Two stories competing for attention in my head today. One is a straight up erotic short that I might write, but not ever publish. The other deals with a constant theme in my works--life after death. No, not in the way you think. But it's such a strange issue with me. It's like my penchant for characters that have strong scientific and mathematics backgrounds. It's like my Muses live to torture me, because I myself have no skill with scientific or MATH concepts. Especially math.
Thanks to my dyscalculia, I can do basic addition, but that's about it. And yet, why do so many of my characters turn out to be math prodigies or scientifically minded? To be honest sometimes I feel like I'm in over my head on just about every story I write. This is especially true with the recently finished Tokyo Area Novel project, which is set in an alternate universe timeline where it's fairly equivalent to modern times in this universe, with major exceptions. One of those major exceptions of course is that in the alternate timeline technology in some areas is far more advanced that in our world. Another more important issue is that in that alternate timeline universe, the Tohoku quake and Tsunami never happened.
Not because I believe in some revisionist history ideal utopia, but because I was so affected by the quake and tsunami, and yet mostly so removed from it, that it felt like to me to address it in fiction would be a surefire way for me to fumble it and dishonor the memories of those who lost so much up to and including their lives. Fictional tragedies I can deal with, but real ones just seem so unapproachable important to me that it feels like I should leave the addressing of it to others who are far more capable writers than I am, like Our Man In Abiko, and Jake Adelstein, and so on. Real people died in that horrific event, and right now at this stage in my writing and life, I can't articulate what that made me feel. I tried in the little blurb piece I was given in 2:46 Aftershocks quake book, but OMIA was smart enough to edit out most of the stupidity I threw in, and looking back on it, I feel like maybe I should have just contributed through the artwork and kept my mouth shut about the quake and tsunami itself. To do otherwise feels like I'm getting the facts wrong on the issue, because unlike OMIA and others who lived there, I don't live in Japan. Never even been, though it is a bucket list item (after getting over my panic inducing crippling fear of going anywhere where people are.)
Maybe I should just write unpublishable erotica. Back to writing!