In which there is a great deal of poetry...

you pretend not to watch me
I pretend not to judge
a half-baked soufflé
too early and it will fall
too late and the cement has set
unyielding, uncaring, cold
just right and the lantern rises
held up by wishes and hot air
careful not to catch on fire
hope it doesn't cool
your hand is warm in mine
grip too tight and bones will break
too loose and the darkness will eat you
having me alone with an empty page
don't blink
I'll make my verdict
---
thumb pad on an ice cube
ridges and slick
---
two steps removed
watching the world go by in slow motion
count the hummingbird's feathers
catch the cold breath in a balloon
let it squeal out in a fog horn
calling in my imaginary friend
keep up with me
moving banana peels from underfoot
chasing fruit flies
waiting for the light
switch it on
write on the bathroom mirror
ghost letters
from the great beyond
two steps away
---
snail shell spirals
warm chocolate curls
---
eyes ask a question
while your smile tries to mitigate it
walking on monkey grass
blades of shattered knives
trying to dance a tango
when one only knows how to samba
a box of chocolates
gun barrel hiding under your ear
not sure whose finger is on the trigger
or if its just a lump in the pillow
I'm not sure of the answer
but ask anyway
---
I'm in class and randomly scribbling things. Stuff happens. I have to admit that the first one is my favorite. I don't often write poetry, but I often seem to find myself inordinately proud of the result when I do, even if it is complete nonsense.

A daily record...

faux amis
false friends
sliding on an oil slick of french
thinking you're ice-skating
olive oil instead of hinge grease
gumming up the works
blowing bubbles of smoke
bright pink sludge
filling up plastic bottles until they're dry
cracks in the mask
deer in the headlights
raccoon eyes hiding gecko pads of want
eyeshadow sliding into lipstick
faux animals
fur amis


---
Yay for complete nonsense? 


Yeah, that's the kind of stuff I scribble in class when a lecture lapses into boring. 
---

There's something to be said for a daily journal. It could be about your daily life or about your writing or for collecting pictures or for writing poetry. Mine is sort of for everything and it goes everywhere with me. I went through phase towards the end of last year, scribbling notes and rants and stuff on scrap pieces of paper, but there is something to be said about having an actual notebook. It makes it easier to keep things together (remember my word of 2011 is to be "collected") and there is really gratifying to watch a notebook fill up, even if it is just with insane scribbles like that above. I'm barely a week into February and already I'm half-way through a notebook I started on the first of January.

Though I think someday I'm going to need to go through my notebooks and binders and write out a timeline for when each one fits so that if I ever need to put them in order, I can without having to actually put them in order on my shelf (seeing as how most of the binders are full-size and most of the notebooks are only like half that size and they would just fit awkwardly).

Advice to my past self...

I was looking over my archives the other day, just sort of skimming through notes and revisions and scribbles and if I were to give my past self a few pieces of advice, they would be:

1) Just keep writing, 2) don't throw anything away and 3) put the date on everything.

They both seem rather simple and sort of "duh", but really, I wouldn't have known back then just how much I wish I'd done those things then.

1) Just keep writing. Even if an idea isn't working or you don't know how it should turn out, just keep writing it. It's sort of the golden rule of NaNoWriMo especially, but it can be applied to just about any other piece of writing. If nothing else, you'll figure out what doesn't work. In the best cases, you can end up with character motivations you didn't see coming or a plot twist that incorporates a throw-away mention you made earlier. In the worst cases, you simply have to throw out some stuff that wasn't working anyway when you edit.

However you won't really throw them away because

2) You shouldn't throw anything away. Even if that one chapter is just awful, the idea makes no sense or it's a conversation from the more bland regions of Blahsville, keep it anyway. If nothing else, you can look back on it and laugh at yourself. In the best cases, you might reincorporate it somewhere in another story or it provides the perfect inspiration for something else. In the worst cases, you at least have material for your future biographers and literary scholars to look back on and write books about.

And to help them out, you should

3) Really, put the date on EVERYTHING. All-caps was warranted there, because you have no idea how many times I've looked back at stuff I know I wrote more than a few years ago and have wondered exactly when I started writing it. Or I find a scribbled sentence or idea and I have no idea when I came up with it. If nothing else, you'll have a timeline of papers. In the best cases, you can track how long you've been on a project and keep track of your consistency and inspiration timeline. In the worst cases... Well, there really are no worst cases here. You just had to take the split second it took to write the date up in the corner. And I really do mean everything. Even if it's just a post-it note you happened to scrawl "two months instead of three?" as a note to yourself for your novel, date it. It makes things so much easier in the future, in ways you wouldn't even imagine now.

Well, unfortunately, I can't tell my past self this, but maybe my future self can put it all to good use.

Nostalgia and crack...

So, in being all nostalgic and stuff on my birthday today, I was reading over my old writing, namely from around 2006, and was impressed with the thoroughness of some of it. And shocked that my memory was so bad.

