Writing

Anchor

Chris Leave a comment

What weighs me down weighs naught at all.
Instead, it pulls me from my feet.
The ways I’m down aren’t ways at all
But an urge to admit defeat.
I wallow not in some dark pit
But in an endless sea replete
With crushing waves that don’t remit
And don’t allow me to retreat.

I tread and float upon the sea
With nothing but my strength and will.
There is nothing to tether me
Or that will make my floating still.
I am not content to survive
Waves larger than the tallest hill.
I will fight while I’m still alive
To buck this watery treadmill.

I will forge myself an anchor
Made of my wit and will and word.
I will twist a rope of my rancor
And all of the pain I’ve incurred.
My anchor will lodge in the deeps,
Stuck fast no matter how I’m stirred
By the wind, waves, and rain that sweeps
Away the rafts I once preferred.

 

My 100th Daily Post!

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By my math, and I’m fairly decent at most math (plus this math is super simple), today’s post marks the 100th post since I started doing daily posts! You can’t see it here since I didn’t think to record myself doing it until I started writing this post, but I took a moment to celebrate by blowing a kazoo and setting off a couple of those “Party Popper” things people buy for New Year’s Eve. This is 100 posts down! only 295 more to go! November 1st, 2017 to November 30th, 2018.  I’ve made it through three months, and they were the hardest months! I am least productive during December and January on account of the holidays and the start of my yearly battle with worsening depression due to little sunlight, the cold, and winter in the northern Midwest of the US. After the end of February, everything will be so easy by comparison! Even February is easier than January was.

First off, I’d like to thank myself for not letting me get away with any bullshit excuses or stupid “one day off won’t hurt” crap. I’d also like to thank two of my friends–who’d probably rather be go unnamed–for reading stuff before I posted it. I’d like to thank my French friend for reading my blog and being easily identifiable when reviewing my view stats. I’d like to thank everyone who shared my blog and then everyone who read it because seeing that people are reading my blog is a huge encouragement.

This has been a trial at times, to make sure to post everyday, but it has been very rewarding. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so productive as I have these last few months. Nor have I ever felt quite so hopeful when thinking about all of the stuff I still want to do. This project, a year of daily posts, has had a huge impact on my self-confidence and belongs right up there with one of the biggest moments of my life as a writer. Receiving an award in college was the moment that made me realize that I could be good at this if I really worked at it (and that other people felt the same) and daily blog posts has made me realize that I can work hard enough to achieve my writing goals. While I’ve still got another 295 blog posts to go before I’ve really achieved my goal, I can definitely say that it has moved from “Shoot for the moon! Might as well go down swinging!” to “This is totally doable.” in terms of my own internal evaluation.

I know I’m a lot better at pursuing an extreme goal with no room for compromise than doing any kind of half-measure or slower-paced thing. Cutting myself slack is an easy way to get me to stop working on a goal or a project, which probably isn’t the best character trait to have. Being able to take it easy for a bit should be what I work on next, really. Ha! As if.

For my next trick, I’m going to start working on a story idea I had set aside last fall, while getting ready for NaNoWriMo. I’m going to write 7 posts a week, post every day, work on this other story every day, and maybe I’ll even find some time somewhere in there to sleep! That’s the dream. Thanks for reading and I hope you’re enjoying what I’m posting!

 

Saturday Morning Musing

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I have a tendency to get distracted while I’m doing things and then see something move out of the corner of my eye. This happens to a lot of people, usually as the result of some small shift in something our brain chooses to ignore, like a hair that’s out-of-place or a shadow in the background somewhere. It’s super creepy. Countless horror stories have been written about creatures that lurk just outside the scope of our vision; something that can only be glimpsed out of the corner of our eye when we aren’t looking for it. I  know of only a few examples of positive things with similar abilities and most of these are more purposely ridiculous than positive.

