A reminder of things to come.

This will be an unusually introspective post. Although I guess a post of any sort is unusual, these days.

I’ve had the kind of day where things go right, but regardless you feel numb to the positives. I’m usually a shower kind of person, but after dinner I decided to have a bath, since I didn’t feel like I was going to achieve much else anyway. So I went on 8tracks and put on some playlists tagged “bath”, and grabbed the Murakami book I’ve been getting around to reading (A Wild Sheep Chase) and for the first time, decided to do that thing that other people say that they do, where you lie down in the bath and read a book.

Personally I’ve always thought it a terrible idea, as my common sense says that it’s a wet-book disaster waiting to happen. But this evening I did it anyway. And then I read this:

I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I’d been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colours swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves.

I remember having to stop for a moment at this, shutting my eyes. Balancing the book above the almost-still water with one hand, pinching the bridge of my nose with the other. He’d got me, in a crystalline moment etched on a page. In that way Murakami has of making the ordinary extraordinary, of freezing a moment like an amber-trapped moth. Understanding me without ever having met me.

Alone, that wasn’t enough. I carried on reading. After a while the water began to cool, so I carefully tossed the book onto a dry patch of floor and plunged my head under the water, letting it tease out my hair. The entire time, 8tracks had been selecting songs for me to listen to, even if I hadn’t been paying much attention over my book. When I surfaced, there was a song by Daughter playing, Medicine, which I had not heard before. And again, another moment of clarity.

You could still be,
what you want to.
What you said you were,
when you met me.

I felt both hopeful and sad. To be honest, since first becoming depressed I’ve not really been able to cry properly – tears just don’t come. Today though, they almost did.

As my catharsis ebbed, I got a flush of ideas. A short story. Two alternative ways to write the short story. An attempt at thinking how to write a more surreal piece; something that I have not tried before. A need to write in my diary for the first time in years, or my blog. I felt, well, how I thought I should do. I felt like I’d been given a glimpse of my potential.

I felt both hopeful and sad. Sad, because I deeply miss being the way I used to be when I started this blog. Hopeful, because maybe I can get some of that back. I don’t want to be the same, because I realise well enough that the clock can’t be turned back. But there are parts of my mind that I feel need reclaiming, that are buried under the silt of numbness left when the rain has passed by. I want to dig up the little music boxes in the sand, clean them off and have a listen. At the moment all I have is an echo scattered amongst sea shells.

But that’s enough to make me smile.

I’m not even sure if anyone reads this anymore, but I wanted to write it down. I’m going off to write that story now. It’s been a while, but hopefully this blog entry has knocked the worst of the dust off my keyboard.

If all goes well, I’ll be back soon.

Qc.

“Because right now we’re here in Boston” – How I fell in love with The Dresden Dolls

Just stumbled across this and smiled. The Dresden Dolls have got to be one of my favourite bands of all time and it was lovely to see someone write about them just after discovering them.

Juvenilia

“I told you,” my ex-boyfriend would eventually say to me, months after we broke up and I had already listened to the album, No, Virginia three times over, and was quoting their song lyrics in Facebook posts; clearly obsessed.

“They are so ridiculously good.”

The Dresden Dolls were a band I subconsciously refused to listen to for a while. I’m not exactly sure why that was.

All I knew of the band was that the singer, Amanda Palmer, wore a devious smirk on her face in pictures online and adorned questionable tattooed eyebrows. I knew that in April of last year, she wrote a controversial poem on her blog, shortly after the Boston bombings titled A Poem for Dzhokhar, that many dubbed self-serving and narcissistic. I knew that a lot of people didn’t like her. On the contrary, I also knew that she had a cult-like following. And for…

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Burning the 5am oil.

I’m not used to insomnia.

This is unusual for writers, from what I’ve heard. Creative sorts and their minds whirring and chugging away, refusing to switch off. If anything I was the opposite: a hypersomniac. Life gets tiring pretty easily, and it’s so easy to sleep too much. When I was in the 6th Form, my history teacher was convinced I was either suffering from either anaemia or narcolepsy. Consequently, irregular sleep patterns are the norm for me. Recently, though, I’ve been having trouble sleeping, and staying asleep.

Tonight, though, it’s through no fault of my own. It’s hard to sleep when drunken housemates arrive with an entourage at 4am.

I guess the silver lining to this is that I’m writing a blog entry. Even if it’s not about anything particularly interesting. Well, it could be. Let’s see.

Something that seems to have coincided with this change in my circadian rhythms is that I dream a lot more. Or at least, vividly enough to remember them afterwards. It’s reminded me that I wanted to write a story involving dreams at one point. In particular, the idea of connecting with something intrinsically human when you dream. An archetypal subconscious, something that is shared between people unknowingly. That every night you bare your soul to humanity only to forget it when you

 

…Sorry, I lost my train of thought when I heard something break downstairs. Back now.

Hopefully I’ll think to write here more often, and my bits and pieces will get more interesting. We’ll see.