It turns out the bulk of the writing for my old project Ocean of Fire was done when I was fourteen through maybe early sixteen, which is older than I had thought. But reading over the notes and things almost made me want to pick it up again. I wrote a ton of stuff back then, like folders and folders of outlines and notes. I had forgotten just how much it was, even if I do remember having the entire twenty-page original outline up on my wall for a long time.

That led me to thinking about one of my other more-favorite characters from that abandoned project, Meirzen, and how I occasionally feel the urge to resurrect his story the way I did Quina and Red's. And I then had the cracktastic idea to combine his universe with that of my hedgehog story. I don't know if it's actually going to happen, or if it does, I'll just be stealing the world and there will likely be no mention of Meirzen himself (seeing as how if there were, he would end up dying and I don't want to kill him off in case I ever do decide to resurrect his story) but I was just shocked at the audacity of my brain for even thinking of such a thing.

There needs to be a term for original fiction writers and ideas for crossovers and such like that within our own writings. Fanfiction writers have the term crack!fic, where they have the strangest crossovers or ships or simple out-of-characterness, but we original fiction writers don't really get that, seeing as how it's all in our head or in our private universe. No one outside of us cares because no one outside of us has ever seen it. But we do crossovers and cameos all the time. I once wrote something like four pages that contained every main character I'd ever written, all in some sort of secret agent group hunting down their respective antagonists or something like that.

Seriously, we need our own term. Suggestions?

Bits'n'pieces...

Been sort of kicking around the beginning to my hedgehog story, consistently scribbling on it in inconsistent places. For real, I've got the first part on my computer, the second part on pages ripped out of an old spiral-bound notebook, the third bit on the backs of scrap paper, the fourth bit in my writing notebook and now this fifth bit on looseleaf.

In a way, this sort of broken writing is frustrating, in that I can't look at my previous bits to see what I wrote before (seeing as how I don't always have them all together), but for that same reason, it's almost helpful. I can't look back and be discouraged by what came before, and it forces me to keep writing. And I have been. It's been like NaNo all over again, only not quite with the stringent word counts and guilt-inducing failures. Writing every day, chugging ahead without worrying too much about what's going on. It's fun, and without a deadline hanging over my head, it's almost relaxing.

I don't do scheduled writing time, but this is becoming my writing task for the day. If I were to say "first thing every morning, I will write", I would drive myself crazy because I wouldn't be able to keep that commitment, what with how my daily schedule changes so much every day. However, if I sneak in writing in the spare moments -  like today, when I got in a solid half-hour of writing (two and a half pages of looseleaf, baby!) while I was waiting to pick up my brother from guitar practice - I get writing done, feel accomplished, and avoid boredom.

Basically, writing becomes my time-killer, rather than watching television, reading magazines or twiddling my thumbs. My poor video games are feeling a bit neglected, but I'm getting writing done and it's awesome.

Bring it on...

December 18 – Try What do you want to try next year? Is there something you wanted to try in 2010? What happened when you did / didn’t go for it?

I actually am compiling a list of things I want to try next year. It's not super long as of yet, but here it is for what it's worth (mostly writing-related):

- NaNo documentary
- write "They Fight Crime", a song based on this website
- some sort of interactive story, possibly involving video
- mah hedgehog story
- at least two short stories
- at least one short film
- "Inasmuch"
- at least one other script

In terms of things I wanted to try this year, the list is even shorter. I didn't really have set goals.

- NaNo documentary (yeah, it was supposed to happen during November and December, but with the new year rapidly approaching, it's gonna have to wait)
- my angel project

The documentary actually had some footage filmed that needs to be edited. I just didn't/don't have time for it as of yet. And the angel project had actually a bit of research and scribbling done, but it just fell through, relegated to the "to be scavenged from" folder.

I'm excited for 2011.

Congratulations, you've won...

December 14 – Appreciate What’s the one thing you have come to appreciate most in the past year? How do you express gratitude for it?

The internet. Oh, thank goodness for the internet.

It gives me automated, archived, and free textual communication in the form of e-mail.

It gives me instant access to the combined knowledge of most of the world's population.

It gives me the random funny cat video.

It gives me communities of people that will never meet in real life, but form the best group of supporters you could ask for.

It gives me a platform to host my ramblings and scribbles on, without having to weave my way through a maze of publishers that would likely (and very rightfully so) kill them before the helpless public was subject to them.

It gives me TV Tropes.

Yes, thank you, thank you, thank you for the internet.

I pretty much express my gratitude for the internet by using the internet mostly-daily. And occasionally posting about it on itself.

Magnetic poetry...

I love Magnetic Poetry. Somehow, having a word bank to create poetry from rather than having to decide on the words yourself makes it a little more friendly, a little more accessible, a little less daunting.

---

the sky sings a song under my bed
the stars look for socks
the sun practices jetés in the mirror


the moon scrambles eggs in a non-stick pan

Thank you, internet...

