Pain/Pain

I have this headache.

I've had worse headaches. This isn't a nail in my frontal lobe, but it's still painful. Like someone opened up my head and have fried up a little section with breading and a white wine glaze, and they're slowly cutting it away, relishing every little bite.

I can't write when I'm in pain . . .

Okay, maybe I can write about pain when I'm in pain, but I can't work on my book.

This morning I finally forced myself to sit down and started working again. And I was so proud of myself. I worked for hours on this, the fifth revision of my book, finally basing it around more of a mystery motif that I think will work better as a hook than the disaffected teenager angst that was driving the plot before.

Granted this means that he book is more formulaic, but it also means that it's dozens of times easier to write.

There may be a problem with it being way too short. Based on the outline that I wrote, if all of the chapters are about as long as revision four, it will only be about 100k words long. If I had to say guess, I would say that Michelle West's books are about 300k. So that's bad, on a certain level.

One thing on the side. Michelle West is the greatest writer ever. I'm re-reading Hunter's Death, and it's just unbelievably amazing.

The problem is that my outline sort of flows along. It makes a certain amount of sense to me, and I really can't come up with any more twists and turns along the way that wouldn't be horrendous departures from the plot.

It does cut off some of the philosophical stuff, which is the thing that I most regret. That teenage angst was important to me because I sort of liked the idea that the circumstances drove the situation against the will of the people involved.

It also means that there aren't as many chances to bemoan the characters' sad and discuss the idea that emotion forms the core of our identifiable personalities. Star Trek and other shows have played with the loss of memory, but there is so much more than could be damaged. What if those telepathic alien kidnappers could have taken away Picard's emotional maturity when they kidnapped him? What would have happened then?

Empaths are terrifying. My version of Deanna Troi would have been horrific and numbingly frightening. The Klingons and the Romulans would have run like little girls.

That's not to say that memories aren't important. There's a balance, and I don't think that gets a lot of play.

Aw . . . I just stood up and now the pain is worse. I'm thinking that it's getting to the power drill and salt phase. I think it's time for me to go.

Pain/pain/pain.

Update: It's the day after, and I still don't feel great, but I do remember what my original point was going to be. After all those hours of working on my book yesterday, I paused and when I looked at how much I'd written, I only had two pages. How very, very sad.

Here's what happened last night. I went to bed early, around ten thirty instead of my usual 1:30 to 2 am. I took two acetaminophen (can't take anything else because of the neck injury) but I still couldn't sleep. I happened to have one or two Hydrocodone left over from the first month of my injury, and finally I got back up and took one. Another half hour of blistering pain later, I suddenly found that I was in a state of mild euphoria and couldn't care less about the pain any more and I fell asleep.

Back when I was actually taking them everyday, I couldn't understand the lure of pain pills. I know that people can become addicted to them (Rush, I'm looking at you), but since then, I have to say, I get it.

It's odd, I've been on meds for depression back in the day, and they didn't seem to have any affect. They work so slowly that by the time you feel better you don't know why feel better.

But on these, you're happy and you know why.

You know what else? I'd be able to work out, too. It's not hard to run for an hour when the burning in your lungs barely registers as pain. Or to lift weights. Or to twist yourself into a knot on a yoga mat.

It's too bad they don't prescribe hydrocodone or oxycodone for depression.