Checkin in…

And so…

I’m checking in, so that you all (whoever you may be) know that I am not actually dead in a ditch somewhere ( as my mother would say).

Because I am not currently able to pedal my writings via the internet, I am forced (yet again) to do so in person, out loud, and with an audience of actual people.   I prefer the less personally invested, and therefore more detached, mode of operation. Incidentally, however, that makes me quite the hypocrite.  And so, I’ve little choice but to interact with the people that I would much rather simply watch.  I’ve no choice but to bear my humanity to them… though I’d like to think I’m from some other planet.  I’ve no choice but to stand up in front of them and admit that I am as weak and sniveling as they are… I am the same.  I do not appreciate this… but it must be done. 

Fuck.

Anyway, for anyone who happens to be in the Norman, OK area, I am reading on Thursdays at Cafe Plaid… or maybe I’m just being there, but thus far they seem to want me to also be present.  Come and watch me do my best not to either vomit or faint.  Some of the words that come out of my mouth may be good, and worth showing up for.

I’ve had a fair bit of wine and would like to say that in some strange and totally disconnected way, I love you all. 

Stupid Digital Machine Type Things

My hard drive is fried. Though I’ve been advised to keep the Machine rather than replace it, because it is apparently a good machine. I know nothing of this sort of thing… I guess I just lucked out. Until it stopped working anyway. So, gonna try to figure out a way to save all of my files… then replace the internal hard drive. I’m told it can be done by computer smart people. I certainly hope so.

Until then, however, I won’t be posting much… if at all. I also won’t be able to check anything very often, since my poorness has ever prevented me from having more than one computer. Sorry about that.

Maintaining the Flow

I’ve not been trying to neglect anyone in the world of the internets, but I am preoccupied with a couple of things… as per usual. One of them, luckily, is the thing that I really SHOULD be writing all the time anyway. In terms of reality crashing in, this blog is the distraction not the goal. I’m working on Embellishments. The other thing is my obsession with music, and getting it all onto the magical device made to hold it.

 

…..

 

As far as my obsession goes, there’s the matter of getting all of my loose CDs onto my iTunes, and getting my 55 or so Gigs of music onto my iPod. These things are moderately frustrating at times. My PC doesn’t like iTunes OR my new iPod. I suspect it is jealous that the iPod has about 26Gigs more memory space than it does. The two machines keep playing petty high school chick tricks on each other.

    My PC says, “So you think you’re smarter than me, huh? Well, I’ll just delete everything you’ve got, bitch. What’s that you say? Losing the 20Gigs it took forever to get up to hurt a bit? Well, that is just too bad.”

    My iPod retaliates. “Oh yeah? Well I’m just gonna misplace half YOUR music files, so YOU can’t fuckin find them. How do ya like THAT?”

This dumb shit keeps tossin’ me back to square one, and it’s really irritating… but I persist… because I am obsessed. I will fucking HAVE access to all of my music on one easy to operate device that happens to dock neatly ON my fucking Stereo. I did this on purpose, and gathered my components one at a time over the last few years, so that I would eventually reach an ease of listening that cannot be surpassed. I will not let the differences of my devices deny me of this satisfaction. I just want to dock the thing and enjoy the shuffle feature, lack of skipping CDs, and the wonders of playlists REALLY FUCKIN LOUD!!!!! This is not too much to ask.

The bright side is that, while I’m uploading CDs I’m also writing and listening to what HAS made it onto my iPod (only 16Gigs at present). I let it sync overnight while I’m sleeping because it takes for-fucking-ever (about 1500 songs in 10hrs), and my PC refuses to do anything else while it’s syncing… which makes me wonder if it’s a love-hate thing they’ve got going on.

 

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I did mention that I’ve never written a novel, didn’t I?

 

In the world of novel writing I find myself not exactly sticking to my outline. I think this is better for character development, namely the narrative character… but also the others. In creating the surroundings of this story I find myself hitting some bumps. I feel the need to be more descriptive, but don’t know how to work it into my flow. I focus on a perspective of events, but describe it emotionally rather than physically. I think it lacks balance… and to some degree, reality. Of course, reality isn’t really a requirement of this book. Much of what I want to get across is the distant dreamlike quality of my adolescence and the journey to clarity using a handful or three of life-changing adventures.

