Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Every time I close my eyes, I see your smile.

It's no wonder I never sleep.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Thoughts

Growing up, I fell in love with music because the young men and women behind it had found a way to turn something so profound, so beyond words, so confounding and overwhelming as my own heart into something tangible. I could invest in each note, each word, each up and down, and release my pain and anxieties and fears and hopes and dreams, every facet of my own inescapable creation, to the trusted hands of an artist.

Now, as something of an adult-in-progress, and just as much an artist in the making, I've grown to appreciate these sounds not for doing something I am helpless to do myself, but for doing something I'm willing to trust someone else to do better. I trust these strangers, largely faceless and anonymous so far as I'm concerned, to share their darkest secrets, their most treasured dreams, in a format I'm able to grab, hold on to, and press close to my heart. I allow them to take my soul on a journey, open and unguarded, to places I'm terrified of, or exhilarated by, or maybe even comfortable in.

I've said before that music has become my faith. I think it's more accurate, perhaps, to say it's like the partner I hope, one day, I can trust just as deeply.

Someone with whom I can close my eyes and surrender my soul.

Face-to-face.

Completely without fear.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

a small update

Writing again. Just an edit of a previous work, but it's creativity, and it's happening.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

I'm feeling a little bit better.

Which may or may not be a dramatic understatement.

Misery comes and goes, but my cats still want their breakfast.

The sky is always darkest right before a tornado.

The only way left to go is any direction not immediately hampered by a physical object.

I've got nothing left to lose, except my job, my home, my car, my pets, etc.

Somehow, I think I just described my anxieties instead of my relief. How telling.



I'll put some real writing here, soon. Clichés are fun to kill, however.

Sunday, May 13, 2012

my mood: 05/13/2012

For all my pretentious writerly prowess, I can't come up with a reasonable description for how I feel that would be any more eloquent than mashing my face against the keyboard. Which would look a bit like this: rdgfsn,jlgsrdfkhjd,n n,j df nj gdfjknl dfsnjklgdshnjk , but probably bear a less distinct pattern.


Wait, here we go:
I want to vomit. I want to vomit so hard that I vomit my stomach, my liver, my pancreas, my heart, my personality, my anxieties, my goals, and my soul, if that's not asking too much. Then I want to take some vitamins and grow a new one(s). Then I want to get in my car and start driving and not stop until I reach something so grand and unfamiliar that I forget where I came from and where I was going. A town, maybe? With small, dilapidated houses built by the hands of generations gone. Wooden floors held together by wooden dowels, each board lain with care and precision.

I'm not sure if this qualifies as depression or maybe something more clinically interesting, something someone would enjoy studying and writing a paper on and graduating with highest honors as a result of, magna cum laude, and everyone claps. I know I'm angry. Blindly angry, livid even, chomping at the proverbial bit to take the wooden bat in my closet--not the metal one, the impact wouldn't be so satisfying--and destroy everything I own. I want to burn this house to the ground and leave with nothing to my name but my good character and integrity.

I want to sleep on someone's floor and have nothing to go home to, but I can't do that, because this frail body wouldn't function without the $2,100 bed I just had to purchase. But I want to. I want to take joy in the simple act of getting in the shower in the morning. I want to work ten hours a week and have nothing to purchase but a few groceries and my small portion of someone's rent. I want to own nothing but a notebook and a reliable pen.

I want to honestly desire to erase the last three years of my life. But I can't bring myself to want it. I can't dash that hesitation, that sentiment. I can't hold my grudge and feel justified about it and chalk up the time as wasted and move on.

I can't stop loving, and by extension, I can't stop hurting.

I want to be naive again.

I want to start over.

But we can't all have what we want, can we?

Sunday, May 6, 2012

where am i?

Deja vu is becoming not a phenomenon, but a state of being. This world is a mockery of the one I once lived in--a vivid dream not my own, lacking the subtleties that made me feel at home. Oh, Dreamer: please, would you wake for me? I long to return to familiar faces, unscathed by the shadow of this plaster sky.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

I'm not dead

A combination of financial, interpersonal, and health-related stresses had rendered my ability to craft pretentious artsy nonsense almost entirely moot. Thankfully, things are falling back into place. Expect updates soon.

