Pain Distraction

Sometimes I wish I was like Lane. She's a character, so it's a bit of wish fulfillment either way, but I really want to be in her shoes now and then. Not that her life is perfect, but she is so good at pain. She thinks it's because of how her body is built - tough and lean and strong, whether she works at it or not. But really, it's her mind. If something hurts, she accepts it and compartmentalizes it. Pain is something to be fixed or ignored. It's simple, no matter how strong it is, no matter what type of pain it is. Fix it, and if you can't, ignore it. Pain is just a signal, a warning that something is wrong. It's a flashing yellow light that you can look away from, and sometimes flashing red that you can't, but it isn't everything in the world. It isn't a topic of conversation or a reason to avoid doing things. It's just pain, a simple derivative of being human. It's scraped knees and monthly cramps and lifting too heavy. It's that knife in your back that you can't get away from, so you squirm and you cry and take painkillers and look at something else, anything else but that flashing yellow light that is so damn annoying you want to scream. But you're not going to die, you idiot, so chill the hell out.


Ow.

Jellyfish Baby

So I haven't done anything for this blog in a while. Shouldn't really surprise anyone. It should surprise people more, really, that I'm making a new post at all.

That being the case, I have been watching a lot of Princess Jellyfish, and reading the manga (which is amazing by the way). And the other day, a coworker (technically my manager, but whatevs) mentioned that we should have a jellyfish tank in the office, since watching jellyfish is soothing. Her birthday was just before my husband's, so I decided to make her a little jellyfish baby knitted in her favorite color (pink). I only had pink baby yarn. Here is the result:

The thing is made out of fuzzy baby yarn, so it's hard to take a pic with my phone
that actually looks like it's clear, and this is the best I got.

This probably isn't something I'm going to make again, but I think it came out fairly cute. It's knitting and pipe cleaners, and it only took me an hour or so to figure out and put together, apart from figuring out how to get the middle tendril to curl the way I wanted it to do. I started out just by trying to knit a circle in garter stitch with smaller needles than the yarn called for, and the circle happened to curl in on itself perfectly for the umbrella shape without needing any further sewing. Yay!

The recipient named this baby jellyfish Lucy.

Writing Project Rundown

So I didn't do much yesterday in the creativity aspect apart from quite a bit of knitting. Yesterday was (apart from work) mostly knitting, the Catherine Tate Show, and half a glass of cheap white wine. A nice evening, mostly.

So instead, here's rundown of all my various writing projects. It is, quite frankly, ridiculous, and this blog post will probably take me longer than almost anything just from sorting through my multitudes of documents and tiny notes on terrible ideas.

Novels I plan to publish, seriously, honest, one of these days I swear:

• The Broken Saga - 3-part modern-day superhero YA fiction romance mystery
• Broken Link (rough draft 100% complete, on my 3rd rewrite)
• Broken Image (rough draft maybe 1% complete, sequel to the above)
• Denial of Service (nothing but sketchy ideas)
• The Ariad - fantasy dystopia romance-ish action-adventure comic book

Novels I might finish, maybe, if I ever feel like it:

• A Touching Story of Alien Meets Girl (placeholder title) - modern-day sci-fi m/f romance
• Beloved Psychopath (placeholder title) - future sci-fi m/m romance, based on an unpublished fanfiction I already wrote
• Superhero and Stage Fright (placeholder title) - superhero m/f romance
• Jailbreak - interactive adventure game in which you develop the main character's personality as you play
• Shadows Underground - fantasy romance concept thing
• A Sound Conspiracy - sci-fi novel
• The U - my first novel idea from when  I was in... middle school, maybe? not sure.
• The Islanders - fantasy romance novel bleh thing but I liked the romantic lead's name

Sketchy ideas that may never see the light of day:

• Nonviolent Protest - fantasy m/f romance
• The FF Word - romance-ish? comedy? sci-fi-ish?
• Starpoint - comic thing, concept I had sketched out in college
• Tinderbox - rewrite of my favorite HCA fairy tale
• Untitled - adventure YA novel, bunch of kids working for an underground king, kind of similar to Shadows Underground but more urban grunge feel
• ...this whole blog, honestly.

Group projects:

• Dark and Fluffy - shh, issa secret
• Fifth Eye Productions - radio program work in progress

There's probably half a dozen other nascent ideas floating around in my head on top of the above, but yeah, you get the idea. I wish I could make myself work on this list in the order I've got it in, kind of top down, but like that's ever gonna happen.

Theory: Right vs Left Brained and Mental Burn-out

I have a theory that when you spend long enough doing left-brained activities, like office work, you burn out your left brain. So doing creative work is the perfect break from stuff like that. Then if you spend an hour doing something creative and you wear your right brain out a bit, but your left brain is refreshed, and you can stare at Excel columns some more.

This could just be me, though. I'm not super artistic (I am bleh at poetry and terrible at visual art), but I love being creative. Playing music that someone else composed, writing prose, following a knitting/crochet/plastic canvas pattern, or putting together stitches I'm already familiar with in order to make something moderately original. I'm definitely not a fully right-brained person based on those specifics, but I'm not 100% left-brained either.

I'm curious, does anyone else feel the same way? The division of creative versus logistic work and how burning out on one doesn't mean that you're burned out on the other?