Now that I’m done writing the experience of my initial return, I am set to the task of describing the other people in this world to which I’ve returned. In doing this, I’ve come to discover how self-centered my writing has been up to this point (LOL! This would not be a surprise to many who know me, but is ironically something that I’d never noticed). I’ve never written characters. I need to be able to bring the people in this story to the forefront, and stop thinking of them as secondary to my goal. I remember them all so well that I want to be able to frame them properly. I can see pictures of them in my mind, and remember specific ways in which they helped to make me who I am. This is a puzzle I will solve, though it may take me a few days to figure out how.

In order to frame the development of some of these characters I was forced to tell a story that I had slated for much later in the book. I don’t know what had compelled me to scoot it so far back in the first place, but it happens to be a story that involved pretty much everyone, and introduced me to a few of the more important ones. I may have to rework the progression of the novel a few times to get it right, but I am pretty excited about how it’s going so far. J

 

When the Music is all Gone

What happens to a soul when it no longer wants to sing? What does one do when the music slides into the background, when it reaches the ears but not the heart? What is the result of forgetting joy?

These are questions I asked myself everyday for a few years. I’d turn it up, but still find myself still and silent rather than dancing and singing along. For most of my life music was my closest friend, what got me through the rough spots, and then little by little it just stopped working. I fretted, and worried why there was no music in my soul. Where had it gone, and would I get it back? I wanted it back.

I lived in an empty silence that permeated everything around me. There was no escape from myself, no vent that sufficed, no air in the mire. I began to pick at my scars and sores, wondering if I’d only avoided them rather than properly healing. I argued with myself, and remembered self hatred. I blamed myself for my unhappiness, and let it destroy any chance of finding a way out. I turned the music up, but it just couldn’t reach my center. It couldn’t get past the drunken fog of broken dreams and thoughts of nothing.

In the swamp of perpetual sadness I flopped around findings ways to cover myself in every kind of muck. I sank with Attreu’s horse. Then in my last ditch effort of hope I shot my hand up above the muck… and another hand caught it.

She’d been watching the whole time, even piling on big globs of shit every now and then, but had finally decided that she couldn’t watch me drown. Her sadness and mine did not have to know each other so well. She dragged my reluctant heart out of the mire with great heaves. I had very nearly given up all hope for the future, and was content to suffocate in my sorrow, going only through the motions from there on out. But she did an unexpected and out of character thing and it saved me.

By some miracle she had restored hope, and THEN steadily fed it for 6 months. Flaking off the dried muck with every caress, finding the rhythm of my soul and then reminding me that the music could return, she worked hard to let me know that I was not alone. She gave me a box to hold my soul’s songs and promised to stay as long as it takes me to fill it, and then some.

I can feel it coming… slowly seeping back into me. It had been creeping up on me for a few months and then, on the last day of the year 2011, I felt it rumbling toward me shaking the dust off the blacktop. I danced, and she couldn’t stop herself from dancing with me. And the music is barreling down the highway in a big old truck as though it is just returning from a vacation with Sarah Conner in the Mexican dessert. It’s coming to save me, to terminate the sadness and reinstate joy.

Dreams of the Future

In the future some city in some slightly pre-apocalyptic world will be recycling all discarded glass to run some kind of corporate giant machines. I will apparently work for this city in the streets and waste division. My coworkers will be a lovely dark skinned woman who drives a giant future version of a forklift that stirs crushed glass as it is being fed into the smelter, a large man who drives a garbage truck, and a skinny dude with a broom who hides in the background.

I say to my female coworker, my first day on the job, “I’d like to do that. And I have a license to operate a forklift.”

She replies, “Maybe they assigned you the wrong position; you should put in an appeal.”

The world itself is incredibly polluted, though free of debris. Everything looks dirty like someone put a grey sepia lens over the sun. There is no point in ever looking up, because no one can see more than 20 feet in that direction.

At home, I will have just given premature birth to a set of twins. A boy and a girl. Though they were born early they were more than fully developed, except that the girl has a slightly deformed right hand. It would seem I live with at least 8 other people… including my mother, unless she was just visiting because of the babies. We all live in an apartment that has a long hall with a lot of bedrooms… or maybe it’s an abandoned hospital. The twins cribs are head to head in my room, and my older daughter fawns over them continually.

