tugging your heart-strings, gonna make you cry

Earlier in the week, I had one of those lightning-bolt-of-inspiration nights, the kind where I have to get up out of bed at 4:00 in the morning (hubby says – with a laugh, by the way – “I hate it when you do that.” He married a writer, what does he expect?) and vomit four pages of a short story into my computer.

I don’t even know what this is exactly, this story, an off-shoot alternate-dimension Danny and Lexi story. Is that allowed? Writing about my characters in a different reality that can’t exist within the confines of my novel? I thought about trying to work it into the novel somehow, but it’s completely contradictory to everything the novel is doing – it would have to be its own, different novel, and I have no intentions of doing that again, lol. The novel I’m working on is a good one, and I’m going to finish it. And this short story is good on its own. I’m leaving them nameless in the story anyway, because I want it to stand on its own.

(Please, somebody tell me to finish my novel! Please, beg me not to start it over again!)

It’s kind of like The Butterfly Effect – did anyone else love that movie? That was a very underrated movie, in my opinion. I found it fascinating, which is maybe my problem in writing – that when I get bored with the dimension my characters are living in, a new dimension looks so tempting, where fresh and interesting things are happening. (The grass is always greener on the other side?) I could totally see myself writing a whole book of these, all the characters of my novel and all the lives they might have lived in other dimensions. Maybe I’ll do that, a book of alternate dimension stories, AFTER I finish the novel, lol.

Anyway, this story, Danny and Lexi in dimension 453, is maybe the saddest short story I’ve ever written. It made me cry when I wrote it. (A baby that he wants, but she doesn’t, but he doesn’t get to make the choice.) How do you sum up a short story in a sentence? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get it all polished up and try to publish it somewhere, and then you can read it. God, when was the last time I tried to actually publish something? Maybe it’s time to try again?

Even my Sim stories are unusually tragic this week, and my Sim stories are very rarely ever sad.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me.