Ridden

Something has happened to me. I'm not sure exactly when it came on; it's been building over time. Possibly it started when I began to ride the bus more frequently. But I have developed an entirely new relationship with fiction. Fiction I'm writing, that is. I seem to have become inhabited by it. It comes to me --usually on the bus -- and grabs my attention and drags me away from what I'm reading, even if what I'm reading isn't a bad book (currently I'm reading Jane Yolen's Take Joy and it is emphatically not a bad book; it's a little jewel). Today I caught myself staring off into the middle distance, thinking well, what if Derek was the vampire? What if he's the one Amy killed by reflex when he surprised her? How is she going to explain *that* to Dara? How could she possibly convince her it wasn't deliberate? and discovering that a minor off-screen character had hooked up with an unrelated, throw-away bit of business intended to establish the main character's powers and relationship to the supernatural and combined into a plot point sufficiently knotty for our heroine that it felt as "real" and immersive to me as any book. I came down from it as from a dream.

The phrase "hag-ridden" -- haunted by recurring nightmares or visions -- seems almost apt. Except that I don't feel haunted precisely. But ridden, for sure. Perhaps it's more like Santeria -- a loa descends on you and rides you where it wants to go.

In the past I've had persistent ideas, ideas that would come back to me periodically, for years even, but they tended to be inert kernels or very slow-building. Things are germinating in my head now. There's this persistent, volatile fecundity -- the slightest trigger and little spurs and tendrils of plot start shooting up through the cracks in my routine. It's almost worrying. I wander off into these fugue states and I'm much more likely to almost miss my stop than if I were "just" reading. I don't know if I can integrate all this stuff into a butt-in-chair workschedule, so I don't know yet if it will be ultimately productive, but there are signs that I can if I don't force too much rigor onto it. I got into work this morning and sent myself an 800 word e-mail of two conversations that practically dictated themselves to me on the bus.

And now I've recorded Derek-the-vampire. I don't know if I'll keep that. I am resistant to that. It makes such problems for Amy. I just don't see how she could tell Dara what happened. Which would mean keeping secrets from one of her best friends. On the other hand, "Oops, I inadvertently set fire to your boyfriend," no, that's not going to be great for the friendship either. Problematic. On the other hand, they do say that your'e supposed to make trouble for your protagonist. But this was not the trouble I had in mind, dammit.

But even if I wind up its only explorer, this is a fascinating country I've come to. I've never been this way before. And now I know how to tell a vampire by checking his nail beds.

Oh, And Another Thing...

The whole point in killing off the vampire at the ATM was to do a quick demonstration of Amy's pyrokinesis and to establish that, because it's practically required, yes, vampires exist in this universe but, no, this is not going to be one of those vampires-are-so-sexy-let's-linger-over-the-details type urban fantasies, but rather a kill-it-it's-evil-and-let's-move-on type urban fantasy, where Amy steps delicately over the brittle charcoal remains and never gives another thought to vampires for the rest of the book. Now, just because Dara is an advocate who lobbies for lycanthrope rights, she'll obviously think vampires are people too, which means that I have to think of them as people because Dara does. Because you just know that the two of them are going to have a major blow-up over Derek, which Dara will regard as murder and Amy thinks of as pest control. So now I've got to figure out the metaphysics and ethics of vampirism. And this story wasn't even supposed to *have* any spam vampires in it.