I've even raped and killed a mountain panda in the hills of Shaanxi.

I stopped writing anything but nonfiction after I finished my novel (urban fantasy cribbed partly from Nightmare on Elm Street, partly from ST:tNG, about teenagers who save their small New England town from an evil dragon). I rewrote about 75% in 2003-04, but I was more or less sick of it, esp. after a real life agent said I ought to think about sequel possibilities if I truly wanted to get published.

 

The next think I tried writing was a web serial (a bunch of us were inspired by the success of Tales of Mu), but I kept writing myself into a corner with the "gem traveler" who could escape any situation by clicking his ruby slippers holding his rubies and concentrating. I had trouble thinking of different settings, let alone scenarios, although if I could have, it would have been a perfect series. (Another story I wrote has this series as a tv show.)

 

I've also worked on and off on some scenarios for "novel 2", about dating and the techno and goth scenes in Seattle. But that didn't really inspire me like fanfiction did. "I can write better than this," I thought when I read Meyer's books. In fact, a lot of Twilight fanfiction I read was anywhere from a little better to "holy shit I would pay to see a movie of this!"

 

I have two "parody" fictions going, one with Bella using Edward as a drug substitute (, and one where he relives the day he met her, except he actually does kill her. A lot. It's a little Groundhog Day but bloodier. It's more or less just for fun, so I can kill one of the worst female protagonists committed to paper over and over.

 

I also have a sort of action/drama one going on, in which I took E&B and gave them different backgrounds (Edward never stopped killing, and Bella was brought up by her dad), and used that to justify the elimination of their more irritating (to me) traits. In point of fact, I think most of the vampires in canon are very interesting, but the books focus so much on the "romance" that, for example,  the only reason you know Alice Cullen is Bella's "best friend" is because it is repeatedly repeated.

 

But I have felt loss of interest in these stories as well, although I've written more on them than any other piece. I am going to try to finish them but then I'm going to go back to the well of original fiction.

 

I likely will incorporate the messages of "Volturi Outpost 23: Forks" into whatever that ends up being. And possibly a trickster god. But some of those are: feeling fear and attraction but ACTING ON THE FORMER NOT THE LATTER, not letting a close friendship unravel simply b/c one of you met the love of their life, having abilities to change the world for the better and DOING SO, putting off violent action in favor of negotiations, killing someone who is a lethal threat instead of running from them, hiding information from authority figures who would otherwise not act in your best interests, and always making sure you attack from a position of strength. (Most of these are straight against similar messages in the Twilight books, while others are more general things ... that most people are also against.)

 

And I might throw in a trickster god too.

Karaoke last night was ok. I still feel the cough at times, and it doesn't make me want to practice singing so much. Anyway I woke up disgustingly early because I had to go to the bathroom. Tricky to get back to sleep after that. But finally I did. When I woke up again I still felt shitty, so I just watched the director commentary on American Pie. Not because it was insightful or anything, but because in the GQ I read yesterday, the Weitz brothers were in a photo shoot. And one of them is fairly cute, and also did About A Boy, which is a great film. I may just have to buy it today.

--

Great quote on writing:

"Reading [my own writing] does not mean anything to me... what matters to me is the writing, the act of manufacturing the novel, becuase while I am doing it, at that particular moment, I am in the world I'm writing about. It is real to me, compeltely and utterly. Then, when I'm finished, and have to stop, withdraw from that world forever - that destroys me. The men and women have ceased talking. They no longer move... My friends are dead."

-- PKD.

Now I've only written one novel, but I know exactly what he means. Even stories sometimes do that.

OK, I actually started writing the screenplay for Bullet Got The Wrong Bloke. Five pages so far, but now it's dinnertime. I've got some really cool images in my head that I'll let marinate till I get back.