In My Head

I day dream so much and get so much in my head that sometimes the stuff going on in my head is claiming more of my awareness than the stuff going on around me. It’s distracting. A lot of the time it’s the plot or the next scene of a story I’m working on. I get so lost in it because I have to sort of “see” it before I can write it—almost experience it. And I experience it in my head. Thing is, I “experience” a whole bunch of stuff and then I end up picking and choosing from that stuff which things I’ll be writing about.

If it’s a novel, that’s pretty easy, because it’s all linear and usually romantic, but if it’s a short story, it could be a million different things. The tough ones are if it’s horror or something bad like a killer because I don’t like to get in that headspace, it makes me feel awful. I don’t like to get in the headspace of evil things or evil people.

I think my favorite place to be was the city of Sana Mundi. That was a futuristic city in my trilogy book and it was a utopia where everybody was striving to live by these wonderful rules of helping others. It was like heaven. The conflict came when a man from the 1960s was brought into that time and he hadn’t been raised with those rules so was having trouble adjusting. It was so fun writing about his troubles with that. He missed his whiskey and cigarettes and he didn’t like complying with the rules to be nice to everyone. I really enjoyed being in his headspace and then going into the headspace of his wife who was of that era and was so calm and beautiful, sort of being an example to him. It had a nice calming effect on me too. That has definitely been my favorite book to write. I’d go there some more but there is only so much you can do with that situation.

Escaping like that — especially to there — was really good for me. Being here, in this world, can be so depressing. We are such terrible people. With conflicts, fights, racism, hatred, war, it’s hard to watch where our world is going.  I know I sound like a grandparent but I AM a grandparent. What’s weird is that this is the way MY grandmother sounded so I’m thinking maybe all grandparents begin to see the world this way so maybe it’s not as hopeless as it seems to me. Maybe it just always looks hopeless to old people.