As for passage of time, it is the age of my older daughter that gives it away. In this future, she appears to be about 16. That makes it about 2020.

Don’t ask me what all this is really about. It’s just what I dreamed last night. It would have more details if I’d made it up consciously, and perhaps I will insert some later for a story.

Note: the twins have been in my dreams for about 5 years give or take. They seem to surface whenever my romantic life seems settled. Usually dreams of the twins are less toxic, but this one also included waste management which points to only one person in my past whom happens to work for the City nearest here. In a strange turn of fate, he texted me as soon as I woke from this dream. I hadn’t spoken to him in 6 months… give or take. I’d actually erased his contact info.

25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing

I read this blog post and thought that it was one of the most motivational posts I’ve ever read.  It validated every thought I’ve had in the last 5 months about my writing career.

I am guilty of numbers: 1, 2, 8, 9, and 19… which means I’m doing pretty good as far as I can tell.  Most of the other advice in this blog I’ve been practicing as part of my life, not just my career.

Any writers out there, should totally read this and be Uber Motivated to just do it.  Everyone else should read it because it doesn’t just apply to writers, and is based on another article anyway.

25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing.

Another Cycle

The beginning of a new year, or the ending of the last, has traditionally been a time for examination among most humans. What have we screwed up? What can we change? How could we do it all better this time around that flaming ball of gas that brings us all life? Some think of how to improve as the year wraps up, and vow to do better as the new cycle starts. Others engage in thoughts of starting anew AS the year does. Personally, I do both.

I don’t judge my own passage around the earth solely by the passing of the calendar year, but also by the passing of the years in MY life. My birthday is conveniently about 3 weeks into the new year, so I give myself these 24 days to examine my previous cycle, be it the last 7 years (a natural human phase cycle), the last decade (as when those have passed), or simply the last year. Last year my examination of the previous decade was terribly bungled by circumstances… or perhaps the Fates just didn’t think I should look into it quite yet. I’m not sure that cycle was quite done with its course. Or maybe it was simply that it was going to take me more than 3 weeks to go over a decade, and I was being told to take my time. Whatever the case, I persisted.

I HATE missing deadlines, being late, and more than anything not finishing things. It really makes me just a little crazy… maybe a lot. Last year at this time I was dating someone who was entirely unaware of my many processes, including my year end/beginning examination. My milder requests for time alone and to myself were largely ignored, and as my deadline approached I became more and more frantic and frustrated. When my deadline passed the damage became irreparable, and the relationship began to fall apart. I tried and tried to get back to my examination to at least get some kind of grasp on where I’d been so that I could set a viable course for where I was headed, and never did quite work out what the hell was going on. Without this overview I was lost.

Since I was about ten years old, I’d NEVER missed my yearly examination of myself and my life. They weren’t always thorough or helpful, because quite a few of those years I was insane and/or on a lot of drugs, but I always plotted a loose sort of course for my next year based on what I could have done better in the previous. Until last year, I’d taken this process of mine completely for granted. It was just what I’d always done. Completely unfathomable to me that I would ever be denied the time, energy or focus to complete this seemingly reasonable task. Furthermore, it hadn’t occurred to me how important it was to me. I had no idea that without this simple tether I would drift so far from myself, or that I would be so unaware that I was drifting.

That said: I’ve never considered myself much of a planner… or a detailed plotter of course. I’m more of a point and shoot kinda girl. I aim myself in a general direction, hope for the best… and, if I’m paying attention, prepare for the worst. I didn’t manage to take aim last year, and failed to shoot entirely. Luckily, the Universe had my back.

Had I managed my examination, I may have realized that I wasn’t supposed to be in that relationship anyway. However, I would have missed out on some other life changing experiences, and some shifts in perspective would not have occurred. It’s possible that I wouldn’t have stumbled across the path I have wandered onto, and things would not be in the glorious state that they are currently. I would certainly still be ignorant to the importance of my cyclical examination.

Though I’ve not really begun looking at the last year in detail, I can say this: One thing that I have learned is that it is okay to lose control, or rather, to relinquish it. I did not give it up willingly, and wasn’t aware that I was clinging to it, but the fact that control escaped me neither killed me nor ruined my life. Losing my general direction in life ended up being one helluva blessing. If 2012 is even remotely as awesome as 2011 turned out to be, I’m not sure I’ll have the inner tools to manage it.