After I graduated college, while I was still working the area, I stopped having this rather common occurrence and started seeing something in front of my eyes as well as off to the sides. I spent a lot of time talking it over with my friends, both skeptics and believers, and even started called it “The Apparition” because it was consistently the same thing. The more I talked about it, the more detail I was able to notice about it, and and the longer it would stick around. I was under a lot of stress at the time and my imagination was at its most active, so I’m not sure if I even really believe what I think I saw. Despite being so positive this was happening four years ago, looking back on it now makes me doubt it ever really happened.

I don’t really have any proof that ghosts are real, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they are. Science can only be used to explain what we can perceive and make educated guesses about what we can’t, so it is entirely possible ghosts are real and we just don’t have the means of detecting them yet. It’s also possible that what we call “ghosts” are just the result of some easily explained phenomenon that escapes us simply because we haven’t figured out how to perceive things correctly. There’s a lot of support for them in the general population, in part as a vague interest and sometimes as a serious belief, which includes a number of people you wouldn’t expect. One of my mother’s church friends claimed to be able to see or feel spirits and also firmly believed that a number of my anxiety, OCD, and depression problems were actually qualities of this spirit that had attached itself to me. According to her, it was likely my great-grandfather. Which is super creepy to think about. Who tells a twelve-year-old that they’ve got a ghost attached to them?

There are, of course, the countless rumors of buildings or places being haunted. After seeing some of the stuff I did in the theater I worked in most days, along with the stuff I felt, I find it hard to believe that there wasn’t something there. Maybe it was a figment of my imagination, maybe it wasn’t. The further I get in life, the harder it is to maintain anything more than a perfunctory skepticism about a lot of things. Maybe I am haunted by the ghost of a deceased relative. Maybe I’ve got some kind of otherworldly being who hung out around me for a while. Maybe they’re the same thing and my spirit’s brief appearance in my vision was a mark of my transition to full adulthood. Maybe they’re not real at all and I’ve got an imagination that just wants to tell stories, even if only to itself.

Who knows? I don’t think it really matters, either way. Sure, it could change some of the way I live my life, but only the micro details. Nothing major. All I know is that thinking about something like this is like lighting a fire in my mind. Open-ended questions that require me to build stories just to think about them are a lot of fun. As a result of these mental exercises, I think I can see where stories for things like Cthulhu or Mind Flayers came from. Additionally, seeing unknown things out of the corner of your eye has given me an idea for a story I would like to write. It would be different from any of the variants I’ve encountered and the prologue I’ve written so far, to solidify the idea, makes use of a few characters who had been homeless for a long while now.

Now, hopefully I haven’t creeped myself out too much to be able to go into my basement to do some laundry. All those memories and thoughts of the stuff I encountered at the theater have given me the heebie-jeebies. I’m going to go spend some time in a well-lit room with many light sources so as to minimize the amount of darkness and shadows near me.

Fire and Peace

Chris 3 Comments

Here sit I, wrapped and stoic
In somber silence insoluble,
Painting prosaic pictures
On a dirty page so voluble
That it has become volatile.

My keyboard cries “calamity!”
Rocketing its reedy racket
Through thin and thankless seconds
Captured in a minute packet
And covered in an hour jacket.

Such soothing salacious sounds
Bring back bitter unbegotten barbs
That jibber, jabber, and jibe
uselessly against my wards
and all my other mental guards.

Plentiful and powerful peace
Is found and ferociously fenced
In the nearest nebulous neighborhood
To be kept as protection against
The encroaching ruin that is sensed.

Words fly like fast-falling fire
On volatile pages that, exploding, shatter
Rancorous raucous reality
And I leave in glorious clatter
Everything that’s supposed to matter.

Here sit I, wrapped and stoic
In fire and peace together,
The nascent nagging of necessity
Is felt like the prick of a feather
As I finally release my tether
And float in fictional felicity
Where I will not care whether
This makes me idiotic or heroic.

