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I woke up feeling better this morning. Sorry I was so gloomy last night, but one of the side effects of being a writer is to be gloomy, or at best, moody. I’m sure there are some writers out there that are cheerful souls, and never have a bad day, but I don’t know any of them. We’re moody in different ways, but in the end there seems to be some connection between that turn of mind that helps us find ideas and that twist towards darkness. You have to be pretty vigilant to keep the mood even, and some days you simply loose the battle, but not the war. I was told by a professor in college that writers are supposed to be weird, and thus we should indulge ourselves, and enjoy the fact that people expect us to be excentric. I never did respect her much, and I certainly wasn’t impressed by this bit of advice. If you’re truly excentric, you don’t have to work at it. If you’re truly a writer, you don’t have to make yourself weird outwardly to be weird inside; we just are a little off center. It’s one of the things that gives us that voice that is unique to us, and that eye to finding what others won’t notice. If you’re a writer you’re already weird enough without having some teacher tell you to be more so. Writers, most of us, spend our lives being the outsider, never quite fitting in, even when we can camouflage ourselves, our minds simply don’t work like everyone else’s. I don’t know why, but we look at the world differently. For me, I’m always seeing mayhem and murder and monsters, or the potential for it. Maybe Tom Clancy is always seeing political threats and technology. Maybe we all write about what we "see". Stephen King was once asked, why he wrote horror, and not something else. His reply, was something along the lines of, "You say that like I have a choice." I think your ideas choose you, not the other way around.

My ideas are dark, violent, and sometimes heavy on the sex. Every once in awhile the ideas are funny, light, and fluffy. Those always catch me by surprise, and truly are inspiration only for me. Dark and dire I do on a regular basis, but comedy that’s hard. When I was in college, the more people I met, the more I had hope that I would meet people that thought as I did, saw the world as I did. Now, as I meet more and more people I find that there are precious few out there that see the world as I do. When I meet them I value them, but we are few and far between. Most of us are gloomy bastards, all of us have to work to fit into preconceived ideas of a moral and civilized world.

Now I’m going to go to bed and curl up beside my wonderful husband who has his own gloomy bastard moments, and struggles with the moral and civilized world. I need that in a partner; we need it in each other. Because when you find someone that looks out at the world through the same cracked ,dirty glass as you do, it makes all that half-empty glass a little less cynical and a little more cozy.