Reading good stuff makes me want to write. I've been reading Neil Gaiman lately, and it makes my fingers all itchy. I've been holding pens and hovering above keyboards for two days, yet genius is not forthcoming.
There's a children's novel in me someplace. I know there is, but I can't seem to get it started. I want to write it for my nephews. I wrote a poem for the youngest one, and part of me thinks I need to write something for the rest of them, but the oldest is 16, and I don't have much time left on him. Maybe this is why I'm always handing him books.
I have little phrases and images flitting through my head, but I haven't got a story. That's always the trouble, really. I never have a story.
My mind keeps settling both on a co-written sci-fi novel a friend and I were writing in middle school. It was really an interesting idea, hers, about a boys training academy that was really a guise for the intergalactic powers that be (we hadn't nailed down who they were yet) to brainwash civilisation into performing within their desires. (A parody of our own middle school experience, which we already vividly pretended was a prison.)
The concept was one that allowed us to work together, but not actually do so, an arrangement that suited both of us well. We each had a character, and wrote that boy's school journal, his own record of events. We would take details in each others "chapters" and turn them into key events, hinging on the story line. We never got too far with it, really, but we worked on it for about a year. I ended up with all the notes (I was the one who dropped the ball on completion), and all the work, and I found them a year or two ago. It's really interesting stuff, but I think the only way it would work is if I could get her to write it from her end again, and she's thought I'm mad at her for a while. (I'm not, but it's a long story why I'm not.)
So, there's that concept, and then another one about odd little girls. Maybe I've been going to Childrin R Skary a bit much, but I like the idea, not necessarily of naughty or devious little girls like the Skary ones, but of odd ones.
Also, believe it or not, I've got a job, for a while, anyway. They were down a person at the summer theatre The Boy is working for, and called me, being the only person anyone knew with any theatre and nothing else going on. They want me for a Dresser, deciding it was easier to have me do that than train me to move furniture. I was a quick changer in high school once, but that was it. Personally, I'm thinking that being a Dresser is the more complicated job- you have to deal with actors, for starters. And you have to deal with costumes, for seconds.
They called last night, and I'm supposed to be there tomorrow afternoon.
Hopefully this means that every single other place I applied to will now call and ask me to work mornings, as my noon-midnight schedule is now filled. (Too bad they don't pay hourly- the schedule is just shy of thirty hours in three days.)
Interestingly, this is a looser joint than my undergrad theatre was. None of the stuff that was standard there is required here (we were all supposed to carry flashlights, paper, pencil, and a wrench). Of course, I've seen their crews- they're allowed to wear short sleeves and white socks. Blonde kids had to wear knit caps in undergrad, even if they were downstairs and had little chance of being anywhere near the stage, they had to have them.
But, yes, gainful employment, hopefully to the tune of two hundred bucks, for the next month.