Inside A Writer's Head - Part 2

I can't help but count the number of stairs as I go up them.

When I'm really stressed I'll have nightmares that I'm working at Westside Rentals again.

A worse nightmare for me is spending the whole dream trying to figure out what 8 subtracted from $17.95 is.

I don't like drinking soda straight from the can. Unless it's one of those mini-sized cans.

I organize my closet by keeping in mind what people will find in there if I suddenly die and women come to help Paul clean out my things.

I'm superstitious when it comes to picking one item from many similar items. When choosing a pen out of a drawer full of pens, a fork from the other forks, a new scarf at Nordstrom from the other same colored scarves etc. It takes me three moments longer to pick something than it does other people. I believe there is either a negative or positive energy attached to the items and by choosing the wrong item bad things or good things will happen to me. So I try not to touch the items until I know which one I'll pick. So I stand there looking everything over before I choose it. This all goes through my brain in under 2 seconds.

I know. It's weird. It's crazy! This is the section of my brain I like to avoid at all costs. It usually takes over when I'm dreaming... or cleaning the kitchen for the third time in one day...  but it's not the same section as  my "writer's brain" (but it definitely resides next door.) In fact a lot of good ideas and humor come from this neurotic thinking and I can channel it into something creative. (And if not, well, then I have a dream about James Franco at least once a week. ) ...(Don't ask.)

The writer's brain however, is capable of amazing things. Ideas and thoughts play out as fragments of scenes meaning nothing and only looking sad, beautiful, fearful, or happy until they connect as miniature pictures and then more ideas and pieces latch on and before you know it there's a whole tapestry you just breathed life and meaning into. During the edit ideas can change within the change and before you know it, dialogue is coming from your finger tips in the best kind of way; eyes glaze over and all there is is the mind firing off electricity into your hands and when you come to, your jaw hits your chest when you read what's on the page and you say out loud, "Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh! That's it! That's IT!!"

And the most brilliant part about it is you have no idea how it got there. You think it came from nowhere. But those little fragments and puzzle pieces have been floating around your universe the whole time. For years. So it really wasn't a new idea. Your story was already written. You just had to put it all together one piece at a time. One thought at a time.

The same goes for me as I struggle along with it. As the pieces of the story grow and change, pieces of me grow and change by constantly striving to make it better, extending a part of myself I didn't know was there. Wanting more to be there. Even by draft thirteen.


Sounds crazy doesn't it.