Why Writers Should Not Be Allowed Out In Public

I started out tonight by trying to work on my novella, but a combination of too much sugar and too little sleep have resulted in nothing but pages of incoherent rambling. So I thought I'd share a little anecdote instead.

Most people who know me know that I work in the clothing section of a large retail store. Tonight I was running around the footwear department, madly trying to tidy it up, and while I was working, my brain was thinking about my novella, and about where a major confrontation between the protagonist and the antagonist should take place. Half way through this train of thought, a customer ran up and hurriedly asked me a question before I had properly registered her presence. As a result, the conversation turned out as follows:

Customer: 'Scuse me, can you tell me where I can find the shoe polish?
Me: The Underworld?
Customer: ... What?
Me: *awkward, vacant pause* What? Oh. Um... Yeah, sorry, two aisles that way.

Luckily the customer had a sense of humour (after she got what she wanted, she came past again and said "Got my shoe polish, had to fight Hades for it though."), but it made me wonder if perhaps my preoccupation with Dark and Silent Waters had become a little unhealthy. Oh well... I'm sure it won't be the last time I make a fool of myself for the sake of my craft :D

Has anyone else out there had an experience where they had difficulty separating fiction from reality?

Hey, Doc, I Got A Bad Case Of Adjectivitis...

Just a quick post to share a blog post by Michael Pryor, author of (among other things) young adult fantasy series The Laws of Magic.

Writing Disease by Michael Pryor

To this list I would like to add Expositionitis: The tendency to dump dull/irrelevant information on the poor unsuspecting reader, resulting in hideous slabs of exposition lurking between otherwise reasonable paragraphs of prose.

I know that I have suffered from most of these on more than one occasion, and I'm sure most of my other fellow writers will empathise :) I think we need to get these recognised as official medical conditions. That way us writers can use them to take time off work/uni etc to work on our novels :D

Staring into Dark and Silent Waters...

I'm taking a short break from writing my novella (I just hit 6,000 words for NaNoWriMo :D), and I thought I'd post a link to the song that basically inspired the whole story:

Shallow Waters - Amberian Dawn

As I've mentioned (I think) in an earlier post, I was muddling away with my fantasy trilogy at the start of the year when I chanced upon this song on YouTube. In creative terms, listening to it was like being hit with a bomb. With the lyrics telling an engaging story and the music setting a dark and depressing mood, my brain filled with images and ideas the same way the Titanic filled with water after it crashed into that iceberg (although luckily my brain didn't sink into the Atlantic ocean, killing around 1,500 people). The world and characters came to life in my mind, growing and changing until it was like a movie playing in my head.

The song may not be to everyone's tastes, but I'm sure that those who have read bits of my novella so far will see how I made the connections (and yes, my novella's title was pilfered from the lyrics).

Out of curiosity, has anyone else ever had a moment where a song/TV show/whatever inspires them to write to the point where they can't step away from the keyboard?

Anyhoo, back to writing I go :)