I've been blog browsing a lot lately. Reverb10 and the lovely list at Dining with Small Monsters have been feeding an itch that started quite a few months ago. Google Reader got me through some tough spots in November. Ever since discovering the wonder that is the RSS feed, I've been subscribing to scores of blogs from writers and authors alike, webcomics that make me want to cry while I smile, and a crapload of other goodies. Just recently, I actually finally subscribed to Neil Gaiman's blog.

There's something to be said about reading about people's lives. Some people brush off their activities, preferring to jump into what they were thinking about rather than their physical actions, some people will linger on the smallest details. Some people manage to make their lives sound like novels and some people are abrupt and funny and satirical. 

I mentioned Neil Gaiman because, reading his blog, I felt so comfortable. There are some blogs that are "informative". You read them like a newsletter. There are blogs that are deeply personal, almost exclusively so, making references and in-jokes that no one but the author understands. There are blogs filled with random thoughts, or carefully crafted humor. Gaiman's blog felt like a conversation, like a storyteller weaving his magic about the simplest things, which is what it was. And it was beautiful, even when it talked about things that I didn't understand because I have no history with them. The entire thing felt so careful and yet so relaxed. It made me happy just to read it, even without context to what he was writing about. 

I have a hard time writing about myself in anything that resembles beautiful writing. I feel presumptuous when I do so, like my life is too boring, too mundane, and trying to add deeper meaning makes it silly and that I'm silly for doing so. But at the same time, I want to talk about the little things I notice, tie my life together into a story, write something that will take people's breath away. But I don't know if that's me, if that's my voice. Perhaps that's something I can cultivate.

All I can say is thank you to the people who bring us the internet. It is such an amazing thing in being able to read the wisdom and nonsense of others, as well as put out my own musings and scribblings.

Looking for more...

December 4 – Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?

(*whoot* Back to 'writing' as a theme.)

I can't say as I deliberately went about cultivating a sense of wonder. It wasn't a conscious effort on my part. However, I would have put down my creative writing and mythology classes as having been the greatest sources of wonder this year.

I'm not saying they were both fantastic classes. I've ranted about my creative writing class before and my mythology professor wasn't too good at encouraging original thought and discussion, but neither of them were particularly horrible. The most frustrating thing would be that we would touch on something for the briefest of moments and then move on, or we would beat a particular subject to death without really getting to the core of it. Partially due to frustration, I would scribble out rants and musings about such subjects, expanding them or exploring other facets that the class didn't.

Mythology in particular led me to a lot of realizations about writing and myself. The idea of the vast reaches of the human race being connected by the thing that is myth, and myth being so ingrained in all cultural products, and the idea of writing, of storytelling, of understanding the human condition. It's just so incredible how much potential there is out there, for anything, and how much of it gets wasted, and yet how much of it is used.

It's a matter of just being bored in class and wanting more out of life. And I think that's the best way to cultivate wonder. Want more out of everything. Not selfishly, but just looking for more meaning, more reason for being, more 'oomph' in everything.

Phases...

I go through phases in writing. Sometimes I prefer to type, punching out stories rapid-fire in a series of taps. Other times, I like the feeling of a pen in my hand, the way the paper indents a little as the words go down. Sometimes the pen is best, ink soaking into the fibers and showing up stark black against the white of the paper. Other times it's blue ink, or soft-leaded pencil on yellow legal tablets, or marker on unlined sheets, or any combination of the above. I'll stick with this method for a while, it being the only way I feel productive.

Right now, I'm in a handwriting mood. No particular preference of instrument, but the idea of typing hasn't been too appealing lately. It just feels cold and detached. Other times, handwriting just won't be fast enough and typing is the only way to keep up with myself. For right now, I'm enjoying the ruffling of blank paper, the little scratching of a pen or pencil and the way I can run a finger over my finished work immediately.

That one thing...

Don't you love how sometimes you are writing and you're really not liking what you're writing, but you're writing it anyway and your characters are being boring and your writing is boring and then all of a sudden, one of your characters does something that seems completely innocuous, but that gives you an idea for something else and then all of a sudden, you realize what you need to fix in those characters' relationship and this was all because you really hated what you were writing and one of your characters just did something boring?

Then...

Don't you hate it when you seem to have finally figured out how to fix your plot and your characters suddenly seem to make sense and everything seems to have fallen into place and then you realize that you seem to have completely lost sight of what you were originally going for in the whole project and your story seems to be a slough of cliches and you're doing all the wrong things and you're not sure if your characters are going to work and you're wondering just how you're going to get back on track?

In which I dump forth my poetic scribblings...

Yeah, poetry scribble dump.

spring time
the light falls down
upon my face
and warms it
moon glow
shine over me
the crickets' song
I sleep
(written stream-of-conciousness with "Sora" stuck in my head)


my muse waits
in a small, tremulous huddle
for the harsh glare of criticism to end
and the soft shadow of inhibition to fall


light
great pillars of terrible shining glory
soft beams gently carressing
a warm glow
a cool shine
filtered into dazzling colors
shattered into deliniating shadows
bright glare
stark illumination
blinding rays flaring into being
suffocating radiance fading into nothing


Yeah, they were just scribbles.