So,
I have this world in my head and it won't go away.
It has sat there fermenting for years, the setting changes, characters pop out of nowhere, sometimes characters follow me about the place, when happens to be the scary ones I must seem totally crazy racing through town to make sure they never catch or see me.
It all started back in transition year in school, the 4th year in the Irish secondary school system that you don't have to do, so nobody does anything. I became friends with a girl who loved to read, and loved to write. I had been writing embarrassingly bad Harry Potter fan fiction as a way to pretend that I was working really hard on my Junior Cert exams, it all looked the same to my mum, peeking in at me from the kitchen. I had made loads of friends online from this exciting clandestine period of my life but I had never admitted to anyone that I really liked writing outside of the internet.
Then one day I did. This girl sat beside me in class and could see that I wasn't writing anything to do with the formation of ox-bow lakes. She asked me what I was doing. I got her hooked. We would swap awful chapter for awful chapter, devour each others characters (thinly disguised as ourselves) watch as they met the man of their dreams, laugh under the table at robbed lines from other comedies cleverly inserted into the stilted prose. It was some of the best times of my life. My online life took off too when I met my best friend and we did the exact same thing.
Now all the way through I had this character, I did terrible things to her, all those that read my samples asked me how i could do all these things to her?
At first she was in Ravenclaw and got attacked by Remus, but not so badly that she totally changed into a werewolf, she would just bleed twice a month instead of once. Then I cut off her arm, then she went insane cause her lover was thrown into Azkaban, then she lost her mother, lost her father, had an idiot brother who stole all her money, then she got tricked into minding a group of death eaters children indefinitely ... exciting right?
She had started out as me, so why was I doing all these things to myself? Was my life not interesting enough? Was I not satisfied with the way life was going pretty spiffingly? Did I feel like I deserved all this?
Then it hit me, and then I stopped writing.
She wasn't me any more. There was no way in hell I would deal with things the way that she did, there was no way that I would get myself into those situations. I would have just got off at the next train station and gone home, enrolled in a good degree and worked hard.
So I lost inspiration for a long time. I felt disconnected to her and even though she kept showing up in the pack of my brain in different places, watching everything I did, I just couldn't get rid of her! So I decided to write again. And its happening this November.
This National Novel Writing Month She is back with a bang.
Gods help us all.
