Bleck, bleck, BLECK!

Chapter Six of Hagaren Country is killing me. I hate what I've written in ways that I could only possibly describe with hellfire raging around me. I wish I could crumple this Word document into a ball and toss it the hell out.

But, alas. I can't. And simply deleting the file wouldn't be nearly satisfying enough.

It's just that the minor characters (so minor they don't even have names) are talking way too much! STOP TALKING, DAMNIT! We don't need to know everyone's freaking life story! No one cares about you! And you--you're dead! So why do you matter so much!

Okay... Now I'm talking to them. Make it stop!

I need some talent and I need it now.

If you hear a story about a foreign girl running around Japan randomly ripping up papers for no apparent reason and finally had to be locked in a mental institution for the rest of her life raving about how characters who are supposed to be dead just won't shut up... Yeah, that'd be me.

Well, back to it.

I don't do crack very well. By crack, of course, I mean the fanfiction term crackfic: "A fanfic in which concept is so out there, one wonders what the author was snorting when they wrote it. Sometimes deliberate, sometimes just WTF?" From Time to Time is most certainly a crackfic, but it doesn't have that hectic, crack-y quality that's come to be expected with those kinds of fics. It's one of the things I get most upset with myself for: my inability to write something completely off-the-wall. Everything has to have a logical reason for being, everything has to be explained. People can't just appear out of nowhere, things can't happen without solid, explainable reason. These are good skills to have in order to write "serious" fiction, but I fail when it comes to comedy or even amusing fanfics. I just can't do it! Grr!

One of my attempts at a crackfic was a House/Tsubasa Chronicle crossover. My best friend and I were talking and came up with the concept. We laughed so hard while talking about that I said, "I have to make this into a fic!" However, when I actually sat down to write it, it became a lot less funny. My tedious narration and character description got in the way and bogged the whole thing down.

I'll probably never, ever finish this and I feel like I've aborted something beautiful.

( I was going to call it House Country )

And so ends my brilliant idea, never to be finished. See what I mean about the crack-yness? It's just not funny this way. It's times like these I wish I wasn't so literary. I feel bound by my own rules!

Grrr.

So, right now I'm listening to the audio book of Wicked while I drive back and forth between home and work. It's a pretty good book, but the bad part is that I've begun to pick up the writing style when I write my own stuff! This is beyond frustrating for me... I thought I long ago outgrew this! Few people have accused me of "lifting" a writing style lately-- actually, it's been since my sophomore year of college that someone has told me to my face that my writing seems exactly like that of another writer's (can't remember whose now...) Of course, I wasn't offended; I was still trying to find my own voice and, truth be told, attempting to mimic what inspired me at the time.

But the fact that it's happening to me now is extremely irking. Maybe it's just because I'm in the middle of a horrible case of writer's block, but I can't seem to shake Gregory Maguire vague, nuanced writing style. And what's worse, I hear John McDonough (the guy who's reading the book on the CD) reading my stuff every time I look it over.

Am I doomed to shut myself off from the rest of the writing world in fear of picking up an author's writing style? Oh God, I hope not. I love books to much to give them up. Maybe I'm only picking up Maguire's style because he has such a unique voice. Or maybe it's because I'm just short of my own ideas at the moment...

Well, whatever it is, I hope it leaves me soon! I really, really want to finish this up sometime.

*grumbles and shuffles away to listen to more of Wicked* Gah!