**Note: This is getting posted late as I ***again*** failed to double click. I fear that as my life becomes complicated with responsibilities, I fail to manifest the patience to sweat the small stuff… like making that extra click. Post is below:
Going back to a regular teaching schedule has reminded me of the interesting cast of characters I freely associate with college. My college experience was such a beast. My best college friend (not to be confused with my brother who is not of my mother for we long transcended friendship and simply… are) looked quite a bit like Hootie (Darius Rucker) and often enjoyed the benefits afforded by such an appearance. Odd for an Indian man. So, yeah, a character. Such things have often inspired characters in my own writing. As I begin to move towards a mindset of having two worlds in my daily life, I am constantly looking for characters to populate those worlds.
I should explain. I write for a shared world. I do not believe I will be moving towards writing for other shared worlds in the next year or so, but I do intend/expect to begin populating my own fictional world again. I have in mind a series of short stories that will form a collection and those stories share a world or perhaps look at suburbs at different points in the near to distant future. In that I mean to populate these worlds and tell a sort of history of man through them. I hope to have a thread of characters who move in and out of the area. I hope to be able to conjure a moment where a family who left 100 years ago has a descendent come back and experience a form of the town that is very socially similar to what was going on when her family left. This came to me when I met a student this very morning who mentioned moving because of feeling like her family was outcast in some way and coming to a new place where they were once again cast out. I might change things slightly, but the general idea is to be telling two types of stories within the boundaries of these shorts. I want to tell a story of people and I want to tell a story of an ever shifting world.
What I am most afraid of doing (and have done many times before) is not telling the story at all; of getting all of this in my head and being satisfied by just that and, as a result, not ever making the hard work happen on paper. That would be a tragedy as it has been in the past.