Chance Of Showers

I am recovering from a hard, emotionally draining, very good productive four-day weekend at a cottage in Lake Como, Wisconsin, four miles from Lake Geneva. I feel very privileged that a friend of mine has asked me to collaborate in a writing project that we expect to take, hope to take, three months to finish. I don’t want to give away too much what it’s about, but it’s about how a bunch of really screwed up people do life together. It’s something I’m very curious about, considering I’m a very screwed up person trying to figure out how to do life. There seems to be a shortage of useful manuals and the ones I do find are often very cryptic to me.

Not that we’re going to write one. Were writing fiction. We’ve spent the weekend coming up with some screw up people and there stories that got them screwed up and their motivations for screwing up some more. Then we had one of them screw up real bad and we started putting the rest of them in the same room to see what would happen. This would be all fun and games if we weren’t serious about what we’re doing, but since we are and we want to make our character believable we have to use are own screwed-upness to inform our characters and how they react to each other.

My recent stroke was help. It turns out that having a stroke effects your emotions and my stroke has brought my emotions very close to the surface. We were using me as a barometer to gauge the emotional truth of our characters reactions to the situations we put them in. The more I cried, the closer we were getting to the truth, sort of. We did quite well if you willing to trust our barometer.

So now we got a really messed up situation we’ve started bringing them to one two or three at a time, each one throwing there mess into the mix. Then we’ve got one of them to tell it all who is either the most screwed up or the least, but his particular brand of being screwed up makes him very reliable to tell what is going on in the place we put them.

If you know anything about writing characters you know you become emotionally attached to them and they don’t always do what you want them to do. They surprise the shit out of you sometimes and when they get hurt it tends to hurt you.
All this to say and warn you if we run into each other over the next three months or so and me eyes are red or I’m crying my eyes out, you don’t have to worry. It just means I’ve been writing.