The last couple of days have been very productive with writing. Not so much with direct writing, as in breaking through a problem so that I can write. No offense, Ophelia, but that problem has been you: needing just a bit more backstory on you to finish writing the story of you for MoW. But thanks to all my thinking & writing about you before in my thick blue notebook, & the reading & writing about issues of madness, so-called schizophrenia, hearing voices, psychosis & its onset — I finally broke through to some fundamentals about how you came to go a little crazy, so that you got locked up in a loony bin, & ultimately came to co-create the Questors Fire world with Dice.
For those who aren’t Ophelia & don’t know what in hell I’m talking about, understand that Ophelia is an important character of my novel-in-progress Mistress of Woodland, as centrally important as Rachel/Henkimaa & her household gods. Because Ophelia, who in the Real World is locked up in a psych ward bearing the label of “schizophrenic,” decided to follow the advice of another inmate: to find a “delusion” — a story — that is safe for her. Thanks to her belief in Luck — aka Dice, the spirit of luck who is Ophelia’s household god — such a story has come about, that is working not only for Ophelia, but for the other questors who find their way there, by whatever means.
In other words, it helps one helluva lot that I’ve made this breakthrough, because now I know the direction in which to write. And I’m writing.
