Wendy Somedays

I live in a shitty apartment and have a singular window ac unit that’s in my bedroom, but it doesn’t do shit so at the start of the summer I bought a big fan as well. It was certainly helpful at spreading cool air from my bedroom to the rest of my apartment, but isn’t all that great at keeping my room cool at night. My bedroom is consistently between 76° F and 79° F which is just way too hot to sleep comfortably imo.

Now usually I just suck it up, don’t sleep with any blankets, cool pjs, fan pointed on me you know whatever. But I am a nightmares sufferer. And when it’s hot I tend to get them more easily because of science reasons I’m too sleep deprived to explain, but trust.

Last week I had a pretty bad one that left me feeling mentally off for like two whole days. Last night was way worse, though. Every time I’d drift to sleep my ADHD brain immediately began to go into story mode and show me the most fucked up dreams. So I’d feel tired, start falling asleep, get scared by a dream an hour in, and I’d jerk myself awake. The second time it happened even threw me into a mini panic attack but I was able to calm myself down easily enough. By the third time I just gave up on a good nights rest.

I’m writing a romance story about a prince who participates in a courting tradition where all eligible nobility come together and over the course of several months attend events meant to help them find a partner. It started as a way to form political alliances via marriage easily, but nowadays it’s just a fun way for the youth to date lol.

I’m trying to decided whether or not I want the final pairing to be a straight or gay couple. I know it’s a dumb thing to be indecisive about but I am. I have ideas for both a male and female love interest and I can’t decide which one I like more. HELP

How do I start a story? I can come up with plots and characters in my sleep, but give me a blank document and I come up with nothing.

And I’m not saying I don’t know where I want it to start, I mean i literally don’t know what the first sentence should be. I feel like it’s so much pressure and am I freaking out over nothing?

Also I’m more experienced (probably as a result of my fear of starting something) with writing fanfics where I don’t necessarily have to go into expositions that tell readers who my characters are because the audience already knows my characters. It’s fan fiction. With my own work and my own characters, I’m afraid of accidentally info dumping or not explaining enough.

I've decided that it would be really hard for one main character to have all these tropes so I might be dividing the tropes among three main characters who experience wild romances lol. That or once character that has just a shit ton of suitors but I don’t know if that would still fit into the arranged marriage trope. I’m still working out the details. If you have ideas about how I could pull this off please tell me.

It’s more like a fact book.

I have considered myself a writer my whole life. As a kid I spent my summers in writing camps. My sister and I would make up elaborate, highly involved and linear stories and would act them out with Barbie dolls or pet shop figurines. We would have entire worlds and plots that would last days or weeks. We’d beg mom to let us leave our toys out so we knew where we left off in our story.

In elementary school, when we finally began learning how to string sentences together and fill whole pages with our messy handwriting, I always found myself writing stories of the fictional variety. When the timers would go off and we’d have to show our work my hand always shot up. When it was time to go home I’d ask my teachers if I could take my paper home with me so I could keep working on my story.

It was in middle school that I learned that I could boot up the family desktop, open word and type my stories so they look like actual books. I found a friend who liked reading and writing as much as I did and we started writing things together. At first, we’d just write in our notebooks during class and swap stories on our bus ride home. Then, we learned we could have shared Google docs that we could write in at the same time. We would spend hours and hours writing together. One summer, it felt like having a job. I’d wake up at the same time as my parents did for work, eat breakfast, have a cup of coffee (I was thirteen and hated coffee but it made me feel like a real writer), and my friend and I would hop on our shared document and work until our parents pulled us away for dinner.

Middle school is a hard time for anyone and my friend and I had many hardships. Before high school, we had a falling out and we stopped writing together. After having someone to write with for so long, I realized that I had become codependent. I didn’t know how to have my own ideas without the validation of my partner telling me if they were good or not. I’d have a stroke of inspiration and then not know what to do with it. I went a very long time without writing anything. Around this time, I also had a lot of personal hardships like boyfriends and breakups and friend drama and academics, so writing became a lower priority in my life. At the time, it felt like this dream or wish, like if I just did better in school then I’d be able to write again. If I was just a better child then I’d be able to write again. If only I could bring my grades up or do my chores or be a better person then maybe I could write again.

Aside from the occasional short story for class or attempt at a writing prompt I saw on Pinterest, I didn’t write much.

When I started college, I started writing again. I decided that as an adult I could do whatever I wanted and the only person whose expectations I had to live up to were my own. And I wanted to write.

For the last few years I have been writing for fun. I even found some friends to write with, but I also learned how to write on my own. I write back and forth with my friends, create elaborate fictional worlds and peoples and faiths and politics… but I never really have anything to show for it. No linear stories, definitely no complete stories. Just a bunch of incomplete notes and concepts with no real products. Thus begins my identity crisis. I decided that I was not, in fact, a writer. Maybe I was just a story teller. I mean it’s true, isn’t it? I like to talk about these epic tales and I can speak about my characters as fluently as if I were talking about myself so yes. I must be a story teller. But to tell stories is a verb, an action. And who am I telling? My two friends? Not really, no. Sure we have our story that we work on together but what about all my personal works? Who are those for? Am I even a story teller if I tell no stories?