Saturday Morning (Evening) Musing

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Today was a nice day. Tomorrow marks three months with my girlfriend. That’s not a whole lot, objectively speaking, but it’s longer than most of my relationships have lasted so it feels nice to reach and mark it. Since we’re both busy tomorrow, we met up for a bit today to just spend some time together and we wound up spending most of it grocery shopping. We both love to cook, so it was preparation for both of us to spend the afternoon cooking. She was cooking meals for a friend who just had a baby. I was cooking because I wanted stew, my bean dip, and cider.

I, of course, had to clean the entire kitchen before I could start. It was too dirty and covered in dishes to cook, so I had to make some space and clean my surfaces. At the same time, it feels very good to get something visibly clean and I find it mentally refreshing. Part of cooking is, for me, imposing order on disorder. Taking several disparate things, my own knowledge and culinary senses, and bringing it all together to make something better than all the parts on their own.

Right now, my dip is made, my stew is simmering (to thicken), and my cider is delicious. It feels good to sit back and lent the scent of all of my creations wash over me as I watch the Overwatch League matches I missed during the day. I’ve got friends coming over to help eat the food I’ve made, and a nice warm house to enjoy during this cold weather. I’ve got no chores that need doing, no errands that need running, and no pressing business to attend to other than my writing and stirring the stew.

I catch myself thinking of the future a lot, of when I’ve finished paying off my student loans and finally settled down to live comfortably as I try to make ends meet as a novelist. I think about how quiet and peaceful my life could be, how idyllic my life would become. On days like today, I feel like I catch a glimpse of this future. Like I’ve gotten to look through a window into the eventual life I’d like to live. The problem with that idea, though, is that it does a disservice to my life right now. Sure, I have student loans and a good job that I don’t hate, but are those really reasons that I can’t build the life I want today?

There’s a reason we use words or phrases like that when we talk about the future. There isn’t one part that just magically makes it all come together, just like there isn’t a “right time” to start. We have to work on the life we want one step at a time, one thing at a time. I think I’m going to try to focus on that idea a little more often and let myself enjoy days like today as a solid step toward the life I want to lead.

Saturday Morning Musing

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I really suck at resting. I took a few days off so that I can rest and recover from the holidays. I wanted to basically start the new year out strong and well-rested so I could start working hard on my goals. While Thursday was fairly restful, Friday was not and Saturday looks like it’ll be fun but not very restful either. One of my roommates and I cleaned our place on Friday and, once we were finished with that, I started on all of the things in my room I’d been neglecting to do since mid-December along with a few new things. Packaging up Amazon returns, getting the presents I had to mail together and boxed up, and figuring out what to do with all of the Christmas presents I’d been given.

Today, I mail the packages, spend the day hanging out with my friends, and then spend the evening introducing my friends to my girlfriend and possibly going to club. Jury’s out on that last bit, though, as not everyone wants to go to the club and I’m not just going to abandon people who don’t want to go out (since my place is the where we’re hanging out, it’d be kind of awkward to just leave them here alone, you know?). If not, then I will stay in and hold down the fort while people come and go. Staying in is certainly more restful than going out would be, but going out to a club with my girlfriend and some of my friends would probably be more fun. I’d enjoy myself either way, really. The only thing I miss out on is writing time, and I’m missing that either way. I’ve resigned myself to that for this weekend.

Hopefully tomorrow will be more restful and full of writing. We’ll see, though.

A Visit From Inspiration

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I’ve been struggling with the poor weather and a certain degree of exhaustion, both compounded by poor health. Instead of my descriptive piece, have a poem I wrote in college, about inspiration. It is a parody of the Christmas poem, “A Visit from Old Saint Nick.”

Twas the night before Writer’s Day and all through the dorm,
Critters were stirring: spiders, ants, and flies, keeping warm.
The laundry was thrown about the floor without a care
Because no one brought guests anywhere near there.

The students lay sleeping off booze in their beds
While visions of parties danced through their heads.
I lay in bed, my game of Pokémon in hand,
Chasing that elusive place known as dream land.

