So Inspiring!

If you haven't read the short story Rebellion that I posted early this week then you should read that before you read this blog. 

Last week while I was talking to Katie she was telling me about a show she watches and two characters trying to get matching tattoos. One is a living piece of gum and the other a vampire. Princess Bubblegum kept "gumming" up the needle and the vampire kept healing before the tattoo would take. And hilarity ensues...

While she's telling me about that a part of my brain clicked into action. The cogs starting spinning. The whirligigs started whirling. And I said, "I don't write alternative history type stuff but how cool of a WWII story would that make? Someone gets outed as a vampire because the Nazis are trying to give them the identifying tattoo and it keeps healing? Then they take out that camp and keep taking out Nazis basically being the turning point in the war and that's why we won WWII. Vampires."

Katie listened to the random rant and even gave me a some sort of supportive sounds.

Then I said, "You must wonder what it would have been like to be raised by normal people. Though your dad is sort of normal so maybe you got a taste of it?"

This is not the first time I've apologized for being not typical. And she knows I'm not really sorry. I mean, I am who I am and I like me a lot so I'm not sorry about that. But there are times I do think it might have been nice for her to have people who didn't think sideways as her parents. Stability is highly rated, I've heard. But I'm not really sorry. I mean...she's great and she got that way being raised by us so...

Writing for Dana right now for our exchanges; I've mentioned that I'm sort of stuck with the longer story I have written most of the year. I'm bored with all of them so I've been doing one offs. Things that will most likely hit the blog later so they are bonus pieces for the weeks that I don't have any ideas. What I've been doing is opening a random writing prompt generator and writing whatever it gives me. 

This week as I started writing I had to stop and think...wait...this prompt is basically the same prompt I got a few weeks ago. Just a slight variation. That one was "an unexpected letter" and this one is "a surprise package." Well fuck. I'm not going to write the same story twice so... Then I was stuck. Got two paragraphs in and... nothing. I shut everything down, told Brent I couldn't unlock the story and would have to let it sit for a bit and went to do chores. 

Which is a great way to get things to unlock. Take a walk. Clean something you don't have to think about while you clean it. Just get busy enough to distract that part of your brain and your subconscious will take over noodling on the problem. I was washing dishes and thought, "OH! That's it!" 

When Brent wrapped up for the evening I told him I didn't have it all yet but I knew who was dead now so I knew the story. And he told me he almost said, "Figure out who you are going to kill and you'll know what to write."  (Poor, Katie) 

Then when we were talking about the story at dinner he said, "I think that's the agreement Good Denise must have made with Bad Denise to let her take charge. 'You'll still get to kill people, just with less chance of going to jail.'"

It made me laugh. 

And made me realize Brent talks about GD and BD as if they weren't the same person as well so maybe I'm not the only, let's say unique, parent afterall. 

Sorry, Katie.