know he desperately needs dental work doing but it isn't currently causing him noticable issues, so I keep putting it off. And it's a long walk for him, too much time for my brain to get worked up about having to interact with strangers. I made it without tears but on the way I was worried I wouldn't. So anxiety over that, and having sent off work to be reviewed, and having a meeting tomorrow about that work...I have other projects to work on but I couldn't focus enough on them either to get much done. 

I managed a short run this evening, having completed Couch to 5K previously I'm cycling through the "Beyond Couch to 5K" runs, and then just felt sad and cried a bit in the shower. It's hard not to feel like I'm wasting my life because I waste so many days but also because I don't know what I should be doing with my days, or rather, because how I wish I was spending my days just doesn't seem to be possible most of the time. As always, John Green has some wise words on a related subject, and I think I better stop there before I start crying again.

Boardgames

 Spent day catching up with friends I'd not seen in far too long, watching seals and the sea at Flamborough Head, and playing several boardgames. First up was Saboteur, where you play as hard-working dwarves trying to mine to the gold, unless you're the saboteur who wants to stop them getting it for....reasons? I'm generally terrible both at being a traitor and at working out who else is, but this wasn't too stressful, not least because sometimes you just don't have the cards to do much anyway. Then we played Ticket to Ride: Europe, and while I didn't manage my usual aim of getting everything in one continous route, I did finish several tickets and ended up winning. Next up was Mysterium - a game I'd not played before but had been wanting to try for ages. Similar to Dixit by same publisher you need to kind of get on the same wavelength as the person playing the ghost who is handing your medium picture clues to solve a murder. It was really good. We finished with the ludicrously good fun Top Gun Strategy Game, where you play beach volleyball in order to be better in dogfights. Obviously. I struggled a bit with visualising the movement in the dogfights and planning ahead, but still managed to win every beach volleyball match and overall. Pretty sure I'd not be as good at either in real life.

[Fiction] Smile

CW: blood, gore, extreme violence, everyday sexism

---

"Smile, love!"

He was hanging, as is the way, from the passenger side of his best friend's car, as it sat stopped at the traffic light. She, or rather, the creature he had assumed was a she, was standing by the roadside as if waiting to cross, head dipped and gazing fixedly at the ground. At his shout, it lifted its head, and its unblinking stare caught him full on. The face split into an unnaturally large, rictus parody of a grin, unveiling rows of too small, too sharp teeth. Suddenly less sure of himself, he stammered out a feeble, "Wh-what's the matter wi-" before the lights changed and they drove off. 

He slunk back into his seat and said to his friend, "That was weird." But before he could elaborate, his friend glanced in the rear-view mirror and swore, "She's fucking chasing us! Why'd you always have to say something?" Turning round, he could see that the creature was indeed running towards them, down the middle of the road, completely ignoring all the other traffic braking, horns honking, drivers cursing. His friend sped up, missing their turning to stay on the main road longer and put some distance between themselves and this crazed being. 

Impossibly, it was gaining on them. 

"What the hell? How is she doing that?" the driver asked, glancing repeatedly between the mirror and the road ahead as he swerved to overtake the cars that were sticking to the speed limit. 

"I don't think that's a she," he replied quietly. He watched the creature's dogged pursuit in the wing mirror he'd repositioned, slunk down in his seat. The horrific grin was visible even from this distance and grew ever larger as the creature grew closer. 

"Oh shit!" 

They'd ran a red light, turning a corner too fast and his friend had to slam on the brakes to avoid crashing into stationary traffic. While the driver collected himself, he urged "Get on with it, go that way," pointing through the oncoming cars at a car park some distance ahead.

"I can't go that way, are you crazy?"

But it was too late. While they weren't watching the creature had caught up with them, and the first they knew about it was when it landed heavily on the roof of the car. 

"Oh shit," his friend said again, and desperately started manoeuvring the car to escape the traffic jam, but stopped when the creature's grinning face appeared in the windscreen in front of them. 

The windscreen glass shattered as one arm punched straight through it, and the creature, hanging from the car roof with unnatural flexibility, reached straight through and pulled him from the passenger street onto the bonnet. It jumped down on top of him, cutting short his screams with a second punch that tore through his flesh into his chest. Its hand re-emerged from his torso, dripping in viscera, and the creature mashed the bloody, unidentifiable, organ into its gaping open mouth. 

All the while his friend looked on, unable to hear anything above the sound of his own screaming.

The creature feasted until his friend finally stopped being able to make a sound, his throat red raw, tears streaming down his cheeks, pressed into his seat as far away from the thing as he could make himself. It turned and looked at him unblinkingly, jaw still stretched wide, blood smeared across its face. In a broken, inhuman voice that sounded like nails on a blackboard it said,

"Smile."

Writing Month

 Most years, but not every, when it gets to this time of year I end up thinking about writing and occasionally even do try and start it up again. Like most of my attempts to create a habit around writing this never lasts. But while I've learned over the years I really do not have it in me to write a novel, at least not with my current mindset, I do keep coming back to wanting to write fiction or at least have some sort of creative outlet. Apparently it's good for you or something.

Anyway, NaNoWriMo is wrapped up in yet another controversy, but a friend linked to the fairly bare bones Writing Month website where you can define your own project of a novel, short stories, whatever in terms of words, pages, stories etc per day. So I've set myself the goal of one blog post a day for the month of November, which feels achievable as the post doesn't have to be a set number of words. I may cheat slightly and try and finish a couple of started stories, and some days I may just manage a sentence of two about how my day went. But if I manage to write something, even a few lines, every day, it might help me get back into the habit.