A Scrambled & Fried Brain

Hello again, blog. I'm sorry I've neglected you. I really did mean to write more posts... but I've been busy. How busy?

Good question.

One test after another can really fry your brains out. Don't even get me started on my utter lack of motivation to crack open my Statistical Methods in Psychology textbook and take a stab at my homework. I'm already three homeworks behind. I'm just grateful that my professor is a really understanding guy who'd rather be lenient than a hard-ass toward his utterfly confused students (which is to say, pretty much my entire stat class). I also sometimes feel stupid around my classmates who frequently participate in class discussions. It's like they have a weekly subscription to Psychology journals and read all the articles cover to cover. Is that something I should be doing? Am I showing enough interest, enough effort in my major?

Doesn't this remind you of Coraline? Yikes.

Is it really horrible that I'd rather write stories than read my psychology textbooks at this point in the semester? Or that I'd rather watch TV instead of write a review for my theatre class on a low-budget mediocre Hunter College Theatre performance of Brecht's Threepenny Opera?

I'd sooner sleep than study.

Don't get me wrong. Theatre is really a creative form of art -- in fact, it's the synthesis of the arts. But there are some plays that I have no interest in. Other times, I have nothing particularly interesting to say about a performance. Sometimes I'm just annoyed at the actors and grumpy at the director for an over-ambitious overarching metaphor for a play. Just tell the story without the hokey gimmicks, dammit! Give me something I can relate to, something I can really enjoy thinking about.

And okay, here's my ditty about my chosen major... Psychology and all its subfields are very intriguing -- really, it's an eye-opening subject to empirically explore the boundaries of people's thinking patterns, behaviors, emotions, and interactions with other people. But I can't see where my life is leading in terms of a career I want to get out of it. A clinician? A researcher? A guidance counselor? A therapist? Thus, the dilemma of having too many choices.

And the dilemma of not having much of a choice -- I wanted to be an English major. But there's not much of a career you can make out of a BA in English Literature, aside from teaching (which I don't think I have the patience for) and publishing (which I wanted to try, but the typical salary doesn't really pay well enough to cover rent in NYC).

So the compromise would be to become a psychologist and write novels on the side. But I really don't know how that'll turn out. I just told my dad the premise of my book this morning. He knew I was working on a manuscript, but I never told him what it was about until today. I know I should take his technical questions as a way to challenge myself and come up with innovative ideas to tell a story about mythical creatures that have become as cliche as Santa Claus in contemporary pop culture.

Suppose you combine the two salient pop culture images into one mega picture of human imagination:

Pretty darn frightening, no?

I seriously think I have something original going. Not the vampire Santa hybrid creature, but my story.

I know that my dad was really just trying to help me by offering different perspectives on some of the key details (like, what kind of human in his/her right mind would attack and pillage a group of dragons? or how exactly does a dragon shape-shift? or how will a dragon blend in with humans?). Really, they're good questions that I have to work through in order to get my story's details straight. But I have this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that the novel I've been working on sounds completely ridiculous.

I felt so embarrassed talking about it with my dad. Probably because he's not the kind of person who would pick up a sci-fi or fantasy novel right off the bat at the bookstore. He's the kind of reader who enjoys reading books written by Sidney Sheldon, Sue Grafton, Tom Clancy, Isabel Allende, or Kahlil Gibran. He reads everything from religious perspectives and philosophies, to ghost-written James Bond adventures and Alexander McCall Smith's Ladies' No. 1 Detective Agency.

Only occasionally will my dad voluntarily select a novel to read from my book shelf. I'd even gotten him to read Airhead and all the books from The Mediator series by Meg Cabot. He even read a few titles that I bought in middle school from the Scholastic bookfair, like Carolyn Meyer's Young Royals series about the Tudors (which, by the way, got me interested in learning about European history when I was 10 years old).

But he's never picked up In the Forests of the Night or Shattered Mirror by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. Nor did he even bother picking up any fantasy novels I happened to borrow from the public library (like the Wicked Lovely series by Melissa Marr or the ). My dad enjoyed watching the Harry Potter films, but it wasn't something he would try reading. He didn't really understand the sweeping epic of Lord of the Rings. Ditto with Tim Burton's kooky, fantastical films like The Nightmare Before Christmas or Sweeney Todd.

