2.09.2009

lil sample

it doesn't sound good, but this is what I'm thinking for my book:

i am indigo. you might know me from certain scientific journal publications (as the subject, not the author). i am an interesting subject of study, mainly because i have a rare variation of congenital synesthesia. color-personal synesthesia is a condition of the senses where humans are associated in the synesthete's mind with various colors. the most common form of this condition is where the synesthete's emotional connection with any given person "broadcasts" itself as a color in the synesthete's mind. after several tests, it is hypothicated that my particular strain of this condition relies heavily on my retinal tetrachromacy and observation of other humans' facial expressions and demeanor to interpret the "feelings" of the human as a very specific color in my mind. it doesn't seem peculiar or scientific to me. what i know is that my father is frog green while sober and dark moss green while drunk. i know that my mother is hurting when her baby blue is tinged with red. i know that i write my journal in front of the mirror. i know that i am alone.

of course, i exhibit other forms of synesthesia; sound--> color and lexical --> color synesthesia. the second of those was the first fascination the doctors had with me, my personal --> color synesthesia wasn't revealed until much later into the experiments and only after a great amount of scepticism. my dreams are fragmented and filled with sensory language, they are difficult to recall and impossible to fully describe. at the same time, they continually seep into my other thoughts during the day, but only as a slow itch. approximately fifty percent of all of my communication is done through writing, i cannot tolerate the stimulus of constant visual or vocal communication for sustained periods of time. the seizures from these "sensory overloads" were inexplicable by my parents, and still give my mother a good deal of concern. closing my eyes does not prevent the color responses from being triggered by lexical feedback, but it does help my mind to ignore any other visual stimulus. after an especially bad seizure, the doctors were concerned that my condition might prove to be fatal, however i have learned to control it to the extent where that is no longer a concern, except for my mother, and secretly myself. i have an extremely poor memory of any rote information, but have what most have called an exceptional memory of human emotion. i was removed from school at a very young age and was thought to be mentally handicapped and/or autistic. i responded well to private tutorship, which i would assume was funded by either a governmental grant of some sort or a grant from the corporation funding the research.

1 comment:

ken said...

Not bad, definitely an interesting concept. Writing it in the first person might prove to be mildly difficult, but it can be an interesting style, a la' "The Catcher in the Rye." One thing you have to watch out for is the omniscience that a narrator would normally possess cannot exist in the first person narrative. Since you are writing from "your" point of view, the narration cannot know any more than what your character knows.

Also, your paragraph runs on a little bit. One good rule of thumb is "One idea per paragraph." That will keep everything clean and easy to follow. If an idea is hard to expand upon enough to occupy a complete paragraph, you can put similar thoughts together. Just make sure the opposites are segregated.

These are things that can be fixed in the edit, but for now, keep writing! Nice start