Let The Evil Laughter Begin!

I wanted to make this its own chapter. It is a moment I've long awaited - the debut battle for the premier middle school supervillain team, The Inscrutable Machine!

Chapter Six

Another Interruption Over

This will be short, because I need to fall on my face.

It's time to clean up Quite Contrary and start thinking about publishing. I got through the first editing pass on about a quarter of it, then went into writing starvation. So I wrote the next chapter of The Inscrutable Machine in a fit of madness.

Enjoy.

I will fall on my face now.

Back To The Machine!

Sometimes a writer stops and goes 'Where did those five thousand words come from?' I was worried that interrupting The Inscrutable Machine to write a short story would kill my mojo. Apparently not.

Here's Chapter Three!

And now I leave you to it. I'm getting that post-writing collapse, and I have a terrible headache and blah blah blah. Chapter 4 is already plotted out. I could theoretically begin writing it tomorrow.

Oh

And yeah, also I finished chapter two.

I'm not needing as much in the way of breaks between chapters as I used to. Not sure what that means and if it will persist.

Where Did The Time Go?

Needless to say, since all of my characters are crazy, so am I. The special neural chemistry that produces angry, abused Little Red Riding Hoods and dreamland paper streamer goldfish relies heavily on good 'ol bipolar disorder.

One of bipolar's fun little quirks is 'manic related insomnia.' Sleep requires relaxation. It's quite hard to relax when you're manic, even a little manic. You tend to stay up late, or wake up and have trouble getting back to sleep. This has an interesting side effect. In order to remain functional when you're low on sleep, you get more manic! And that increased mania makes it harder to sleep. This cycle is quite capable of proceeding until you're bouncing off the walls and have to be hospitalized. I've watched it happen.

Thankfully, my bipolar's fairly mild. The insomnia's not going to rev up until I'm hospitalized. Instead, it'll rev up until, like Thursday, I've had less than four hours of sleep and I'm incapable of doing anything that requires thought that day. Then, in desperation, I take a magical drug called 'seroquel' for a few days. Seroquel is very, very strong. The first day, like yesterday, I'm usually so tired and doped up I'm incapable of doing anything that requires thought. Fortunately, I adapt quickly. Today I'm mostly functional, which means I should probably increase the dose (I'm taking really tiny amounts) tonight.

So what I'm sayin' is, I'm in the middle of Chapter 2, but I didn't get any writing done the last couple of days. Hopefully some today!

You Can't Scrute The Machine!

Oh, writing feels SO GOOD. Okay, long break over. It ended the way writing breaks should, with me desperately writing something because my brain was about to explode and I couldn't sleep at night for the ideas.

Here, have Chapter One!

In case I haven't mentioned it fifty times, this is the beginning of The Inscrutable Machine, a book about a middle school girl supervillain. Quite Contrary filled me with a burning passion, but it was dark. It kept getting darker, and by the end it just wrung me completely dry of darkness for awhile. I'm going to try to keep The Inscrutable Machine light and frothy.

Yeah, good luck with that.

As an interesting note, I kept feeling that I wasn't ready to start writing it. I had too many unanswered questions about the story. Then I absolutely had to write, so I started it. After that first page, everything began falling into line. I understood the context, and was able to finish my outlines and plan for what comes next. That layered 'theory, then practice, then more theory, then more practice' approach is pretty common in my life. Didn't expect to see it in writing.