Day 28: When the night comes, I tremble with fear.

It is pretty obvious at this point I am going through some things. Most of them are in the deep caverns located only in my mind and others are out in the real world. Unfortunately I cannot blatantly say what either are. No, I am not considering suicide and no, me and Cal are very, very happy. I just go down a dark path every now and again. Sometimes I come back to the light a little quicker than others. This time it has been a hard and rocky road…if even it was a road, path, avenue, whatever.

Lately, I have discovered that when it gets dark or when it gets late, I become afraid. Not so much of the dark. I am afraid of sleep. Lets back up for a moment, shall we? As a child, I was always afraid of the dark. There were monsters in the dark. Even after my Uncle forced me to watch Nightmare on Elm Street II, I would not sleep with some appendage hanging off the bed or with the closet doors open lest something grab me and drag me away. As I entered into my teenage years, the whole “stay totally on the bed” thing remained but the things in the dark that scared me changed. I was afraid of some stranger waking me from my sleep. If I kept my eyes open in the dark, I would imagine horrible things coming into view and murdering me or dragging me off…half alive. Noises didn’t help. Shadows didn’t either.

Cal used to laugh at me and Number Twenty Two years ago. Both of us had the same habit. If we had to shut the light off and walk across a room in the dark, we would flip the switch and race across the room like something was after us. Thinking about it while not experiencing it seems crazy, I know but its not. I don’t know about our son but for me, it was a very real fear and it did not feel good. Your blood becomes hot as your heart races and forces it through your veins the very second the sound of the “flip” from the light switch would reach your ears. Fight or flight ensues and you take off running, trying to race darkness out of the room. Obviously one never wins that race because you are running through the room which darkness has already enveloped. Loser. Once you get to where you are going; be it the other door, the bed, the couch, whatever, the fear leaves you. Only, it is not so easily spat out. It gradually leaves. While it only takes a few seconds to return to normal, your inner self notes that it seems a great deal longer than that. Even after spending four decades on this planet and am fully aware of what can and cannot be in the room as well as knowing what will go bump, it still does not help. There are certain rooms that I will still flip the switch and run. Dark and I are simply not friends. We never have been. Looks like never will be. (Hrmm, maybe I will be forced to roam this earth forever, hiding not in the shadows but in the light. I wonder if this makes me one of the “angels” that play with babies when they are first born? Ah, I digress. That, dear readers, is a story for another day.)

Back to the dark.

I am not sure words would suffice to describe how I feel when the sun sets. Its primordial fear. Pure and absolute. I want to run screaming into the night and never return but where would I go and what would I do when I outran that fear? That is scary all by itself. I feel the blood rush through every single vein in my body. Almost like I am becoming self aware or something. My heart begins to race and then sets itself to cruise control until I am able to make myself go into a fitful sleep. Sometimes, I have a beer or two to help me become drowsy. Sometimes I take a migraine pill. (Yea, I have a script for these people, I am NOT a pill junkie.) Anything I can do to force myself to sleep. It is not that I am NOT sleepy, I am just afraid of what dreams will bring or what the last thought which enters into my head will be. I have been having very vivid dreams as of late. Most of them relate to my novel. That is ok, The really good ones stick with me and I get them on paper before they vanish from my memory but the other things are what haunt the voices in my head. Horrible, vivid premonitions. Evil laughter and murderous visions.

It is simply not fair. Sometimes I think, the fear of the dark is a cakewalk compared to this. Not only does it make me afraid of myself and whatever is creating this discomfort for me, it makes me sad. I find it hard to describe to my family what is going on and when I just refer to it as “whatever is going on in my brain” they just go “Oh, that.” Its alright. They are not being callous or cold. They are just tired of seeing me torture myself like this and want it to be better. Only, nobody knows how.

I am not one to go to the doctor for such things and I am certain they will just give me some sort of medication to “make it all better” but I don’t want to be medicated. I just want it to go away. Its like smoking. Just. Flippin. Quit. I know its hard. For me, even eleven years later, I still chew the hell out of a pen when we go on road trips. But I have not had a cigarette, have I? Nope. Any crutch or debilitating “feeling” is going to leave its mark on you. That is just life. You just try to live with it.

At work, when it gets busy, we all talk about “Once more….into the breach! AAAAHHHHGGGGGHHHH!!!!”  This is exactly how I feel with ever sunset. I don’t see it getting any better any time soon. Now that I have put this out there, I think I should take it like that. Face my fear. Fight it. Run into the breach, rifle above your head, screaming….into the night.

Out run the darkness. Face your fear. Grab it and make it yours.

That is the ONLY WAY!

What do YOU think?

Day 25: When killing off a character

When I started writing my current book, I had no intention of killing someone off. Nor did I have the intent for it to take the turn that it has. I have found it difficult to convey the feelings and emotions my characters are experiencing but the story must come out like it has. It is not that I am having difficulty coming up with the circumstance, but I scare myself when the words begin to flow. I assume that is how it is supposed to be. If the author can invoke emotion by simply rereading and tweaking the paragraph, the first successful step has happened. Or is it something else?

