Another week gone by

I planned it out - it was perfect. I was going to write last week and get it done before I had to start worrying over this week's assignment and next week's test. But the life happened. I've gotten so out of the habit - of both writing and taking classes - that I'm a damn mess. The difficulty of the class isn't what's getting to me. Oh no - that's not the problem. Sure, it's a lot of reading and when I do the work, I like to make sure it's what I consider good work. This means my notes are too detailed and my answers are too researched for my TA to appropriately respond. I guess that's where I'm feeling the struggle. I feel that the response I'm being given is either highly authoritarian or too narrow.

On top of all of that, I got my husband's hope up that I would work on the writing project that he and I are working on together now and so I've neglected another story for a community that I write in for another week. I'm hoping to get a chapter out (for the first time in much much longer than I'd like to admit) for that community after I get my assignment done today. I'll give myself a day's break from studying to get that done. Then it's back to the grindstone and studying for the first test (which I'm positive will be much easier than the one I'm preparing for in my head).

Oh the stress. I need to remember how to let it go.

What's keeping you from doing the writing you want to be doing?

Starting to Relax

I finally got my grad school application submitted. I'm still waiting on one recommender, but then it's all finished. I'm trying to get this medical junk taken care of and even though I've had no luck with jobs, it looks like things are FINALLY starting to settle out a bit. It took long enough. 


I'm really hoping that this settling out business will allow me to start writing again with some regularity. Really.


If nothing else, I'll have more book updates. I'm reading The Te of Piglette and The Secret Holocaust Diaries right now, so I should have plenty to be updating on soon. 


What keeps you ridiculously busy during your summers?

Blogging

In trying to use this blog to improve my writing skills, I have finally come to the point where I might start redrafting and reposting a few old works as they get modified. I don't have anything ready quite yet, but it should be along soon.

I have a busy week ahead of me. I'll be traveling almost exactly halfway around the globe - back to the US for me - and so I will be a little out of touch (if you haven't already noticed). Packing and preparing leaves me little time to be able to concentrate on the writing, but hopefully the 17 hour plane ride will give me some time in which I can write and make up for the lack of literary-ness that has been plaguing me recently. 

On the up side and with the lack of writing going on, I have been reading extra and have had plenty of updates for my reading goal. I'm almost done with Little Women, so another book should be under my belt before I fly this week.

How do you find the will to keep going when you're lacking things to write?

The Fight

This week Red Writing Hood calls for us to write a fight. I happen to have a fight written from a scene of a longer work that I've been fiddling with for quite some time now. 

Background:

All the world (aka the stage): 
What can I say? There's magic folks - I'm calling it erg for the sake of this post. If it's not your cup of tea, don't worry - it's the setting, not the point. The three characters are sitting around a campfire after a long day of travel.

Men and women (aka merely players): Three traveling companions
Alden - an older gentleman who looks to be about 60 and displays magical abilities
Niko - a seventeen year old boy who's just getting out into the world for the first time; has no magical abilities and is very scientifically minded
Taran - Niko's former teacher and also a magic user
Tully - another travel companion


The fight:

“The only way it really could have happened was for the powder to have been poisonous to that species…” Niko finished, impressed with his logical conclusion.

“And how do you explain Taran being able to draw with erg then?” Alden asked, getting to wits end. He had heard about every scientific explanation he cared to hear and then some.

“I’m still not sure that’s what it was exactly. See, Taran doesn’t seem to be entirely human and it could be that something secretes from her skin had a reaction with that kind of  mineral –“

“Are you serious?” Alden asked, standing in his anger. Taran, too, stood glaring at the boy and with a shake of her head, stalked off. Tully gave an assessing look to the old man and the boy before heading down the path Taran had taken.

“What?” Niko asked confusedly, “What did I say?”

Alden, whose face was cradled in his palms, looked up again with rage in his eyes. “You are a naïve child. Do you not understand why she might take offense? When you begin to doubt her humanity?”

“I didn’t mean -,” Niko started, but Alden broke in again.

“What? You didn’t mean to call her an animal?”

“I didn’t… I just… and don’t your people revere animals?” Niko defended, not wanting to let go of his idea.

“We revere and respect their place and our connection with them. But just as an insect should never be mistaken for a bird, a human being should never be mistaken for something he or she is not How dare you strip her of the last thing she feels in common with those around her. Just because you cannot explain it with your contraptions and theories, doesn’t make it not real. There are things beyond explanation.” He sat down again with a forceful exhalation.

Niko, who had started to cower under the weight of Alden’s words, snapped back to attention. “I don’t think that’s true. Everything has an explanation.”

