Hypergraphia: The Compulsion to Write

Back in the 90s, a favorite Sunday evening key show of mine was Silk Stalkings..  As you might guess is it was what they call a police procedura, one of my favorite TV drama genres. One episode they were in investigating the death of a woman and suspected her husband had done it. What made the the episode memorable for me was that she had written on every piece of paper in the house, and when she had run out of paper, she had written on the wallpaper. The CSI guy explained that she had a condition called "hypergraphia," the compulsion to write.

I began to think about how fortunate I was – – still am, actually. I have an abundance of paper and besides, an abundance of places on the Internet in which to express myself. That poor woman had only a few paltry pieces of paper and the walls of her home to express her loneliness and her feelings of hopelessness at being stuck in a marriage to a cold and unfeeling domineering possibly abusive man. I had no such hopelessness, but I do have her condition of hypergraphia.

I have to write. I've tried going without writing for a few days, but then I have to write. Something. Whether it's journaling in my diary, on one of my three blog sites, or work on my WIPss (works in progress) I must put pen to paper or fingers to the computer keyboard. My fellow Wiccans would say that I have a very active Visuddha (throat) chakra.  The throat chakra is the seat of artistic self-expression. I’m much more fortunate than that poor dead woman was because of the many outlets I have for writing. Writing.com is a website for writing. Most of my works are far too long to put on that site, however. Then I have my LiveJournal site, blogger, and my author page on Facebook.

What do I write about? Not much happens in my day to day life, but ideas do occur to me. Back when I was 10 or so years old, while the other kids were killing their imaginations by various means including television, I was busy beefing mine up and improving it. Much later, when I was learning magick, creative visualization came very easily to me. I hardly had to work at it on all except to make the visualizations sharper.

Ideas can come from anywhere. On my favorite mental games to play with myself is "what if – –?". Fear-based what if is to be  discouraged. If your main reason for playing what if is just to create disaster scenarios I discourage it unless you're going to use these disaster scenarios in a story. People in the planning and first responding industry use what if disaster scenarios to plan various drills and preparedness scenarios. In their case thinking of all the horrid things that could happen is part of their job. But unless you are writing about a dystopia, giving yourself nightmares is not a very constructive use  for this sort of thought experiment. For me, real life is already so horrid considering the news of the nation in this world, that I really don't want to think of all the bad things that can happen. A lot of those things are happening in actuality. I don't have to play the negative what if game. These incidents are plastered all over the nose and on Facebook and other social media. So instead of dwelling on the things that can go wrong., I think instead of what could go right. What if an alien  ship disgorge ETs and we have first contact? Sure we could have problems because the aliens could be completely on a completely different wavelength than we are and regard us the way we regard pesky insects. But maybe, just maybe we’ll have more in common with these aliens than we as first guessed. Maybe, just maybe human and humanoid are the basic shapes for advanced life in the galaxy. Of course, we’ll have to broaden our definition of what being human means.

In the far future, two millennia from now, Earthlings have already ventured to the stars. They join an interstellar society called the Compire, which is short for constitutional empire. There are still many worlds left to explore. And on some of these are cultures of advanced sentient life. A group of women, a sisterhood, the members of which evaluate each culture/society to ascertain which level of contact with the rest of the Compire it should have. Takuhi’s Dream is about one of these Sisters as she flees from a nightmarish creature pursuing her wherever she goes as two men pursue her with different agendas. It is true that Takuhi’s Dream was published before, but that was as  a YA, young adult novel but this edition has the adult portions fully restored. Why are the men pursuing her with such fervor, and will she discover the true nature of the creature in her dreams?