Starbucks musings before my afternoon job.
I tell myself stories as I go to sleep. Or I used to anyway. My favorite for a long time was a pretty intense fan fic crossover.
I had Mary Sued myself into 5 different fictional worlds as the same character. There was a complicated magic/physics, crossing multiverses reason for it. It was awesome. The worlds were from Joss Whedon's Buffy/Angel TV shows and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden, Diane Duane's Wizards and Mercedes Lackey's Diana Tregarde books.
There was a backstory where I used to exist in each of these worlds according to the standard parallel universe idea of multiple yous in multiple worlds. In each world, I was a young magic user raised by my evil sorcerer type uncle. He was twisted but brilliant. He found a way to breach dimensions and collaborate with four of his other selves in the quest to combine their essences to create someone who could cross freely from one to the other, drawing on the magical power available to the inhabitants in them all. But he wasn't reckless, he didn't try it first on himself, but on me. He succeeded in combining 5 of me into one who could travel to all the places. Of course, my first act was to kill him in every one of them. Hey, it hurt. Plus your Mary Sue needs something dark in her past in order to redeem herself later.
So I had a tragic backstory and a lot of power. I aged slowly. I lived for periods of time in each of the worlds, having adventures that would sometimes intersect with known characters. Did a lot of bad things, mostly as a result of the insanity that came from suddenly being all of me, and gradually came to regret them and attempt that redemption. Tons of bedtime stories for myself.
The story eventually led to a problem cropping up in every 'verse I existed in that I had to investigate. Of course it turned out that my creation had formed an instability in these 5 worlds that could lead to their destruction if I didn't find a way to fix it. By reversing the original spell, destroying myself as I existed and probably not allowing for my survival.
That was the broad outline of the story. So one night maybe I wanted to hang out at the Magic Box in Sunnydale, inadvertently crashing one of Buffy's adventures. Or I could visit that time in England when I worked as a spy for Dumbledore when Voldemort was rising. Or I had to visit an oracle with Harry Dresden, telling me about my upcoming doom. I could occasionally help Angel Investigations, if I was in the mood, or fight monsters with Diana and Mark. And towards the end of the story, the cat wizards looking after Manhattan's world gate would sure come in handy with all this multi-dimensional stuff.
I had a few original characters, but mostly I thought about the various lairs I had across the 'verses, and how my magic worked differently in each according to their own rules, and visited various time periods of my character's existence according to my mood. I could work through emotional issues I was having at the time by getting all angry or injured or whatever in my head story. It was fun.
I never was able to spin that off into something more original. And I never attempted to make my character interesting to anyone but me. It was all in my head, no reason to worry about the Mary Sue-oscity of her.
Many people hearing about my habit of telling myself these stories -- which I've had for a while, this was merely the last, best version because it could incorporate so much -- might think that with my imagination, I could be a writer. Okay, I might think that, lack of originality excepted. I could still be a bad writer, right? But there's that disconnect between the daydreams and writing a real story. I've not found the impetus to transition the brain power put into the daydreaming into something more tangible. It's even impossible for me to write down the schlock in my head as a starting point for something else. It just won't go down on the screen or page. This is the most I've ever said about it.
It's just weird is all. Is it just a lack of discipline or is there just some toggle I can't check on? Does everybody feel like there's something they should by all rights be good at, yet can't seem to do it? I blame myself for being -- something negative. But sometimes I feel like I'm missing something really obvious. Screw the meaning of life, where's my epiphany for this?
