There is SO too much going on in my head right now.

And it's making it very difficult to finish anything.

I mean, I know I come in here with writing problems every couple of weeks, and I make them seem major, but this one just slays me because, well . . . I mean, everyone has That One Story: the one that's been on your mind forever and that you need to write someday even if it kills you. Even if it just a story purely for you that you doubt anyone else would care two cents about reading.

See, the worst thing has happened: the story I've been trying to figure out for the last six or so years of my life just decided to make perfect sense - only, naturally, I am in the middle of so many other projects right now (Camp NaNo, TGoES, TH: Skyborn) that I'd feel like a total jerk for dropping them all for this. And I'm so changeable when it comes to what I'm working on, I'm a little doubtful about haphazardly throwing myself behind something that, to me, is a very important story that is going to need a lot of my time.  

But at the same time, I feel like I need to drop everything. At least for a couple of weeks.

The thing is, I started this one story years back called Until the End of Colin Ackartt (now that I check, it's #6 on The Bucket List), and all I had were the characters (so vivid in my mind that I could not ignore them) and such a vague idea of a plot that it literally was incomprehensible. The whole idea verged on the notion that the title character, Colin, just . . . should not have existed. And I mean in a metaphysical/existential/order of the universe extent. And that he was near to just totally disappearing. But I did not know what he was, why this was happening to him, how he had come to exist in such a unstable state in the first place, or what he and the other characters were going to do to save him. But I had the atmosphere and there were scenes in my head and I knew how it ended. Elaina, the FMC of the piece, was and is still my favorite character I've ever come up with. The story was just so out there and missing so many pieces, though, that beyond a few scenes I could not possibility write it and feel right about it. It wasn't a story. It was this disjointed, dream-like scenario. 

(I nearly choked a few years back when I found a book that was similar in subject matter/surreal-ness called Frozen Fire by Tim Bowler. Like the story I was trying to write, few answers were given concerning the nature of the strange boy that the main character meets.)

Then, about two nights ago, I was playing with a plot in my head that I had no intention of actually writing - it was just a mental exercise, like, "OK, what if I wrote this kind of story, with this scenario? How would I do it?" And I thought pretty far into it - the setting, the main characters, the initial few chapters - until it hit me in the face that this was my story. I honestly leapt out of bed. If I dropped Colin, Elaina and crew in, and looked at it from the perspective of UtEoCA - well darn, it suddenly made perfect sense. I mean, it was still surreal and out there and everything, and there were still things that would be unexplainable - but it was a purposeful kind of unexplainable. And the whole story, beginning to end, was just there. I talk about wanting to have just a skeleton of an outline when I start a story, and with this all the bones for UtEoCA just fell in my lap. After I had been trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B with this thing for years. 

Anyway, I guess this is just something I needed to get off my chest. I still plan on doing Camp NaNo in April, because NaNo events are like long writing festivals for me, but if I'm scarcely seen at Figment for a while, this is probably why. I'm just . . . very happy and anxious about this story. 

OH almost forgot - on the subject of the much celebrated notebook from my last post, I've decided to hand-write my Camp NaNo story in it. Last November revealed to me that NaNo goes a lot smoother if I can just carry a notebook around with me.