Oh fudgesticks. NaNoWriMo is here!

So I decided to write again. Hello blog!

After blowing some dust off of the keyboard and getting comfortable, I remembered how I used to enjoy keeping a blog. So here I am. Tidbits of what I’m writing over the month should appear here, *fingers crossed*

That’s it for now, as it’s nearly midnight and I need to get ready!

 

Let the madness begin.

33 Unusual Tips To Being A Better Writer

Blue Monday.

It’s unusual for me to write about negatives well, at all, really. I tend to find them to be more personal, the kind of stuff you keep to yourself because no-one really wants to know that, now, do they?

When I started this blog, I wasn’t exactly in the brightest of places. The whole point of this was to force myself to look for points of light, constellations to guide me through my own, very personal night. Looking back on it now, it’s obvious that I needed something like this, and still do. I’ve just re-read The Spark – I can’t believe it was over two years ago that I sat down and wrote that, my first blog post. I feel aimless now, cast adrift, lost in the doldrums. Time passes by my window without throwing me a second glance. Cause and effect seem grey, inertia chains me to myself.

Just the very fact I’ve decided to come back to this blog is a quintconsequential for me.

And now that I’ve got this off my chest, to work. I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep anytime soon, so why not? Why not.

Finding time, finding space.

Writing is no longer the priority it once was for me. This is sad, but not the end of the line. I haven’t given up on it, as such. I just now find it much more difficult to fit in around an ever-increasing number of monsters eating up my time and energy.

I’m here, though. Despite the difficulties, despite that writing doesn’t come to me with the same ease and fluency as a couple of years ago, I still come back. In the last week I was introduced to the Ghazal form of poetry. Looking into it I realise there’s a lot more culture and history behind them than could be shown to us during one short workshop. So I guess the poem I’ve begun to craft isn’t a true Ghazal. But it IS a poem, and it is mine; that is enough for me.

I plan to do some more work on it and have 12 glorious lines of verse posted here within the week. I also plan to have read up on Quantum Mechanics and Physical Fields by then, but I think I know what I will end up doing, given the choice!

 

It’s good to be back.

Ten Ways Writing is Like Sex

The Brown Road Chronicles

10. Writing definitely became more prolific and interesting when electronic tools became mainstream.

9. Although sometimes it’s easier just to go it alone, in the long run you’re better off having some other people involved.

8. Sometimes writing is slow and deliberate, sometimes it’s fast and frenzied, but you’re usually pretty satisfied with the end result. And if you’re not… you can always try again tomorrow.

7. We live in a busy world. You often just need to schedule a specific time to get your writing done, like Sunday nights after the kids go to bed.

6. A little prompting can help lubricate your thought process.

5. Most of us are ready to write at a moment’s notice, but sometimes it’s easier just to use the excuse “I have a headache.”

4. Protection (as in copyright) should always be at the forefront of one’s thoughts.

3. Some days writing is…

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The House That Jack Built.

It’s my first time here for a while, I know. Writing hasn’t been coming as naturally to me of late. When I actually do it, it feels great; but being able to actually sit and write something worthwhile feels like a Herculean effort for the most part. My original intention on sitting down tonight was to begin a flash fiction entry for this year’s Inktears competition (something I’ve been intending to start for about two months). However, the blank screen stared at me until I changed tack, and started to write this post instead.

The problem with having no limits is that it can leave you feeling rather lost. You are in the situation of having to stake out your own frontiers, guarding your little corner of civilisation from the terrors of the unknown. Where do you start?

I’ve been having to do this in a much more general way, too, I now realise. Since about Easter I’ve been at home, trying to work out what to do with my life. Not in a bad way, as such, but I have been finding it rather difficult to live in the middle of a void. I’ve very suddenly had to deal with sorting out my own life, without much in the way of outside influences (i.e. the day-to-day responsibilities of a University timetable).

It’s been difficult.

So I guess this is me, trying to create something from nothing. Making my own way of doing things, my personal house of cards. I’m getting the hang of it, maybe. But we’ll see. We’ll see.

Revision break.

In case you haven’t read The Spark, I am a Physics undergraduate. And in case you’re not a student yourself, at the moment it is exam season for a lot of us. So although it’s 7am now, I’ve been here in the library since 3am working on algebraic thingammywotsits for my exam later on Waves and Vibrations. (That’s a very technical term, you understand.)

And then I thought: how better to inject some joy into my life than to do a little writing? So here I am.

This is just a little ramble, to be honest. A lot of things have been happening of late, from the whole ruckus over SOPA and PIPA to more personal worries, like my marks for the semester. Nice things occasionally rear their beautiful faces, though.

Life would be nothing without its little moments of grace. Sharing biscuits with a despairing English student in the library. The realisation that, in a few short hours, a friend will be coming to visit to give you post-exam cupcakes. Sitting back to think about things like these and share them with the world… It helps to relieve the stress. It lets you smile and remind yourself:

Life is good.