Sometimes, Charlotte and I are just that good. Sometimes, we stagger ourselves with the amount of sheer brilliance we have. No, scratch that … it’s not brilliance, it’s utter stupidity and self sabotage. We’ve been talking for a while now about how utterly brilliant we are at self sabotage, at destroying our own pieces of work. And yet … here we are, carrying on in the same way. Old habits die hard and all of that … but we are starting to learn.
Slowly.
Very slowly.
We nearly made a catastrophic mistake last night. And when I say catastrophic, I mean catastrophic. Catastrophic to the point that our lead characters may never have spoken to us again. But for once, we paused, we thought it through … and we realised we were making a monumental error.
This is what we do though. We try and control our characters, tell them to do what we want them to do and all the while .. we forget that they are their own people. We forget that this is their story and not ours. And yes, ok, at times they drive us mad to the point where we want to send them to their rooms or sit them in time out but … on the other end of the scale, we miss them when they’re not there. They go quiet, they withdraw into themselves and we’re left with a hollow shell of their former selves and eventually they get retired out to the former characters retirement home … sometimes they make their way back from there, other times they don’t.
And this is what gets us into trouble. It’s become habit now that we don’t even realise when we’re doing it. We don’t recognise the signs anymore because they’re so ingrained in us that we just do it. We break things. And then we grab the figurative super glue and try and put it back together … only, we’re that kid who in the process of gluing the thing together glues their fingers to it and half of their arm to the table. In fixing one mess, we create ten more because we think we’re doing the right thing.
I live in hope, honestly I do, that one of these days we’ll write a blog where it’s all … we’ve learned from our mistakes! We’re not doing what we usually do!
In the meantime, we’re carrying on with our mission to sort things out. On that front we’re making good progress, we’ve managed to fix some really major things (even if 1 of these major points we then proceeded to almost break again) which will hopefully mean that those glaring plot holes are starting to close. We’re getting a step closer each day to having something substantial we just … need to stop with the sabotage.
One day we will … I hope!
~ Clara
Charlotte and Clara 