Could Even Be Your Buddy

I read a thing where a scientist monitored the brains of professional writers and non-professional writers while they were writing. Non-pros brains appeared to be visualising what they wrote, and the pucker scribbers brains appeared to be narrating what they wrote. I have absolutely no clue what that means, but it just goes to show. Anyway.

Whether I’m writing or editing, if I get disturbed for long enough and a couple of days goes by without me getting on with what I’m doing, I can’t just carry on from where I left off. I have to backtrack and go over notes before I can get going again. If I have enough interruptions, and lately there have been many, I’ll sometimes work on one of my newer WIPs instead – my books for 2015 and beyond – rather than go to all that trouble only to have some new thing arrive to take me away for days again.

The one I fiddled with a bit today got me thinking though. Most of my mainstream books have some dark characters in them, and dark life situations too. I can’t imagine writing anything other than what I either have experience with or what I’ve researched, and my readers will never know which parts I’m writing because I’ve lived something like it, seen it, or because I’ve studied it – because I’m not likely to tell. Keeps things interesting.

Most people believe that other people must have some good in them, because we tend to use our own characters as examples. None of us can say that we’ve never been rotten tools, and if you can – well – jolly well done to you! A lot of behavior that is bad, and to be avoided at all costs, I’ve learned from doing myself. But I do learn, and regret that I’ve done these things, and I never do them again, just as we all learn and grow.

But there really are people out there – quite a lot of them – who don’t have the capacity for good at all, because they not only lack the ability to love anyone other than themselves, but because they get actual pleasure from causing mental or physical suffering in others. I zoomed over to Amazon and bought a couple of books on the subject, and I must say that that was the most shocking thing I learned today.

So many people are in short or long term relationships with these people, or have them in their families, and always believe that they are just a bit selfish, or see things differently, or are shy, or have been abused themselves, when in actual fact they are soulless, absolutely incapable of any empathy whatsoever, somewhat demonic, and very coldly interested in the destruction of others, all the while worshiping at their own alters, believing themselves to be deserving of the best of everything, and more attractive, intelligent, and deserving than anyone else. So the most shocking thing I discovered at the end of all this was that these people ENJOY the results of their casual and sometimes not so casual hurting of others. They like to see you broken – thinking that you’re the one who isn’t right in the head. They make an effort to put you in that place. They’re real people, and trotting about studying the rest of us so that they can copy what it looks like to have a soul. Unfortunately most of those who they destroy will never know what they are, because we project our own humanity onto these evil, empty vessels.

So guess which WIP has just been moved right into my current batch to be published with the first five. Hah! Love this scribbling thing.