Novels

Sunday 10 September 2017

Obsession

OBSESSION

"You are playing a game. Your writing is a mind game.” She said.

In the real world she did not say this directly to the writers face. She explained it to the police who she was attempting to entangle into her game, into her vendetta.

On this occasion the police saw it sensibly for what it was. She made the accusation. She logs into a website of her own choice, which is either cyberstalking because she is obsessive or else she is a fan, albeit a fan with both a grudge and an overwhelmingly huge sense of self importance. The whole world exists to support her control drama. The writers she encounters online exist solely to support her control drama. She is that desperate for attention. The maximum yield for the angry type of attention she requires is to target an online author and attempt to see him into jail. She does not recognize this as a mental health issue.

Yet she exists only in the writers imagination, as a buffer for an idea he is exploring; the writer adds by way of legal disclaimer.

He replies with his truth:

"It has nothing to do with you. If you want me to use you as inspiration for a character in my fiction novels, I will consider it. That you clearly believe everything I write is aimed directly at you personally proves two things. One about you and one about the writing. About the writing, it is of a type which people relate directly to, they clearly find it relevant to their own life situation. This is a very good thing and positive feedback for any writer who aims to succeed at that goal. The technique is because I ‘tell it as it is’, with no bullshit.”

After a very short pause he adds: “Well perhaps a little bit of bullshit which is necessary because am not writing bullet-points, I am writing script. It is a different style where some level of characterization and a lot of proper grammar is necessary. As far as getting the point across, such things are bullshit. As far as being approved by literary circles, they are important, so we are told by those literary circles. I resent having to please them to the detriment of my intended purpose, yet as I explained I am not writing bullet-points.” 

He pauses for breathe, to contemplate the irrelevance of his previous paragraph to the overall nature of the manuscript and yet at the same time that he opportunity given by the flow of the story to include it here makes it worth doing, despite it complicating the nature of the text. The pause was also useful to allow the information to sink into his bored listeners mind. Being of her technologically attention-stunted generation with very little patience and inability to integrate long tracts of information in a single sitting, she had already switched off. He knew this speech would be transmitted into text and while on a roll with expressing himself he continued anyway for the purpose of posterity. Fully answering the points he had raised, the main bulk of the diatribe’s intention.

“Secondly, it says about you that you are a sociopath who cannot tell the difference between where yourself ends and the external world begins. You have identified with this writing but can not or will not accept that it is not written directly about you, nor for you to the exclusion of all of other people. It is written for whoever reads and enjoys it. If that is a one-to-one relationship between text and reader, that is a good thing. If that is a one-to-one relationship between stranger and author, that is a different thing entirely. You opened the book. You opened the gate. It is your choice for which you are responsible. I did not ask you to read my text. You chose to do that. The text is not the author and you very much must learn that to be a true and real thing. The characters are fictional, they are not the personality and beliefs of the writer. They do not represent the personality and beliefs of the author. If you can not separate those things you need to get help from a qualified mental health professional.”

Her glazed and inattentive eyes were awoken mildly by his reference to her mental state. She was still too dulled from being spoken at incessantly to make any sort of quick response and he recognised she was effectively in some sort of trance state, digesting some of what he had been speaking about even while he was bombarding her with more dialogue. He was on a roll and finding it hard to stop.

“Writing is my form of counseling, I do it to get these thoughts out of me so that my mind is empty and free simply to float and perceive sensations other than an onslaught of words which pour through it. Through and not from. These fluctuating rhythms are assigned meaning by the collective. Whatever form of communication that results in toward a readership of hundreds of people. I hesitate to use the word fans but they do come back for more and some of them such as yourself even blow air around. Unfortunately for me the only ones who ever contact me directly tend to be sociopaths who believe I am writing for them personally. It happens every few years, I get a psycho-fan who wants to dominate and control me in some way. Some of them sexually, some of them legally, some of them a mixture of both. Some simply want to control what I write about, to seize the helm of my creativity because they are too damaged to acknowledge their own. The possibility of money does have to do with it, these are usually industry people who want me to re-write something so they can sell it for a cut in the profits.”

Mention of money and profits caused her to look directly at him. She was interested now and glad that she had not interrupted him before he had mentioned this. She was still in slow-motion from the effort of thinking about what he was saying and so it is possible that it was mention of sex and control which had caused her to awaken slightly. At any rate their eyes caught at this moment, his explaining that his manuscripts were sometimes deemed profitably publishable by literary experts.

“All of this experience does affect my writing because I write about events in my life. I write about it in my own way of expressing it. It does not intentionally relate directly to any one specific person. Although so many people have felt it does, this says a lot about the nature of some people and about the type of writing it is. Whatever energy I am attempting to convey or is being conveyed through me. Such readers not only are extremely self-obsessive but also generally obsessive. They target those things and people which resonate to their energy-control-drama and whatever power-games they want to play with other people, people who are nothing to do with them."

It is a long, well thought out response explaining exactly what I feel is occurring here.

She blinks a few times and does not answer. There isn’t really an answer because there was never a question. 


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