I’m writing this early and without caffeine. It’s obviously doomed for failure, but I figured I’d try. What’s the harm in a little trying, right? I attempted to dream about my book last night. I have been having luck staring at the ceiling before I go to sleep and imaging the characters and story. That is where a couple of days ago I screamed, “eureka,” (okay, screamed is not the right word. It was more of an internalized, boy, that would be an interesting twist thought) after discovering that the little girl with the pink sweater doesn’t have to be a little girl. (And a few nights before that, I dreamed about the Chair story and recorded the first line, which I promptly forgot after listening but not immediately transcribing. As I said before, you missed nothing.) (I was very close to erasing the last parenthetical during editing, but since I’m determined not to turn these musings/pre-Nanowrimo writings into edit-fests, I resisted the urge. While I am editing, it’s more to put down additional ideas I would have had when I first wrote, but for not being fully awake and properly caffeinated this morning. Of course, I won’t take any consolation from knowing that this aside, while completely useless in almost every way, nonetheless increased my word count for the day and moves me toward the less, and less elusive goal of 2,000 words. At least not much consolation.)

The ceilings in the Castle aren’t particularly entertaining, which gets my mind into the proper state for thinking about other things. If the ceilings were too interesting, then I probably would never think anything. It’s hard for me to sit down and just think. Even these exercises in writing aren’t real thinking. Thinking involves concentrating on following a series of thoughts through to their conclusion. While writing sometimes accomplishes this, for me, it’s more like I’m painting a series of understood—at least at unconscious levels—ideas with a palette brush. It’s during the pauses between typing that I find myself thinking, and if I don’t try to catch those thoughts quickly, poof, they’ll vanish. That’s one of the reasons I don’t do real thinking that often: The act of recording breaks the thinking spell, which leaves me without new thoughts to record, because the very act of recording stops the thoughts. That didn’t make much sense, and I’m not even sure it’s true, but there you have it.

Where I was going with this before I attempted to explain the act of real thinking was that yesterday I dreamed about the narrator of the pink sweater. I’m now waffling on whether to make the main character a young boy told through the eyes of his grown-up self. These seem like such silly questions for a Saturday morning. This is going to be one of those entries. So, if you’re bored already, I’d recommend putting down the paper (or pressing the back button or whatever link you usually use to escape this site, e.g., soap opera digest), and doing other things.

Wow, the consternations have begun early today. I’ll have to check, but I’m thinking this is a sort of record for me (it would have been a record if I hadn’t edited the last few paragraphs and added gobs of useless thoughts before the last consternation). One advantage I have found to writing everyday is that I find myself having little to talk about in my every day life. This is good. When there’s much going on in my life, I tend to focus my writing on those things exclusively, which lets my less interesting, but more important, discussions about my stories languish. As for the consternations, I don’t think I can do anything about them (wait, I keep forgetting that I’m an optimist now—happy thoughts! I’ll subjugate those evil thoughts to my will! Be gone, Carl demons! Damn, it didn’t work). When writing about nothing, or, worse complaining about nothing, I end up babbling endlessly for hours and hours, which may sound like fun, and may, if used correctly, pad my Nanowrimo story toward the 50,000 word goal, but in the end it pains me when I return to edit the babbles: Reading my babbles leaves me with too many questions about my sanity.

Doolies woke up before I was able to finish writing this morning. She sat next to me on the living-room couch and stared at me until I finally gave up and turned off the computer. We just finished shopping in the Bellevue mall and we stopped by the local bucks of stars so I could finish my quota for today. I’ve just finished going back through the first part of this musing and completing the thoughts that I should have written this morning. Having finally run out of things to talk about, I’m finally at the point where some original thought about my story would be useful to get me past the halfway mark. Let’s see where this brings me.

One of the ideas I had this morning while taking a shower (another place where I can fully concentrate on nothing except the relaxing scalding water and the empty depths of my mind), was a physical cost for using the sweater’s magic. Most fantasy books that have magic usually include some cost for its use. Just like doing anything difficult in life has a cost: think of practicing incessantly for writing or any difficult feat, or the wrecking of the body for professional athletes. When something comes too easy, too many people do it and it becomes devalued and less interesting. Getting back to the shower, there was a book—I think it was called Thinner, although I never read it—about a person getting skinnier until he wasted away. I’m not sure if this was a horror or ironic (if that’s a genre now) story, but that was the main theme. It might have been made into a movie, which would be why I would remember it (I didn’t read it, and I usually don’t remember books I see in the bookstore or read reviews of). My weight has always been a problem for me. While most of the people around me struggled to lose weight, I would struggle to gain weight. At one time, my mother offered me significant amounts of money to break across certain weight goals.

