Not Too Shabby, Abbie

"Care to play a game?" The maiden stopped and stared at the chess board, mesmerized by the hauntingly enchanted scene unfolding before her. Where once there was an empty, dusty attic, there were now swarms of strange people and figures. Men and women lined in perfect formation along the middle of the room, separated by the chess board and divided by black and white cloaks sweeping down their shoulders and puddling like liquid onto the floor. They were still as statues but breathed in a way that told the maiden of life. Every glassy eye gazed blankly ahead, except for one pair of midnight eyes that gazed into her soul. The owner of these unfathomable eyes had asked the question. She was a tall woman, situated behind and at the center of the black-cloaked formation to the maiden's left. She wore no cloak, unlike her brethren, but her hair fell in luxurious sheets of ebony down her back and pooled on the ground like a waterfall of ink. Her face was too sharp to be pretty...

For many, the writer's struggle is not an inability to come up with ideas, it is coming up with the time and motivation to bring all of those ideas to life. I'm the poster child for this dilemma. I have an arsenal of ideas, some great, some mediocre, some are probably cliché, but none of them has actually become a completed novel. Most don't even make it past the half-baked, incoherent iPhone note stage.  The ones that do make it to stage 2 (random, disconnected paragraphs and sections of dialogue) have so much potential. Small excerpts of creative genius make me feel like the next J.K. Rowling!  ...And then I get to the point where I know the next big event, or where I want to characters to go, or even how the very end will be written, but I can't figure out how to get there for the life of me.  Basically, I just sit there like this.  For hours. Or days. Or weeks.  I've written chapters 1-4, and 7, and the climax, and the conclusion,...

Are you an introvert or an extrovert? The results may surprise you! Doubtful. Buzzfeed, I've taken so many of these at this point that nothing short of a "nonexistent-paranoid-delusional-trovert" would surprise me. See, the thing is, with the millions of psychological studies of personalities and inclinations that I've seen, the one thing I have actually learned is that psychology is fluid. Despite claims of enlightened absolutes, nothing in the study of man's complexity is concrete. We are so eager to free ourselves by discovering ourselves that we end up restricting ourselves. Does that make any sense? As a society, we have become so concerned with labels that we box ourselves in. In truth, we are so much more than black or white, gay or straight, gender-fluid or cis, vegan or omnivore, introvert or extrovert. Imagine you had an enormous jar full of assorted jelly beans, and you slap the label "Cherry" on the lid. Technically, you'r...