When in my imagination there arose such an idea,
The racket could have been heard in South Korea!
I flew to my desk and threw on the light,
In the process blinding myself, ruining my sight.

The light on my laptop, notebook, and all the clutter and debris,
Made my whole desk simply too bright to see.
So I turned off the light, saving my poor eyes,
And instead used my laptop’s light to improvise.

I entered my password with a clickety-clack,
Brushing away the remnants of my midnight snack.
As slowly as turtles, my desktop booted up,
Right then and there, I almost gave up.

“Monkey Nuggets! Stupid Crap! Worthless Lunk!
Load faster! Come on! Stupid piece of Junk!
Close Skype, close Adobe, Close AIM too!
I need a fresh install! I need to start over new!”

As raspy as gravel on glass, my computer started,
Making as much noise as a dear soul departed.
Up came my icons, my widgets, and background,
And I began Microsoft Word with nary a sound.

Without hesitation I made such a racket,
I began typing, using every key but the bracket!
I drew out my plans, turning them all around,
I took the last of my AMP and chugged it down.

I dressed my characters in armor, giving them swords
I made them fight, giving the winners awards.
Countries rose and fell, millennia passed,
I had never known myself to write so fast!

My mind, how it sped through stories untold:
The strength of the young! The wisdom of the old!
The daring of knights! The defense of the weak!
Those who never find, doomed always to seek!

The stump of a pencil I clutched in my hand,
As I beat out a rhythm while drawing the land.
Broad sweeps of mountain, small little rivers,
Imagination coursed through me, giving me shivers!

Writing like I had never done before,
I felt like I’d washed up on creativity’s shore.
But something was wrong, something seemed off,
“No night could last this long” I realized with a scoff.

I’d said not a word, but my voice boomed ‘round the room,
Sealing my fate, bringing about my terrible doom.
I awoke, feverish and panicked, in my bed,
I lay there and groaned, wishing I was dead.

My inspired writing was naught but a dream!
I wanted to stay in my bed, do nothing but scream,
But here I am, writing a poem for you,
Because that’s how inspiration works: what can you do?

Late-Night Writing

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When midnight approaches
And exhaustion encroaches
I make a silent wish:
Just one more late-night hour
To write and feel the power
I have when I create.

A mind full of thick fog
Permeates my daily slog
When I choose to stay up.
Better fog than the loss
I feel as I turn and toss
When I instead choose sleep.

Second shift and spare time
Is never enough to climb
The mountain before me.
I just want to explore
Writing in a time before
I’m bidding friends good night

So for now I contend
With foggy days that descend
From my late-night writing,
All while hoping someday
I will be able to say
I spend my days writing.

NaNoWriMo Day 30 (11/30)

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I finished last night. I wrote my last 1500 words and then celebrated. I also wound up taking today off of work because I was up so late celebrating last night and I decided to reward myself this morning with a nice day off. A day of video games, reading books I’ve been ignoring, and reflecting on my month. Honestly, I could use a whole week off, but that’s a rather unreasonable expectation when I’ve actually got a 9-5 job to support my writing. It’s hard to support your writing with a job you’re not doing.

I think my biggest lesson from this month is that I’m still capable of incredible writing feats, though I really need to work on the “every day” part. Despite all of the time I’ve spent away from writing over the last year, since I entered NaNoWriMo in 2016 and decided not to attempt completion a day later, I’m still capable of pushing myself to produce a large number of words when I need to. My ability to write isn’t diminished, only my discipline and self-control when it comes to writing. Those will still be problems for a while, though. The end-of-month panic writing is clear evidence that I still need to work on pacing myself properly. Sure, I updated my blog every day, but the goal is to be able to write some of my story every day AND update my blog every day.

