I’ll answer my own question. I’m thirty-six. So how come I’m only now figuring out how I work?
Regular readers will have noticed a period of distance. I was just searching out things on the web to toss on this blog. I tend to go in cycles like that, and I’m only beginning to map out the edges of what’s going on.
If I’m writing, it doesn’t seem affected. I can’t go back and point to a time in a book when I was spaced out. But in my life–for three months, once, I went to work and came home and wrote. Nothing else. Mail was tossed on the kitchen table unopened. All my friends were told not to call me. I would call them when I knew they weren’t home, and leave “I’m alive” messages on their answering machines. The only way I know it was three months, was my bills were paid going in, and my gas got shut off right before I came out. Generally three months is as long as you can get away with that. It’s not like I notice on my way in that I’m headed off-planet.
Once upon a time, I worried about it. Just as I worried about the voices, and the calm observer in the back of my head taking notes no matter what was going on. Now I’m sure it’s just another facet of me. I hope it feeds into my writing somehow, but as I don’t know what’s ‘normal’ I couldn’t say.
Really? Not everyone has smartass voices reacting six different ways (at least) to absolutely everything? Not everyone has that b*tch in the back of her head, pondering how best to write down the feeling you get when you have to tell your five-year-old that her daddy is never coming home, he killed himself?
More than once in the past, I’ve joked that I was leaving the planet, and invited cherished ones to come along. I had a Klingon Bird of Prey, I’d tell them. (Actually, the second and third time, I told them I wasn’t really me, I was a hologram of me–then a hologram of a hologram and even holograms couldn’t take this place.)
Guess I wasn’t kidding.