Alden roared furiously into the night. “So what it it’s true? Does knowing the explanation change something for you? Does it make you its master?”

Niko couldn’t find anything to say.

“Just because you can’t explain it,” Alden said, “Doesn’t mean it’s not real or substantial. You can’t explain away how Taran saved your life today. That doesn’t make it unimportant that she did so.”

Niko shifted uncomfortably on his log, staring into the fire to avoid Alden’s eyes. The old man shook his head again and sighed as he went to his tent for the night.

Questions from the author: Does the dialogue seem realistic? Do you get the impression that Niko is a young man trying to prove himself? Do you feel the age difference and experience difference between the two (without any serious background info)? Do the characters reactions seem realistic?
**Please note that this is all first draft material**

Please excuse the silence

The last few days have been a hectic, emotional whirlwind. Lots of things involving governmental forms, bureaucratic tedium and major thesis revision have fallen into my lap suddenly. I promise a response by the end of the week to the Red Writing Hood and at least one more post before next week, at which point I am hoping to be back to a(n almost) daily schedule.

Stolen

Someone has stolen something from you (or your character). Something of tremendous value. What will you do to get it back? Or will you give up?

Write a post - fiction or non - and tell us about it. Word limit is 600.

Today's prompt comes from Red Writing Hood. I had a pretty hard time coming up with an idea for this one, which I found strange. Shouldn’t this be one of the easiest things to come up with? Maybe…

Stolen

I sat up in the night, not from a dream or a nightmare, but from the sound of the door of the apartment opening. I listened for a moment, breath held tight. The door shut and someone giggled, another voice shushing the first.  Another late night out for the flat mates then…

I lay back down, closing my eyes but not to sleep. What was it that was happening before I woke? It felt like there should have been something going on. I was asleep and… I reached out in my mind, willing myself to find anything there, but no. Just darkness. Emptiness.

It had been this way for months. I didn’t remember when it had started, but no those are the wrong words too. I didn’t remember when they had stopped – my dreams. From an age before I was cognizant of such things, I had dreamed – vivid dreams, subtle dreams.

“Why don’t you write them down and make them a novel?” he once asked, “You have more ridiculous junk happen in your dreams than these silly vampire novelists have all put together.”

Ridiculous junk. He had always thought so. Other people called them “strange” or even, in my mother’s words, “nightmarish”, but not to me. To me they were just something that another part of my being was trying to tell me.

I sometimes used to wake up with a sense of urgency – the need to remember, to know what had happened in the dream, because it was real and meaningful. Other times I would awake confused – how did that end up in my head, where did it come from? Only once or twice did I wake up in fear. Dreams that frightened others at the thought were no source of terror to me. On the few occasions I did have a nightmare, they were memorable, but thankfully not re-livable.

But this seemed all in the past to me. What had once remained in my waking life had now invaded my dreamscape – a pressure, a dampening. As my daily self lost its vigor, its intention, its vitality, so did my dreams. I could manage the day to day, but the loss of my nightly reflections was unbearable. I mourned.

The doctors called it depression. My friends called it “a damn shame that someone like that could hurt someone like you.” I didn’t really call it anything – not until it was much too late.

The life that I had been living and pursuing had become a confused muddle of daily routine and wandering. I had dealt with this before – losing my way, but then I had my dreams to ground me, to help me reflect, to turn to for understanding. Now they were gone too. Stolen. 

There's nothing like anxiety in the spring

I'm not sure why, but every spring my anxiety kicks up a few notches. I've been trying to figure out what might cause this sudden upswing. I've come up with a calendar of theories, but they may not stand up to the test of applicability:


1) January: New Year's resolutions


Everyone seems to make this list of things that they're going to do in the New Year that they didn't do before. This is one of those cultural rituals that is an expression of our continuous search for perfection and designed to make those with high blood pressure or anxiety worsen their conditions. Instead of relaxing and doing small things to help ourselves change, like adding a 15 minute walk to our day, we feel the need to set a goal of hitting the gym an hour everyday when we don't believe we have enough time anyway. What's worse is when we've done well for the first week of January, we think "I'm getting the hang of this" and then promptly stop going to the gym and/or start eating more calories (because we worked it all off, right?). When we suddenly notice that we're not meeting the completely unreasonable goals, we start worrying - which only stops us in our tracks to good health more. 


2) February: Valentine's Day


Another holiday for those who are exceedingly happy in their romantic relationships. It tends to make everyone else just feel worse that they're 30 and not married, or remind them that their mother wants to know when they're going to produce come grandchildren and also worry about how there are too many curves in their silhouette.  Luckily, I don't have either of those problems, but then I don't really celebrate Valentine's Day either. 