In the meantime, have a doodle from work.



Thursday, February 2, 2012

Elegia -- Part 1

Just some random thing I've been working on. Set in the world I crafted for an older book I was working on and set down half-way through college, with the intent on picking back up on it later. Maybe I will, now that I've graduated. Either way, this has nothing to do with any of the characters of the book. It's just a place.

Because I didn't feel like describing the species contained wherein, a brief bit of information: 'Keshiir' are anthropomorphic cat people, effectively. Slender, flexible, and all-around small, they tend to be at least six inches shorter than humans of equivalent build. Their features tend toward a middle ground between "big cat" and "domestic cat".

'Niquon', in this story, are never named. The protagonist and her friend are niquon. Niquon may as well be humans, save for a few vestigial reptilian traits. They have bits of scale in places, lack body hair, and have sad little claws instead of traditional fingernails.

Anyway.

As is becoming trend, this is probably NSFW. Contains language and adult themes.

More will come later. Just wanted to post something now. It's been almost a month, after all.




            The sound had always soothed her. Rhythmic, predictable, each quiet ‘ba-bump’ accompanied by the slightest, softest jolt of her spine. The cold glass against her cheek and the seatbelt cutting into her neck were tied to nearly two decades of memory—to the quiet whispered adulations of her father to her mother, to her brother’s impish grin as the family car flew past yet another risqué billboard. Notches etched in the highway, ready to accommodate next winter’s freeze. The sound of travel. The sound of everything being right again.
            ‘Ba-bump’. ‘Ba-bump’.
            Her pale grey eyes shifted from the blur of trees beside her to the road just below her window. Thousands of tiny indiscernible features melted into an ever-shifting black wall, tiny specks and imperfections dancing about like the lines and dots that lent authenticity to old film. Her own visage in the side mirror sat on the periphery of her vision, watching along with, pale brow furrowed under the weight of reality. The weight of the phone call she’d received four evenings prior. The weight of—
            “Goddamnit.”
            The voice made her jump, though really it shouldn’t have. That Verci had gone this long without speaking was the only real surprise. Grey eyes panned to the left before the rest of her head followed. Slender fingers pushed raven hair away from her eyes.
            She felt the van begin to slow.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Character Art - Abdiel (by Merystic)

     Every now and then, I meet (i.e. stalk online > introduce self to > cleverly force friendship upon) a skilled artist who is forced into interested in crafting something collaborative. This generally takes the form of a "two player" story of sorts, with each character involved being assigned to either myself or the collaborating artist and the two of us writing our respective characters. The result is rich and rewarding--it forces each of us to engage the other's characters as we might an actual person, with no certainty about how our own character's actions might strike them and no guarantee a given interaction will proceed as either of us have in mind. In a word, it's organic. In another, it's fun.

     Given how incredibly disgustingly picky I am about art, stories, and people, this doesn't happen terribly often, and only with people I trust and have forced developed a rich and open friendship with. I have to respect that person's creativity, intelligence, and integrity, and they have to be able to put up with me, which, generally speaking, is a fairly monumental task.

     Merystic is one such individual. Given how much I adore her art and my tendency to become a babbling, stuttering little fangirl in her e-presence, her tenacity in coping with my nonsense is both laudable and tremendously appreciated. (Her [beautiful] gallery can be found here: http://www.furaffinity.net/user/merystic/ )

     Having expressed that having a visual aid for characters helps her to envision their actions, develop their personalities, and grow to understand them as individuals, she decided to do some character art. What follows are a few pieces she crafted of my character in our collaborative work, Abdiel. I'm going to refrain from describing the setting or even the character, as chances are good I will post relevant writing at some point on this blog and I would rather not spoil anything. As is, enjoy the pretty pictures. I'm putting them behind a page break because they involve casual nudity. If you're easily offended by flaccid penises, I advice you not to advance.