Which is something I still plan to do. Update my blog every day. I’ll find something for tomorrow and then spend my weekend working out an update schedule (for topics) and writing up a week’s worth of posts. Once I’ve gotten a decent buffer built up and worked out the kinks in WordPress’s scheduling function, I should be able to be able to just write the post a week ahead of time and schedule it for the next week. That way, I can still post on holidays without actually having to work on Holidays. Or, if I get sick again, I don’t need to struggle to make cohesive sentences, I can just focus on getting better and let my buffer take the hits. All-in-all, it sounds like a very solid if somewhat ambitious plan. Which is a theme of my plans. I really hope I manage to follow through on this one. It’d be really cool.

As for regular story writing, I’ll probably aim for 1000 words a day. Less than NaNoWriMo, but I’ll be able to go over 1000 words any time I want to. That, plus daily blog updates, should put me in the 1500 to 2500 word range which seems like plenty. I plan to continue my NaNoWriMo story until I reach the end, which should be in less than 100,000 more words. I would definitely say I’m in the 33%-50% range, so maybe I’ll finish it some time this spring. That’d be nice. Then I can get back to work on other projects while this story sits for a bit.

I’ve got so many things I want to work on and only what amounts to a part-time job’s worth of time to use unless I completely give up every other aspect of my life in order to write more. As rewarding as writing is, I think the last week has made it pretty clear to me that I need balance rather than unfettered pursuit. I’m super tired and ready for a rest. Maybe not a complete rest, but definitely a slow down.

 

Daily Prompt

In every story, there is a moment after the main action has concluded where the characters wrap up all the loose ends and make the last points on behalf of the author. Today, for the last day of National Novel Writing Month, write a scene about your character wrapping up your story. Maybe they’re talking with their friends after defeating the Big Bad Evil Person. Maybe they’re having a moment to reflect on their growth and the growth of those around them after coming of age. Maybe they’re looking back on all of their mistakes and realizing that they were wrong the entire time. Whatever it is, write it so that you can have the same sense of closure as the month ends.

 

Sharing Inspiration

One of my favorite things that crops up in older storytelling is the narrator speaking with the audience or invoking a muse. Tolkien didn’t do it in most of his fiction, but he wrote about what he called The Tree of Stories. Milton invoked a muse he referred to as The Holy Spirit. Shakespeare, in some of his plays, had the narrator invoke a muse. My favorite muse invocation is from Shakespeare’s King Henry V. The play begins with

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

The narrator is calling upon a muse to help them tell the tale of King Henry the fifth, a tale of war that could not be properly captured on a stage alone. At the end of the play, the author follows up the invocation of a muse with an apology:

Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen,
Our bending author hath pursued the story,
In little room confining mighty men,
Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.

This is a sentiment I feel a lot of writers share and one that I don’t think was entirely an affectation by Shakespeare. King Henry the Fifth was incredibly popular in England when Shakespeare was alive, so he likely felt exactly as the epilogue of the play depicts–the same way almost any amateur writer feels–like we’re not good enough to tell the story properly. It feels nice to see that even someone as huge in the literary world as Shakespeare struggled with these same feelings of inadequacy.

 

Helpful Tips

Remember, as long as you did something this month, even if it wasn’t necessarily more than you otherwise would have, the important thing to note is that you tried. Try often, fail frequently, and try again. As long as you’re willing to keep trying, you’ve never really failed. There are many lessons in a project and almost all of them come from the failures you experience as your go about completing it. Failure isn’t bad. Its part of learning and growing. If you don’t fail, then you’re not really pushing yourself. As Jake the Dog once said, “Sucking at something is the first step towards being sort of good at something.”

NaNoWriMo Day 29 (11/29)

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I did it. I got home from work early yesterday, dug deep, and wrote 5,000 words. I’m officially over a day ahead of schedule. I’m 1500 words away from finishing. I would have stayed awake longer to just power through those last words, but I was practically dead from exhaustion. I’d been nodding off during a meeting at work and couldn’t shake the feeling of fuzzy-brained idiocy I get when I’m warm, not nearly caffeinated enough, and sleep-deprived. So I opted to go home early at the cost of working an extra hour or so every other day this week. The trade seems to have worked out for me because I’ll easily be able to finish writing tonight and I feel so much better than I did yesterday.