3) March Madness


This is usually a term that is reserved for those of our country that are already diagnosed with a serious disease (Basketball Fanaticism), but it doesn't make it untrue for the rest of us. There's something about March that it's just the time when things start picking up and you feel even busier than usual. When you're a student, your midterms are coming around and the papers are due. If you watch television, then all of your normal relaxing me-time shows are being cancelled for someone's basketball obsession. Maybe you share the basketball obsession and have decided that gambling money is a good way to exercise that obsession. This means that you'll spend an entire month worrying about something that is in no way dependent upon your behavior that you're most likely going to lose your hard earned money on. It also seems to be a month for evaluation. You have to start doing the self-assessments that are required for ...


4) April: Tax Season


Everyone that has spent the last two months ignoring the W-2s that reside in the growing pile of mail at the end of the table, on the kitchen counter or in that corner of the office starts to sweat. It's time. You've got to pay your taxes. But to do that you have to go through the most confusing and often unintelligibly meaningless jargon of tax law. If you have any idea what most of that junk they ask you about in your tax forms means, then you're ahead of the game. I usually look for keywords like GI, military, train, miner and disability to help me decide whether or not I am required to fill in one of the boxes. At any rate, you've got the first two weeks to get all of your finances straightened out and make sure that you're accurately representing (and certainly not over-representing) yourself on paper to people in the government who won't think twice about rubber stamping your tax return, unless they see something fishy. And something fishy can be as complicated as not paying taxes on all of the money that you're taking off the top of your multi-million dollar corporate income or as simple as not understanding the language in which your accumulation of assets (otherwise known as your bank account) in being described to you. After the taxes have finally been filed, envelope licked, stamp attached and placed in your local letter carrier's trusty bag - you have two more miserable weeks (at least) to wait to see if they have been received, accepted and (if you're lucky) you'll actually get the return your state owes you or (if you're not lucky) they've removed the funds from your account. 


5) May: Light at the end of the tunnel


Perhaps I've been a student too long, but this seems to be the point at which spring just can't be spring anymore - it has got to start heading toward summer. All that worrying you did in April led to binge eating that is now starting to show around your thighs and the bathing suit season is creeping up faster than you'd like. Everyone's back in workout mode a little too late to get into the shape they want to be in on the beaches, but hey - at least it's almost time for a little vacation - a little R&R time right? 


In my family, all the birthdays have come around and by mine (mid-month) the anxiety has started to break up and leave me again until January.


So here's the thing... none of these things really apply to me. I didn't set New Year's resolutions this year - I was adjusting to being newly married and living in Hong Kong. I didn't celebrate Valentine's Day other than to eat some chocolate sent to us by my father-in-law and to say to my husband "Happy Valentine's Day" once. Also - not sad and alone, so no worries there. I don't care about basketball, nor do I own a television, nor did I gamble any money in the month of March. As I am abroad, I didn't even do my own taxes this year and they're already filed and I've already received my return (yay!). As for May, I'm just looking forward to going home for the summer. So how is it that all the things that usually give people anxiety don't apply to me and yet, here I am feeling it?


Sometimes life doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I am currently trying to apply Daoism liberally to the affected area to see if I get any results. Thus far there has been no increased inflammation, but no reduction of what's already there either. 


Advice welcome. 

Conference Killer - A rough poem

I was recently at a philosophy conference, when a poem struck me. After listening to one gloriously presented lecture, a second lecturer took the spotlight. Well... the rest is in the poem.


Conference Killer

The battlefield set - pitting academic against academic

In a conference, competition: who will win the day?

One skillful warrior completes his task,

the crowd eager to continue the fight

A second must be given his chance

awkwardly he sits reading, his notes becoming crumpled

as he foams at the mouth with excitement

not stopping to wipe away the spittle,

weapon wildly wielded: the mind has learned, the tongue has not

slurring well thought words with a foreign sound

Inertia gone, the crows loses interest

their eyes roaming the room like prowling cats

avoiding mutual acknowledgement of boredom

others politely look attentive, leaning forward in their seats

willing themselves to not be revealed, a yawn giving them away

Few have the endurance to outlast the incomprehensible

the lecturer surfaces from his berserking on the field

the sole survivor in the slaughter of interest

Yes, I know it's rough, but I'm having a hard time moving on it. And I'm not kidding about the spittle. The second stanza is almost reporting. Of course, so is the third. Anyways. There is some writing for the day.