Yesterday, Doolies made comments about how I looked skinnier. When I don’t go to the gym, I tend not to eat as much (unless I’m getting lots of free food, which I will usually scarf down unless it’s buffet style, in which case I’ll eat it only if it’s high quality and clean), and I lose weight. I’ve not gone to the gym over the last two weeks because Scott, my Seattle-gym buddy, has been away. I’ve probably lost a few pounds because of that, and Doolies noticed. She has since tried to withdraw yesterday’s comments, but the cat’s already out of the bag—I’m not sure which bag or what a cat is doing in it, but you know how much I love those clichés. Getting back to her comments, as I was showering this morning, I thought about my problems with weight and the narrator’s magic. As I said, magic is more interesting if it has a cost. The sweater’s magic already has a cost to the narrator, but it’s more of a cost created by his uncertainty, not the sweater’s price. The narrator can take off the sweater at any time and see what happens.

Whoa. I hadn’t even followed the main idea through to its conclusion. If the narrator doesn’t take off the sweater—I mean never takes off the sweater, not even to shower—he’ll probably have worse issues than a smelly sweater. Would he also be scared to wash it? How far will his psychosis go? The sweater, like the Lord of the Ring’s One Ring, will have a hold over its wearer. This hold is created less by the magic itself than by the thought of losing that magic. I’ve thought about this in a different context. Imagine if you had a winning lotto ticket. No, imagine it is the winning lotto ticket, the one-hundred million dollar ticket. What would you do to keep it safe? Would you leave it alone or stay with it at all the time? Who would you tell? Would you take a shower knowing you’d have to leave it lying on the sink for a moment? Would you hold it, risking ripping it or squeezing it too tight, or put it in your bag and hope it doesn’t fall out. These are the thoughts, and, more importantly, the feelings, that are going to go through the narrator’s head. It’s not too difficult to imagine how I would handle that situation: complete and utter paranoia comes to mind. But it should be interesting from the narrator and story’s perspective.

Finishing this thought, it’s going to be difficult for the narrator to do much once he gets the sweater on. In the beginning, before he understands what the powers of the sweater are, he might take it off. But after he fully appreciates what he has, he going to find himself in a tight spiral of fear. What he finds at the end might be what makes this an interesting story (I’ll leave it to you to define “interesting.”)

Getting back to my penultimate thought, the narrator will be getting skinnier and skinnier as he wears the sweater, as its magic uses more and more of his energy and body fat. He’ll probably start off more on the thin side anyway, something he’ll be self-conscious of (particularly his thin-thin wrists—where do I come up with this non-personal information? Oh, wait. This is all stuff from my life. Fuck.) Why wouldn’t he eat more or use the magic of the sweater to reverse the weight loss? Before I can answer any of those questions, I’d have to understand the nature of the sweater’s magic, something I know nothing about. I have way too much thinking to do between now and November 1. That’s nine days from now. I’m swallowing my fears and consternations now. I have to keep reminding myself that this is not high-quality writing that I’m planning to do. This is only first draft material. I’m going to throw whatever is in my mind on that day against the wall and hope it has something to do with the story. These broad strokes that I’ve been writing about the last few days are just a way to get some guidance on which wall to throw the thoughts onto. I’d hate to end up splattering the wrong wall.

I almost went back to the beginning to try to edit in the last 500 words. I don’t think that would have worked. Instead, I should continue this thinking and try to arrive at more ideas for the story. The narrator is going to need more people around him. I’m leaning toward him working as a salesman in a large corporation. I know something about corporations so it won’t be too much of a stretch. The sweater is going to allow him to get ahead in the company, at least in the beginning. Or perhaps it won’t. More details.

Why was he given the sweater? (There are so many thoughts I had while dreaming that I forgot to record. It’s good that they’re surfacing again. I hate losing thoughts. The book I’m reading now, The best American Nonrequired Readings from 2004 edited by Dave Eggers, has an introduction by Viggo Mortensen, from how he’s introduced, I assume he’s an author of some merit. He tells a story about how many of his notebooks that he had written poems and thoughts in while working and living in Africa were stolen. Out of everything that the thief took from his bag, that was the worst of it. He hated to lose ideas. I feel the same way. When I work so hard to come up with them, it’s difficult to see them vanish.) I had given some thought to his grandma, the person who gives him the pink sweater. (The sweater doesn’t have to be pink—I’ve been giving that a lot of thought as well.)

I imagine his grandma as a cranky person, who knows she’s cranky, but accepts that it’s a symptom of aging. She’s a smart lady with a high pitched voice who is full of wisdom that the narrator doesn’t accept. He likes her, but more because her cynicism reminds him of himself. I’ll have to develop that part more. But getting back to the grandma, she’s going to play an important part in this. How does she create the sweater and does she know what she’s giving her grandson? Why is she giving it to him? I don’t have any answers today. I don’t even know if the grandma angle is the correct one, but I want to give this more thought. She needs a motive. Everyone needs motives.

I’m losing steam. Luckily, the loss occurred at around 1,700 words, and I was able to pour out the last few paragraphs to push me over the 2,000 word limit. Word count: 2,060; Time: one hour in Starbucks and thirty minutes this morning. Caffeination: tall mocha. Word count after editing: 2,238; editing time: 18 minutes.