It’s 5am and I’m still not able to sleep. No I don’t want a sleep aid. My dreams are generally weird enough without them. I’d use alcohol more often but Topamax don’t seem to mix well with it in my system. And this is with just a low dose – or so the med clinic loves to remind me every time I go in. Hurray for pharmaceutical sensitivity, I guess?

Anyways, it’s been 7 days now since I posted the Chaos Pen Challenge #5 over on the Writing Hallow and here I am a little bit over 9k words into what was supposed to be a short story, it’s not done, and I don’t like it. It’s worse than a vomit draft. I keep writing though because I’m hoping that by reaching the end of whatever this mess is, I can then go back and repair this horror.

The upside of it all? I actually wrote a full on complete explicit sex scene – start to finish – without shutting down. All 2k words of it, but this now puts me in the dilemma of what the hell I’m going to do with this story. I just checked the settings of my blog and it’s not Rated X and I don’t want it Rated X because this isn’t the primary focus of my blog. It’s currently Rated PG, but the definition for that tells me it’s really PG-13 by US standards and I’m feeling my fiction is pushing that boundary already.

The issue I’m having is that over at LiveJournal, you could set the rating for individual posts but you can’t do that here. It would be nice to have an overall rating for the blog, with the option to override on individual posts. But then again I suppose that can get messy when it comes to parental controls and the like for browsers. I don’t know how those stupid things work as my children have already shown me repeatedly. I’ve had to block shit directly through the computer settings or through the anti-virus rather than rely on parental controls to keep my youngest away from the graphic gore. It’s bullshit really.

So anyway, to be clear, I’m upset with the way the plot is turning out in the story. I’m also unhappy how after I lost the first attempt to write this, the male character I’m introducing to the series changed in personality on me. He was somewhat of a punk – you know the kind that likes to push buttons just because he can, but not too much to make you hate his guts – but when I started writing again that vanished and he feels kind of flat. I don’t know. I was sort of hoping for a dynamic like what you see between Edward Elric and Roy Mustang in Full Metal Alchemist even though those two weren’t a couple. It was just a super fun dynamic that plays out. (And yes, I’m looking forward to the live action film!!!!)

I guess I just have too much going on in this story. Because I’m actually trying to introduce a villain. *gasp* Who is working behind the scenes doing shit, so there’s that plotline and it’s the plot driven aspect of the story. Then there’s Clarissa dealing with her shit – another plotline, which is the character driven aspect. New guy! And yea you guessed it, another plotline – kind of, sort of? I don’t know what he’s doing other than info dumping, because this guy only has three very basic objectives throughout the story. So the info dumping is pissing me off but I keep telling myself most of it the reader doesn’t need to know, just me – it’s world building stuff. And last but not least, since this is Clarissa’s first time into the world of magic, it’s also setting driven. So I have to place a lot of effort in getting that description in but I want the setting to match the theme of the story and blah, blah, blah.

Really starting to feel like I bit off more than I can chew here.

But I think the sex scene came out okay. Too bad it made me realize how horribly alone I am and the last person I want touching me is my husband. I suppose this is the joy of having a relationship with mental illness involved. Nothing can be normal. Nothing can be simple. God forbid if things were straightforward and face value.