Writing Exercise 1: Self-Portrait

She's something like okay. She's just about... normal and a half. Maybe. If you look at her from a distance, squint your eyes and turn your head slightly to the left, she seems like a girl writing some random thing, yeah. She seems like she's focused, intent. She doesn't look mad at all. But when you look close, everything changes up, and her eyes kind of unfocused because she's probably reading some story or writing something or dreaming out loud like she did when she was five. She'll tell you all about it if you give her a chance, though maybe not if you scare her off first.

She's halfway pretty sometimes, or at least she has pretty pieces in the thousand-piece puzzle that makes up her appearance. The corner of her upper lip, five eyelashes, her second biggest toe, and the space beneath her eyebrows if she managed to get a wax that month. She's got black nail polish that's hung on for a long time, but now it's chipped off at the sides, leaving a little patch in the middle, like tiny puddles of ink on her hands. She scratches the same place on her head over and over, lets the little white flakes drift down to her sweater where they'll never leave. She bites the inside of her lip till it bleeds, then licks the wound because it has a taste now where there wasn't one before. She has moles that won't ever get removed, probably, even though she spares them a worried glance now and then. She twitches. She falls in love with people who don't exist and out again just as easily.

She doesn't like to be looked at because it's just not worth the willpower it takes to go to the gym (willpower is a limited thing after all, like the ozone layer or a human lifespan), though there's a painted picture of beauty hanging up her mind of what she could be. There's a plaque below that picture, a caption that says, "Maybe, Someday. But Probably Not." She likes adverbs more than she knows she should and will do verbal battle with anyone who says that what the author means means anything at all. She's a comma addict. She has a chart in her head, probably on the other side of the painting, and it's got a great big list of all the things she loves, and if you love them too then you'll be her new best friend. She's scared of getting stabbed in the eyes but has no fear of drowning. She misses who she was as a kid, because it isn't who she is now, and damn but that five year old had so much confidence and stupidity.

More than all of that, more than anything, she has this golden ball of potential, stuck right in the middle of her ribcage. This glowing, transcendent, ephemeral orb of I Could. And if she taps into it, if she touches it, the world becomes crazy beautiful. It's just not always easy to reach, and sometimes she forgets it's there. Because the But Probably Not is also there, like a cloud, obscuring everything else, and it's so big sometimes. It's overpowering and massive. It's the enemy of I Could. And she gets these ideas, you know? She was going to join the Air Force. She was going to write a cooking blog from the perspective of a Sim. She was going to clean her entire house. She was going to lose fifty pounds and become a personal trainer. She was going to make a comic book. And way back when, back in the days before she had any sense, she was going to fill an entire wide-rule single-subject notebook with numbers. She's got stories to prove that she's not too normal, not too boring, but sometimes she wishes she was a little bit more eccentric. A little bit crazy.

Maybe she wishes she were you. Did you ever think about that? Maybe she's jealous of you. Wants your life, to take your successes and make them her own, or take your failures and tell herself, "Well, I could do better," and then get it done. Not really likely, though. The But Probably Not gets in the way too often.

Right now, though, she can see the I Could. And she's thinking, Maybe. Maybe not Monday, maybe not on New Year's, maybe not when this other thing is done and I have time and this and that are out of the way. Maybe Now. Maybe this is it, that thing the I Could wanted her to do her whole life.

Then again, probably not. Probably she'll just cling here to this web of thought and dream of the same things she's dreamed before, until inspiration hits and she's spinning her wheels again. Gets ideas. But that's all normal, right? Normal and a half. Something like that.

Introduction, to be Heavily Modified in the Future

I'm terrible at being creative.

No, really, I am. I think of myself as a writer, a very creative individual. I love typing. I can type 90 words per minute when I'm doing one of those online tests where they give you a block of text. Less quickly when I have to think of things first, of course, but typing is the one instance in which my body moves faster than my brain. It requires very little effort, and I have such good muscle memory that it works out well enough.

So, yes. Terrible at being creative. Mostly because it all comes in fits and spurts, just like my desire to clean my entire house (I only end up cleaning the kitchen, every time) or to stay in touch with friends and family (I determine to call once a week, then forget for 5 months). I create blogs and forget about them, spend days on end obsessing over my latest work of fiction then abandon it mid-sentence, and that's when I think the writing is good, let alone the bad stuff. It's why I forced myself to jot down my first manuscript, 150k words in 3 months straight, but never finished the editing.

I'll probably forget about this, too.

But for now, let's try it out. A blog about my terrible creativity. Right now I'm knitting a scarf, so I'll probably finish that. I'm reading fanfiction, too, and there's a writer in it who is talking about reactions to his work, which is quite honestly what made me decide to throw this out there.

Maybe I'll keep up with it. Maybe I won't. Maybe I'll post five times a day, once every three months. That's pretty likely.

I'll post the scarf when I've given it to the intended recipient. For now, here's a picture of a Tardis tissue box that I made for my friend Janaye, based on an online pattern. Took about 50 hours to make. I did it over a week or so during Christmas break.

BAD WOLF graffiti was a a part of the pattern. Which makes it basically perfect.

Came out pretty well, I think. That's my couch it's on. I have the best couch in the world. So there.

I'm gonna go back to my fanfiction and knitting though, for right now. Maybe I'll write later. I need to do some work, too. (I'm the Lead QA Editor at a business consulting firm. It's a good job but I'm constantly stressed out because it requires too much left-brained thinking.)

Anyway, as I used to say during high school because I have a penchant for quoting old black and white comedies, Hail and Farewell!

(That's from a Marx brothers movie. "Room Service." I should watch it again.)