I find that I have pieced this together haphazardly and can only hope that the finished product (for this part of the story at least) conveys the amount of terror and fear that I intend to convey. I am by no means a horror writer but I have found that I hate this character just as much as the character that is committing this brutal act. I am not saying the person doing the killing is right or wrong or evil or not. I will leave that for you to decide when the time comes to publish. I just scare myself sometimes. It also has become an all encompassing thing in my thoughts. I dream about it, I eat it, I breathe it, it is in the far reaches of my brain and I feel I can only get over it when it is finally on paper.

Therein lies the difficulty.

I am by no means a monster but I have created one. It bothers me. Just like seeing someone hurt someone else in real life or on a Facebook video bothers me. It keeps me awake at night and I just know if I can get this damn thing done, I will be ok. It would be different were it someone real I could base my vengeance on and do what the general public believes authors to do. You know, piss me off and I will kill you in my book. That is a terrible connection. What if the writer has always been one who writes in the horror genre? I have a hard time believing that writers like Stephen King and (in other genres) Dean Koontz or eve Louis L'amour had that many people piss them off in their lives. Come on people, be realistic (hehe, get it? Realistic in a fiction author's mind? Ah, I digress.)

This is the first time I have tried my hand at a fiction novel. I have done short stories and paragraphs before and this thing is making me sick. Not in the sense that I hate it but in the sense that if I don't get it out of me soon, I will explode! I used to wonder why people took so long to write books. Some authors will put into their forewords or introductions how long they worked at a piece. I now understand.

Just. Wow. I get it peeps. I get it. For those of you who write, what is the most difficult piece you have ever done?

What do YOU think?

Where is my beloved beach?

Most of you know I have been fighting a battle with depression and the jury is still out on which side is going to win. I am vehemently opposed to obtaining medication for this because I believe I can kick its butt on my own. However, sometimes I wonder.

I tried something different yesterday. I made myself get out of the house and go visit an old friend who was in town with her family for the weekend. It was nice to have a grown up conversation with someone who does not live in my home nor is not words on a computer screen. We talked in general about nothing as we watched the beach activity and looked out over the ocean toward the end or the world. While it was horribly hot, it was nice to be outside of my element even if only for a short time. It was great catching up with an old friend. I needed to be at the beach. I love it there. The smell of the ocean air, the sound of the waves and the beauty of the dangerous ocean. It has more power than anyone realizes. I am also trying other things. I am writing via snail mail to my lifelong best friend and it is exciting to wait for the mail and to write back and see how long it takes to get there. That helps too. (Teeny digression there. Yea, you didn’t know that.)

Unfortunately, I cut my visit short because I had hungry children and I knew I had to get home soon. I always have something to do that I will never get done because the inspiration leaves me when I start to see blue. (You know, you see red when you are livid. I see blue when I am down.) I didn’t want Mary to see me like that. So I left. That didn’t help my mood any. Instead of going home the way we came, I decided to give in to the boys request and we walked the beach back toward the house. I am happy to say they had a blast. I just felt worse and worse. I looked out over my beloved ocean and began to think of how the United States and other developed countries constantly send their street run off into the ocean and how dirty that makes the water at the sand’s edge. To watch people freely play in it. Hell, they may as well be playing in ditch water. I also thought about how careless people are in that they don’t take care of my beloved beach. They leave trash everywhere and really do not care that it affects everything. This made me sad because it is yet more evidence of human nature that fails our planet and fails our children. We fail each other as a people.

Then I turn inward and begin to think of personal things. How I used to LOVE the beach more than I do now. How it was a place of solace for me. I could stand at the edge of the tide and feel the waves lapping at my feet. I would look out as far as I could see and imagine falling off the “edge” of the earth and deeply breathe in the salt air and feel at peace. I would feel at home. For a brief moment…I would feel comfortable in my own skin. I would feel comfortable breathing and with Michele. Its almost elation. Once I began to think about how being at the beach used to make me feel. I stopped. I tried to catch that elusive moment of joy.

It eluded me.

The ocean seemed dark. The sky unforgiving. I felt alone.

I had to step back from that. I turned my attention to my boyz who were frolicking in the tied pools and having a blast. No video games, no money being spent for some overinflated attraction that is a disappointment. Just fun with each other and the beach. My beloved beach. That perked me up a little but I was still sad. (OMG did I just break down into tears right now while writing this!?)

We continued our walk down the beach and happened upon a festival that was going on for the day at the board walk. Once we got on the boardwalk, we listened to some music from a concert while we put on our shoes and refilled our water bottle. The band there played “Happy.” Maybe that was the world trying to tell me something. I took that as a sign and put all that mess behind me and we took the street which led to our house. Another sign was that we came across one of our daughter’s friends and he stopped and had a conversation with us. Polite and respectful teenagers always are a breath of better in this horrible world we live in.

Maybe I can beat this. Maybe my beloved beach will come back to me.

What do YOU think?