Memory And Writing

Something that frustrates me is that when I watch movies and television shows, I forget a lot of the details soon afterwards. I have a terrible memory when it comes to these things, especially if I only watch them through one time.

I have seen all the episodes of Bob's Burgers, for instance, and I have a friend who is obsessed with that show and quotes it all the time. I laugh and pretend I know what she is saying, but in my head, I go,"What episode was that again?"

This extends to my writing as well. It's a gift on one hand. If I take a long break from writing a certain story, I can come at it with fresher eyes than many authors can because I've already forgotten most of what I was saying. But it's bad when I'm trying to write a book series because while I am writing it, I easily forget details sometimes from previous books (and have to re-read those) or my stories get riddled with plot holes.

Last night, I drank a caffeinated beverage. I never drink caffeine because I have anxiety problems, but I couldn't seem to help myself. I also decided to do this at midnight, which is a wonderful idea, especially since I'm not used to caffeine anymore and should have been going to sleep.

So I sat in my living room, wide awake and jittery, in the dark, with my kindle.

I was going to re-download my books. I keep hoping that re-downloading them will somehow update them on my device (but it never does), so that I can read what you guys are reading and make sure that the formatting is going well. I always preview the formatting, but I don't trust the preview for whatever reason. I make little changes on the formatting sometimes and I need to make sure those are translating the right way.

So I start rifling through Pandora's Mistake and instead of just glancing at every page, I start re-reading the story. And pretty soon, I am engrossed in reading it because I can't remember anything that I wrote the first time around.

I start laughing hysterically and going,"Pandora's so naive!" And I feel like a crazy person because I wrote this book and I can't even remember anything that I wrote. And people would probably think I was crazy if they were reading it outloud and I was going over and over again,"Oh yeah! I forgot that I had written that!" Because I finished writing it a little over a year ago, so how have I already forgotten the entire thing?

To me it's like looking through one of those old photo albums with your family while you nudge each other and say,"Remember when we did that!" And you go,"Oh yeah! I forgot about that!"

So I finished re-reading Pandora and will likely have to re-read Medusa as well. Because I am hoping that as soon as I finish writing these "God Of Light" books, that I can start working on my Sisyphus novel. (I wrote one chapter for it one time and that made me excited.)

 But I'm also trying to finish up critiquing two things and have a lot more work to do on the "God Of Light" books, so it might be awhile before that happens.