Of two minds

A lil' too sleepy to post anything of substance.

Before I begin thtubbing out some bumbley words that don't mean much, here is a link to an excellent post Suley wrote about Haibane Renmei (the anime stuff I was glumphing about in my last post). I am too tired to think of the right words so I'm making some up. Oh also Suley's post has good pictures.

Today I had an experience that highlighted my rambling-on interior monologue about what to do for NaNoWriMo. Half of me wants to use the month of November to revise my current novel and get it into better shape and myself into a mindset where I can send it out for agent search round two. (Yes my ego is still battered from agent search round one, even though I am telling myself that the fact that I got as far as I did on my first try is pretty good. Rejection is still a steel-toed boot in the crotch, no matter.) The other half of me wants to strike out into new writerly territory and do something completely different, just for the sheer utopian joy and agony of writing again as opposed to editing.

It is like work vs. play.

The experience I had today was a flash of green fear. It's been a while since I was so scared I saw green, but today I was so scared I saw green--just for a fraction of a second, green like encroaching flowerpetals making a frame around my vision. It was precipitated by a Nathan email in which he mentioned killing himself. This has actually been in the past a thing of regularity that, after the first terrifying times, ceased to cause me fear. Every once in a while though he means it and these synesthetic flashes of fear I have always correspond to him giggling and reeling desperately and drunkenly on the edge of some real or imaginary cliff somewhere, teetering and deciding whether to let whoever's around him at the time pull him back by the shirt. It's just a silly thing that shouldn't scare me anymore, because after all, as he said today, "you have to want to die. Anne Sexton used to attempt to kill herself pretty much weekly. But she only died once." Every once in a while though. Every once in a while I get scared about the once. It only takes once. Especially I get scared when his tone wanders for more than a few days into the more esoteric realms of pontificating on pointlessness, as it has done since last week when a job thingie of his went into territory that means more than it maybe should.

The reason I bring all this up if only to myself is that for that moment when the green crept over and through me in a creepy flash, I was back where I was when I was writing the book in the first place, letting all that synesthesia madness be me, trying to get that one character out onto the page in the most honest way I could, and I felt all...whole again, like I was the conduit through which this actual person, not some figment, this actual person had to have his story told.

It's a heady feeling.

It made me think November should be given back to him. To his story. To trying to get it right again and to pursuing the goal of letting light fall on it.

On the other hand the darkness has been gone for going on three weeks now which is starting to feel like some kind of record and I don't know if I can just go back into it like that. I mean how many times can you do that to yourself.

I am soooooooo tired. Hence the lack of commas here, probably. And the improper punctuation to make a point.

Tomorrow is another day.