A day of distractions

Many distractions: taking someone to the doctor, phone conversations, writing up some notes based on those conversations, and feeling that much of what's happened, what I've seen/read/heard could, one way or another, form either the basis for a plot or elements of a story.

I woke up at 4.26am with one word from a dream - 'incandescent'. Who knows? But it would fit well with a scene I'm about to write which takes place in a candle-lit setting.

Read a bit of 'Freakonomics' (the economics book by Steven Levitt). He doesn't address this question but it popped into my mind: how can one monetise being a freak in today's postmodern, media-rich society? Is it a case of being a media whore and grabbing your 15 minutes of fame, followed by repeated exposure as other media companies home in on you? Or are we all freaks now?

Exorcised some of my surrealist tendencies (see the previous blog) by replying to someone else's blog in the form of a few sentences of surreal flash fiction. But I still want to pursue the idea of surrealist erotica when time allows...

Read a bit of an Umberto Eco essay that set up an idea in my mind for a voodoo-related story. It may get written but I have a dozen other things I want to write first, and two I want to re-write before I think they're publishable.

Also I've noticed a local writing group which runs monthly readings is inviting submissions for June on a theme of 'taboo'. I know about taboos, right, because I write bdsm? Well, yes, but I've just been consulting Freud's 'Totem and Taboo' and thinking about what I might want to contribute. Nothing I have 'in stock' would work. But do I really want to write a story about incest or cannibalism or necrophilia? Not really... well, maybe cannibalism. I'm still mulling that one over.

Think I'd better get back to the things I'm trying to finish or rewrite at the moment before starting anything new.

Ah well. So it goes.

(And even that's a quote - a character in a Kurt Vonnegut story I think!)