I guess some people's suspension of disbelief can't stretch that far. Which I suppose is the reason why I felt embarrassed telling my dad about the premise of my book. He looked at me the entire time as though he had no idea what the excitement's all about.

"You need to make it sound really believable," Dad said, "otherwise an editor might not be willing to publish your story. Fantasy's okay, but you need to make the story relatable to your readers and have a very lovable main character so that your readers will keep buying your books."

Thanks, Dad. I already knew that. But he does have a point.

I'm hoping that my book comes out as a Young Adult novel, considering that my protagonist is a teenage girl who's only just realizing her heritage and her potential despite her angst and anxiety over fitting in with the rest of the world. Though there's some romance, but I wanted it to be more of a coming-of-age story, a kind of bildungsroman. I'm not sure my readers would love Danica right away -- she's whiny, angsty, pessimistic, and has a frequent tendency to overreact. But I hope that by writing her story, she'll grow into a strong, wise, independent woman.

Right now, though, I can't really think. I don't exactly have writer's block, but I'm stuck. I'm having some trouble writing a fight scene. Mostly because I can't really get into the mood of the moment. Sounds pretty flaky, but there are certain things you have to be in the right emotional state and mindset for, otherwise your work will end up sounding like crap. Lately I haven't been able to fully immerse in that creative mode. Blame it on school, on other responsibilities taking a toll on my mind. So I end up not feeling it, despite my efforts to find fast, aggressive, heart-pumping, adrenaline-rushing music to write to on Google.

Suffice it to say that a majority of my search yielded less than savory results. I hate power metal (sorry, metalheads) and rap really isn't the kind of vibe I'm looking for with this particular fight scene.

Take this scene from The Vampire Diaries, for instance:

How does a writer put the Salvatore brothers' (and their enemies') emotions and actions into suspenseful, words?

But I did manage to find some cool tunage to occupy my caffeine-induced neurons as I wrote. Like the theme music from Angel (YES, the vampire that David Boreanaz used to portray before becoming Agent Seeley Booth in Bones) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the ominous-sounding score from Batman: The Dark Knight. I also really like the dark, romantic mood of Michael Nyman's "The Heart Asks Pleasure First/Promise" from the movie The Piano (I think it goes by either title; not sure about that).

In no particular order, here's the music that gets me through writing the fight scene (or any scene in my story for that matter):

• Pony (It's OK) by Erin McCarley
• The Breakdown by Alexz Johnson
• Ruthless by Something Corporate
• Syndicate by The Fray
• Over My Head (Cable Car) by The Fray
• When You Were Young by The Killers
• Sick Cycle Carousel by Lifehouse
• Practice Makes Perfect by Cute Is What We Aim For
• Naive by The Kooks
• Sunrise by Yeasayer
• The Con by Tegan & Sara
• No One Sleeps When I'm Awake by The Sounds
• Disturbia by Rihanna
• Feel It In My Bones by Tiesto featuring Tegan & Sara
• Rooms On Fire by Stevie Nicks
• Fader by The Temper Trap
• Naked by The Goo Goo Dolls
• Reinventing Your Exit by UnderOath
• Howl by Florence + the Machine
• Drumming Song by Florence + the Machine
• Hemorrhage by Fuel
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer Theme
• The Sanctuary (Extended Remix) by Darling Violetta [Angel theme]
• The Heart Asks Pleasure First by Michael Nyman
• Aggressive Expansion by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard

Of course, this list is still subject to change according to my mood and crazy as this might sound, my characters' moods. If you want to hear the playlist, check out the "Tunage" tab underneath "Turn the Pages." Hopefully you'll find some artful arias to inspire you as well.

In case you haven't noticed yet, I pretty much changed the layout of my blog again. ;)

So there you have it, friends -- another rambling from a girl who currently has addled brain cells from reality scrambling and frying her mind to anxiety-ridden putty. Still recovering, but coping well enough.

More later, lovelies.