I was always sure I could finish (and I REALLY hope I’m not jinxing myself by assuming I’m going to finish at this point) but I know that I truly considered giving up more than once as I fell further and further behind during the first two and a half weeks of the month. If I hadn’t gotten sick, I probably wouldn’t have been so exhausted that I had to write almost half of my word count in four days. I’d have spaced it out better. If I’d had better discipline from the start, I wouldn’t have fallen so far behind that giving up seemed like the right option. I know for a fact that I only persevered because I knew I could do it and I am too stubborn to do anything but double-down in the face of this kind of adversity. If it is something that relies on my ability to work hard and keep going, I will always double-down.

As much as I’m often conflicted about the many different parts of myself and my internal life, I really appreciate this sort of stubborn inability to give up. I can safely say that it is either a result of learning to cope with my mental illnesses or has been instrumental in coping with them. Or both. Something as core to my self-identity and self-experience as my stubborn refusal to accept giving up as an option is hard to trace to its source. Maybe I was born with it, maybe I developed it, maybe its just a tiny voice inside me that constantly says “you’ve gotten through worse so you can get through this.”

Whatever the case, I can verify that the wakefulness and focus this sort of determined stubbornness provides is one of constant and exhausting tension. I can always feel it in my back and in my neck when I’m relying on it. I can feel it in the way my head rests uncomfortably on my pillows and in the way my headaches start at the base of my neck and work their way up when I get so tired I can hardly see properly. Losing that tension, born of a need to accomplish a goal, leaves me feeling all limp and unfocused. After I finally caught up, it took me almost an hour last night to get back to work and only by focusing on another goal, on getting my word count to the point of being ahead one day, was I able to become productive again.

Today, I will finish writing. Tomorrow I will look back and reflect on my journey through National Novel Writing Month. Friday, I will look to the future. I’m interest to see where this goes.

 

Daily Prompt

Even the best of friends will fight or have disagreements from time to time. No matter what we do, we will eventually lose out temper with someone we love and respect. It may not even be their fault. Maybe we lost our temper with them because they were the dozenth person to ask us a question we don’t want to answer or address. Maybe we’d had a very frustrating day and something they did that normally is just a cute annoyance was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Regardless of why, a lot of the burden of fixing what happened is on the person who lost their temper. Not because expressing their anger or frustration was wrong, but because they lost control or weren’t respectful. To be sure, that is not always the case, maybe us losing our temper was entirely justified, but we’ll still often feel incredible guilty about it. For today, write a scene in which your character loses their temper with someone they love. Show us whether or not they were justified and show us what they’re willing to do to fix things, even if they weren’t the one who was in the wrong.

 

Sharing Inspiration

Today’s inspiration is something I’ve technically shared before. On the second day of this month-long project, NaNoWriMo Day 2 (11/2), I shared a link to an hour-long compilation of Pokemon Route music. Today, I’d like to share a specific song from it because this song, to me, is what victory sounds like and I’m feeling pretty damn victorious today. This link is to a half-hour version of this song. This one is to a Jazz rendition of it. They’re both pretty good, depending on which sort of music you’re in the mood for. I was definitely feeling the jazz version last night as I sat in my room, writing, my room light only by the softened glow of my monitors and the four pillar candles I’ve placed around my room. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do and that it propels you on to finish your writing.

 

Helpful Tips

Music has a huge influence on my mood and on the tone of what I’m writing. I like to keep a variety of playlists around specifically for changing and influencing my mood as I write. I used to keep my playlists on iTunes, but I’ve changed computers and had my library deleted by iTunes too many times to rely on it any longer, so they’re all on YouTube. That way, I can access them pretty much anywhere on any device that has internet access.  I high suggest that you do something similar if you’re looking for a way to affect your mood while you write. Even just putting on something that makes you feel good about yourself or the world or other people can turn what started out as a burdensome day of writing into a more exciting and fulfilling day of fun.