Welcome to Bedlam...

Hello all! I've had this little blog set up since October and have yet to write a single word. Now I've written 22. We're already making progress.

I'm not sure what I intended it to be when I began, but recent circumstances have determined what this blog is going to be: a pressure value to hopefully stave off the inevitable explosion of my brain because brain explosions are gooey and I don't have time to clean that mess.

Speaking of mess, what a glorious segue into this blog's title!

A writer's mind, more specifically, this writer's mind. Do, as the subtitle warns, watch your step. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm unbalanced, but to characterize me as abnormal would be no stretch. No one has yet found a proper box to stick me in and thus I spend my life hopping from one box to the next, baffling people as I go. It's fun to watch, but it makes for some rather unnavigable cranium territory.

At 24 I've had more occupations than most retirees, more family calamities than most people who've lived a cetury, and more education than is healthy (which is frightening given that I'm only on the first year of my MA). All of this has contributed to my brain's critical state, but being a writer makes it worse.

On top of UPC codes, family disfuction, illness, semiology, and Joan W Scott I have to share my brain-space with hundreds of characters, plotlines, imagined territories, governments, religious orders, and a horde of stampeding plot bunnies on a rampage. The latter space-takers would all be fine except being an MA student I have no time to indulge them. You may be thinking, you have time to write this ridiculous blog that no one is going to read, so how do you not have time to write your own work?

You, good sir, are clearly not a writer.

It's easy enough to dump absolute tripe into a virtual hole that no one will probably ever fall down. I have in fact done so throughout the day between proposal edits, medieval primary source readings, and visual theory. It's quite another thing to manage to write anything of worth regarding the plotline for the three set triology that is sitting loosely outlined on my harddrive or the theological novella I've been working on for months.

The problem comes when your mind, so accustomed to having time for such frivolities during your undergrad, can't seem to manage to shut that creative part of itself down. Most of the time I do all right. I get through my readings. I write my stiff academic dribble. I teach. I sleep. And then I do it all over again. Then there's the last four and a half weeks where I can't shut it off no matter what I try and end up averaging two hours of sleep a night. I suppose insomnia could be the solution to my time problem, but I really do need to at least TRY to sleep. I've done the no sleeping thing. It doesn't help me or any of the people closest to me (inside my head or out).

Hence I am here, venting into cyberspace. It is my hope that this blog will help alleviate the pain in my brain. No one but a writer can truly understand the unbearable din of having hundreds of irrate characters - some of whom you haven't even been introduced to yet - shouting obsceneties at you while trying to do, well, anything. I'm going to try to post a few times a week. If you're looking for consistency of content look elsewhere. You may find a word I particularly liked, a description of a scene that popped into my head, or a whinging diatrabe much like this one.

You never know what you'll find, but I'd be thrilled if you join me on the journey. Perhaps once I'm finally done educating myself I'll have time to start writing publishable material and can switch the title to Inside an Author's Mind.

Until then...welcome to Bedlam.