So I'm sick as a dog today. It's a sunday morning and I could normally be seen dancing in my room or playing video games in the living room.

Unfortunately, I caught the cold from hell. Pounding headache, stomach cramps, runny and stuffy nose, sore eyes, weak muscles, achy joints, you name it. Thankfully I was still able to see Candy's play last night (which was an epic beyond epic that I will post about later,) but today I can't even get out of bed. As of now I feel a little better, curled up with a few of Daddy's homemade cookies and the complete 3rd season of Hell's Kitchen. (That show makes me hungry...)

But earlier today when I felt like I could die from being so sick, I tried to take advantage of that and write some fanfic.

Last time I was this sick, I had the luck of just happening to be writing a Sailor Moon fiction in which I had to describe a sort of physical pain Usagi was going through in this dream of hers. It was totally easy, I just wrote down how I felt that morning, and people raved like nuts over the writing, sending reviews akin to "It read SO real, I could feel it myself!"

Now I'm kinda irritated. I've had this idea for a Horton fic floating around my head for a while. There's a lil snippet in the movie that I wanted to take and write what the characters were thinking during it. It was meant to be a fluffy fic, but my characters were also supposed to be troubled about their respective problems. One for being thought of as crazy, and one for having a dad who doesn't understand at all that he doesn't want to have his job when he grows up.

So these are the fictions where I gotta guess. No one thinks I'm crazy (at least not seriously I hope :P) and my parents are supporting me in what I wanna do, so these are the parts where you gotta step into a character and see inside their heads. Reading the scene I'd written over again, I noticed I looked a little too much into MY head.

No one sounded really melancholy about what was going on. They both sounded, well... sick.

GRR. How is one supposed to get out of their own head? I'm sitting here trying to write something like "Jojo felt like no one was hearing him, and it struck a nasty feeling in the dead center of his chest" and getting more like "Jojo felt like no one was hearing him, and it was bringing on a MASSIVE headache." I keep having to reread, step back, and tell myself "No dear, YOU feel a massive headache coming on."

Frustrating as heck.

I'm trying to channel helplessness into the scene now by trying to think of that helpless feeling when you have a cold and you know there's nothing you can do to make it go away instantly. As for trying to channel feelings about the world thinking you're crazy, well, I still haven't figured that one out. I'm doing my best to guess on what the Mayor would be really feeling. I've found a helpful method for that, actually, by just picking out a word that you KNOW that person would feel. The whole world thinks you're crazy: frustration. Who wouldn't be frustrated by that? Now the world's never though I was crazy, but I HAVE been frustrated before, and thus I can build off that word and convey realistic emotions.

Good writers write what they know, and when they don't know, they find a way.

Wow, sorry, I didn't mean for this to turn into a page out of a writing textbook.

Mom, is third-person omnipresent sloppy when you switch back and forth between characters? In other words, I want to start out telling you everything a character is thinking and feeling down to the last detail, and when he sees another character, I want to start doing the same to the NEW character. Does that sound too much like it's switching point of views?

-Chi <3