Writing as An Author with AuDHD
First off, I will apologize to those who read my blog. I haven’t been very diligent with updating of late. I have on the other hand been very hard at work on writing the second book of the Vaeritas Saga. Over the last 8 months I have been working on it. I even went back after the editing of The Soul-Sung to strengthen the story more and fix a few of my weak areas in writing. But, the good news, the second books zero draft is now complete. I have begun the grueling task of now typing it into a working draft that I can then hand off to an editor. So, if all goes well it will be available and ready 6 months after The Soul-Sung releases.
Next up I wanted to talk for a minute about what its like for me to write. Alot of people have this image of an author secluded in a room with a feather quill and an inkpot or at least that is the image I used to have. For me its a tad different. See, I have AuDHD. I am not ashamed of it, its who I am. So besides losing my keys, getting overwhelmed in large crowds and completely missing social cues from time to time, it actually serves as a benefit for my writing.
I start with an idea in my head. Then I want to test that idea so I generate an entire world. well worlds need rules and animals and smells ect. So i creat those and of course the Autistic side of me then has to catalog entire back stories for why the world is this way. This happens very fast. The entire world is rendered in 3d all up in my brainpan. Then come the characters but again I cannot have fake characters in my world so they get full blown personalities. Notice I have not even begun writing yet. Once I have the world and the character I then jot them down. Next comes the story which lives as a full movie in my head. I know where I want it to go. What the main plot is. What the subplots I want are. All that is left is the filler right. Normally this is the hard part or, so I have been told. But, for someone like me It’s just a matter of following causality. I force hard choices using the world and the actions of other characters to create ripples and then I just live inside the viewpoint of the character whose POV I'm writing. Whew sound exhausting yet.
That’s not even the hardest part. The hardest part comes when it’s time to actually write. I read a lot of books in my youth. I mean ALOT. As I read them, I always have this internal narrator that is reading the words aloud inside my head and I am kind of just following along like my own audio book. This trained my internal narrator. So when its time for me to record the movie I created in my head. The narrator does not hold back. He takes off at full speed. I then have to strive to keep up with typing so as not to lose the image or stall the movie. I’ll mistype words, leave out grammar and produce something that is wholly unreadable at first. Then I go back and retype it. the whole time the internal narrator is reading aloud and I am scribing. Its really a wild ride. Often exciting, always exhausting.
The results though speak for themselves. Thank you and Next time I’ll try to drop another short story or two….maybe when I take a break from the revision of 90k+ words.
