I’m not sure whether this is a hyperphantasic thing, or just being a writer thing. I tried to describe what it’s like to my husband when I’m trying focus on one thing to write. He finds it strange that I don’t do more of it, and that when I do I seem to get rather perplexed sometimes. So I broke it down as follows.

Its like having a multiple television channels all in my head, and there are episodes and films on each one, some of them short stories, some full length films. What’s frustrating is not being able to chose which channel it stops on, and not being able to keep it on that one. I explained it would be annoying if the remote control kept changing channel half way through a programme or after the first ten minutes. Well that’s my brain sometimes. I’ll get half the story, or the dramatic ending, then nothing for a while.

And when you specifically allocate time to write and sit down to access those stories, nothing. Blank screen as such. They aren’t there at my beck and call, only when they feel like it. So I can plan my creative time as much as I would like, unfortunately my creativity doesn’t always play ball. So I do my best and having a growing number of works in progress, hopefully they will pull themselves together and I can get my next book of short stories published. I have five written so far which feels like an achievement in itself, so I’ll try to build on that and get my internal remote in order and get it to settle on one story. If anything, I want to know where they go!

(c) K Wicks