Hours of Oddity

She had finally done it. The last of the words had been typed, and it was all finished. The very thing that had been consuming her thoughts for the past two months. At 3 o'clock in the morning, Victoria Wicks had completed her story in a writing fit that had started at eleven the Friday evening before.

While it would have been nice to say she was feeling proud, or happy to be finished, Victoria was in a state of unparalleled apathy. There was a possibility that staying up horribly late every day in the past week may have been a bad idea. But that didn't matter, because she was finally finished.

Of course, there was a very large chance that there were some grammatical mistakes that even her computer wasn't realizing. As well as the fact that writing past what is considered "normal people hours" heightens the chance of writing complete and utter garbage that has no real plot or purpose.

A little less than ten minutes ago, the words in front of Victoria's eyes had begun to blur quite a bit, so there was an awfully large possibility that she had put the wrong name in the wrong place, or used entirely the wrong word to describe a feeling. Though that was possibly just because feelings were such a pain to describe, and there kept being new ones that you've never heard of, much less felt.

Victoria's story had been that of a world of wonder, and magic unlike anything we know. Of course, that's the life of a creative writer. Looking at the world around them and deciding they don't like it, so they make up one. Or they build on our world, changing it enough that it might as well not even be the human-filled planet that is known today.

Victoria had spent a few days dreaming up how to make realistic republican government, as it was one of the few that would make it easy for her to kill off a character. That was one of her main plot points, after all. She had researched how certain poisons had effected the human body, and created poisons based off of those.

Of course, this means the government was likely keeping a closer eye on her, but that's just the life of a writer. Not to mention the day that Victoria had spent almost four hours doing some incredibly in depth research on the digestive and reproductive systems of both cows and whales, in an attempt to see if she could combine them, and make a realistic creature. She could. They were just really, really weird. And they had an awfully short life span, but there wasn't much you can do to fix that.

She'd put no love in the writing, because writing healthy, non-platonic love was surprising difficult. Not to mention that the dialogue was excruciating to write without it sounding uncomfortable or cheesy. It had been surprisingly easy to avoid romance, when the main character only had a bird and their sister as their companions.

Birds were Victoria's favorite animal, and you know how writers are. They take people they know, sometimes even themselves, and use their traits in characters they make. The horrid neighbor that gets mentioned atleast a total of five times, and everyone hates them? A real person that the author really wanted to rant about, without actually naming the person. Some delightfully heroic person that had saved a dog from getting run over? It is entirely likely that there was some very short article or social media post that the author happened upon. A ridiculously cute person at a cafe that had a flip phone? Very likely a real experience the author had, and while it may not have been interesting enough to tell the ones they love about, it was curious enough to go into their writing.

How absolutely wondrous it is to read about a character as simple as that. Authors can show glimpses their souls and personal lives in books, and you see it when you look at the simple interactions, and the inner thoughts of some characters.

Reading a book in the odd hours, you may have an entirely different experience. Maybe it's because the odd hours bring a feeling of dissociation and melancholy. Or maybe they bring a feeling of tiring thrill for what's to come in the day you've already started. No matter the reason, odd hours can be some of the most interesting hours to read.

In Victoria's case, the odd hours are the most interesting hours to write in. In the odd hours, you remember that incredibly strange thing that happened to you when you were about eight years old, that very well may have been a weird dream. And it somehow gets into your writing. So when you awake, and read over your brain dump of plot and character development from the odd hours, you get to remember the curious things that brought on the writings.

The hours of oddity are a unusual and marvelous time, as they are some of the hours that people of oddity and creativity can do some of their most amazing pieces of work.

However, Victoria may not think that when she wakes up and reads the mess she had written the night before. She had apparently decided that throwing in a new character with a habit of talking too much was a brilliant idea. Of course, Victoria is too great at writing dialogue.

So this means Victoria now has the fun job of going through and deciding if she should junk that character and all the interactions that have them, or if she should try to hint at some mysterious things in previous parts of her writing, so that she may write a fulfilling sequel that has more of this brand new character. It was entirely possible that Victoria would have to junk everything she had written last night. Staying up till the odd hours had been for nothing.

Perhaps some people do work better in the hours of oddity. But others should stick to the hours when they have coherent thoughts that make any lick of sense.