Written in a Car

I was in a car the other day, going from my grandparents' house to my mom's. And suddenly, I really started to notice the shapes of the trees. Weather-wise, there's no snow obscuring the branches and trunks, but it's still early enough that there aren't any leaves either. It's been rainy the last couple days, too, and the contrast between the wet, black bark and the grey of the sky blew me away. I noticed that so many of the single trees I saw (whether by nature or by human artifice) had branches that absolutely spiraled out from the trunks. I could look at the trees and see movement. You have no idea how much I A. wished I had a camera and B. wished I could capture on film what I was seeing.

So instead, I cobbled together a haiku and recited it silently until I could write it down.

Here it is. I know it's a paltry offering, considering what I was trying to express, but I worried that if I tried to make a longer poem, not only would I forget half the lines by the time I recorded them, but that the poem's impact might be diminished.

----
The tree: twisted, gnarled
Bent from seasons in the world.
Still, in spring it buds.
----

Argh. I wish I was a better....poet? Writer? Something, anyway.

~Later

Art Blogs

I've been reading a lot of other peoples' blogs lately, and I have to say, this foray has resonated with me. Specifically, I've been dipping into the wealth of blogs written by working artists. (And by working artists, I mean both A. artists who work really hard most of the time at their crafts, and B. artists who then make money off of said art...but mostly I mean type A.)

Even though I am, by and large, not a visual artist--drawings, paintings, sculpture, etc.--many of the artists I've been reading are. And I am amazed at how similar their working lives are to mine. I am also always amazed at how much more awesome their chronicles of their works are, compared to mine (and not just because they post pictures of their stuff!) It's kind of weird to phrase it like this, but I feel like I'm cut off from my work, like I can identify so much more with the struggles other people are going through.

Sometimes--well, okay, most of the time--I feel like my work is just so boring. I've been experiencing an abundance of creativity lately, which is really excellent, because I'm excited about writing again. And not just a little excited. I'm so full of ideas and snippets and just general excitement that my sleep is getting interrupted. The littlest thing will get me worked up so fast that (seriously) I feel ill with the strength of it. I'm frequently burning the candle at both ends, kept awake with the need to write and waking up early because I just can't lay in bed with words burning their way through me.

Yesterday, for example, I found I could not in good conscience retire to the bedroom for the night until I wrote a ballad. And so I struggled through it. I'm pretty in love with it today, but yesterday I just wanted to be able to stop. I took a couple breaks while writing it, yes, but I could not allow myself to quit before it was finished. (And even then, after that, I sat in my bed until two in the morning and scribbled frantically to capture a scene for a story before I was too exhausted to hold the pen any more.)

I'm also putting my hand in trying to create an art quilt. It's going fairly well, though I'm only in the planning stage. I'm using a couple of different traditional blocks in addition to the fancy parts. (I hate that quilting requires so much precise math! I'm terrible at figuring out how big I have to make certain pieces if I want them to come out a certain size.)


Doing so much all at once is really very tiring. But...I have found that reading about other people's works restores me. It makes me really happy to be creating things. It gets me excited about all kinds of art again. Now, if only I can control myself a little and stop missing/burning meals because I get distracted by writing.

~Later

Stretched Thin...

I feel pretty exhausted, truth be told. I managed to get myself started on another (potentially) fanfic-o-doom, this time for Saiyuki. This past weekend was hectic, because I was editing Entropy and drafting the as-yet-unnamed fic...at the same time. The new fic was hammering hard, demanding to be written, and yet I had promised myself that I would get another Entropy chapter ready for posting. I persevered and finished the editing.

I have good-ish news, I suppose. Today, I edited and posted a short piece for a Saiyuki challenge community on Livejournal. Did I mention I've gotten myself an LJ for the exclusive purpose of fanfic? Well, I did. I will probably end up crossposting all the things that go up on AFF on the LJ, mostly because I want to offer alternatives to viewing sites. (Read: posting on LJ gives a thin veneer of classiness to my tasteless writings, hahaha.)

Also today, I finished drafting part two of a two-parted fanfic/writing experiment. I say experiment, because it's one of those flip-side things, where you get one writing style and perspective in one half and another radically different style and different perspective in the other half. (And both halves cover the same events.) I need to figure out a real title for it, too. I hope to polish it off tomorrow.

I worked a short while on the unnamed fic, too. It kind of rickrolled me, really, because I was focusing on that two-parter (which is a vastly, vastly different kettle of fish) and the other story was all...BAM! Write this scene, since you're sitting right there! I don't care if you don't want to, you have no choice! Do it!

Let's see...I want to edit another chapter of Entropy over the next couple days, too. (It might be a good idea to draft more of that, while I'm at it. I'm running low on pre-written, just-needs-editing chapters for that.) I have a pretty good handle on where the story is going. It's just a question of connecting the dots with a combination of plot and character development. I haven't exactly lost interest in the story, but I am getting tired of grinding away. I suppose it's more accurate to say that other stories are getting my attention more than this one. (I shall do my best to persevere and get more done, though!)

Must go, words will eat me...

~Later

Bridging the Divide

I know, it's been ages since I've written anything here. That's because...well...there are a number of reasons, chief of which is that I've been focusing almost exclusively on retooling Entropy and setting up a page with AFF. (You can find that page here, though it is only, I repeat, only going to house my fanfiction, and there's precious little of that right now.)

As for Entropy, I'm going to be going through and uploading the new versions of the chapters sometime soon, so that we're all on the same page, metaphorically speaking. At this time, I don't plan to put up any of the other, shorter fics here. I think I'm going to go back to my original plan of making this blog be for my original stuff and not my fanworks, but I'm not going to get rid of Entropy here yet.

Random Subject Change: epigraphs and epigrams. (Not to be confused with epitaphs.) I'm wondering how well they work as focusing tools. You know, sometimes you'll read a book and it will have a few lines of poetry or a quote at the start of a chapter/section. That's what I'm talking about. I guess I'm wondering about how they cause a person to focus on the contents of a chapter. I'm not in the habit of using them, mostly because I'm concerned I'll get too married to an idea or subtext and ignore the other possibilities and directions the work could take. What if I were to choose and apply them after the chapter is done? I wonder how that would go...

Anyway, must go do other writerly things!

~Later