My Brain Decided to Vomit, and I Saved It For You

I am currently avoiding doing homework.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe because I know it involves writing, and I don't particularly want to write anything but this fantastic new idea that I have floating around in my head.  I figured out backstory for the main character today.  It made me happy.

Another thing that made me happy in the oh-my-god-this-is-actually-going-to-happen kind of way came in the mail today.  The graduation review people reviewed my credits and I am eligible for graduation this semester.  It kinda freaks me the fuck out.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe because it means I have to move on to the next step, and that means making decisions, and I hate making decisions about my life?  Or maybe because I have begun to be comfortable here, and now I can't stay?  Or maybe because I hate change, even though I crave it?

Speaking of cravings, I have been having a weird anti-craving recently.  Yes, I just made that up.  But seriously, I don't want to eat anything.  Obviously, I have been, or else I would be passed out right now from lack of blood sugar, but nothing sounds good, nothing really tastes good.

So, this character that I have been working on.  He is very complex.  I like him a lot, because he is broken, so very broken, and I am hoping that I get to put him back together before the end of his story, but he is so broken, that I may only get to put a couple pieces back together.  But he is interesting enough that he could probably get a sequel.  But that means finishing this one.  And I have no time to write for pleasure, unfortunately.  What I would love to do is take a novel writing class.  Don't get me wrong, I loved writing the short stores in cw: fiction, and I learned more than I could have thought possible.  Okay, so I don't really want to take a novel writing class.  I want to be able to sit down and write my novel, and have someone sitting behind me for moral support and to say every once in a while, that is brilliant, or that is piece of shit, rewrite that scene.

I have gotten out of the habit of using swear words in my for public consumption writing.  My facebook and my twitter are inundated with much younger cousins and other family members who would be all judgy of me.  And I just don't want to deal with that.  So, I keep my mouth clean, and try not to talk about things uber controversial.  Mostly because I despise confrontation.  And also, I have a deep-seated fear of rejection, and even though the most logical part of my brain says, they won't stop loving you if they see more of the real you, the emotional part, which I think I can safely say reigns on high most of the time, is like the lizard brain in the first animorphs book:  runrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrun at the first sign of disapproval.  I hate that part of my brain sometimes.

I think I have decided that I am willing to turn the assignment in late.  I will try to read the thing when I get up in the morning, and if I have time, I will write about it, too.  If not, oh well...

Miyazaki!

So, I decided to do my paper about the films of Hayao Miyazaki.  Not all of them, though I plan on watching them all within the next week, to make sure I know which ones I want to write about.  I am almost definitely planning on My Neighbor Totoro and Ponyo, though that might change.  I think i want to do Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind as well.  I watched it last night, and it is fantastic, and as the first film from his Studio Ghibli I can see a lot of the seeds for his later films.

(also, can I just say that the newly redubbed English version of My Neighbor Totoro with the Fanning sisters really kinda drives me nuts...I don't know why)

I think that it is going to be a good and interesting paper.  Still a little worried about the interview requirement, though.  Hmmm, maybe I could interview Sesson Sensei...I don't know what kind of insights she would have though, she did her Mission in Japan quite some time ago.  She does like Totoro, so maybe she would be able to give me an idea about how that kind of film represents something in Japanese culture, though I don't really want to go that direction in my paper, it might be a good introduction topic.  Or I could get in touch with the other Japanese professors at CWI or BSU.

The Gap

Not much to say, but I wanted to share this:

I don't know what you are talking about

So, I may have mentioned that I am in multiple reading and writing classes this semester.  As in all of them except for yoga.  No, I am not taking all the reading and writing classes (nor is yoga a writing class), all of the classes I am taking (except for yoga) are reading and writing classes.  One should probably be considered more reading, one more writing, and the third is pretty balanced between reading and writing.  But they all decided to have essays due the same week.  Within a couple days of each other, actually.

I am going to stop, because that isn't what this post was going to be about.  I will save it for posterity, but you may ignore the above paragraph.

I have another essay that was assigned.  I have several weeks to work on it, but it is a heavily researched essay, rather than the light to no research required for the ones that were due this week.

I want to do something fun.  Which is not as difficult as it might sound to some people.  I honestly love writing.  I don't always love academic style writing, but I can get behind it if the topic can hold me.  Hence the need for something fun.  I had initially thought about doing a sort of research project on a book.  Maybe American Gods by Neil Gaiman or The Dark Tower series by Stephen King.  Both would be fascinating topics to delve into the mythology and the lack thereof of America or "The Child Roland to the Dark Tower came" or is it went?  I can't remember now, it has been a while since I read it.  That reminds me, that poem/epic thing is on my kindle and I need to read it.  I don't think it is very long, relatively speaking.  But I got House of Leaves today, and that is going to be my next read.  It got put at the top of the list, replacing Miss Peregrine's House for(of?) Unusual Children.  I find that my stack of "to read" books never gets smaller, and often has the same books in it for along time.  The problem is that I often read from the top, which are the books that I have purchased/collected most recently, instead of reading from the bottom, and getting out the ones that have been there longest.

Anyway, back to the essay topic.  I haven't completely ruled a book out, but because my other two classes are a lit class and a literary analysis class, I think that I shouldn't overwhelm myself with that kind of a project.  Then I thought about maybe doing something along the lines of the merits (or insert some other word there) of speculative fiction.  It sounds vague, but I could narrow it down with some research, I think.

Then I thought about doing a movie.  The first one that popped into my head (probably because I have a stack of his movies on the bookshelf in front of my desk) is some sort of study on the themes of Miyazaki's films (My Neighbor Totoro, Ponyo, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, etc.).  It could be fun.  The other movie that could be amazing would be Donnie Darko.  One of the greatest movies ever.

Oh, or an idea that just popped into my head could be some sort of thing about fan fiction and published works, fan fic writers vs "real" authors, and maybe include something about how so many published authors began writing fan fiction, whether it was something that they shared with others, or did simply for themselves.  Also the negative and positive views of publishers, authors, and other fans.  That one could be really interesting, if I wanted to take the time to do it, and would it start to get boring after a while.  Essentially I am  just thinking with my fingers now...

There is a part of me that really wants to write about writing.  Simply because I love meta.

stress and writing correlations

I have been extremely stressed out the last week or so.  Four essays due this week, three of which needed to be at least four pages.  The need to be writing, and only having a vague idea of what I should be writing about made for a difficult time.  I'm still not home free, but I was able to get an extension on the two more difficult ones, and the others are done.  This semester is chock full of reading and writing classes, and it is a bit of a struggle for me (a chronic procrastinator) to get myself scheduled to get all the readings done and all the writings done on time and with the amount of thought that I prefer to put into them.

Now, you would think that the thought of writing more would send me running, but over the last few days I have had an idea percolating in my mind for a piece of fiction, length as of yet undetermined.  I would prefer it to be novel length, or maybe novella, but I guess I wouldn't say no to a short story, though a lot of the development I have in mind wouldn't fit into that length.  And letting this idea sit in the back of my head gathering strands of character and plot from bits of conversation and music (a lot from music, this time) has actually been relaxing for me.  I haven't been doing anything on purpose, as it is still at a stage where it can't be forced, not just yet.  So, I will sit and listen to Florence + the Machine for a while and let her lyrics catch on the bare grasping branches of the story and write notes down on scratch paper that I can shove into my notebook for later compilation.

For your viewing and listening pleasure, I give you the seed of this story (though you probably wouldn't recognize it even if I told you what it was), "Bedroom Hymns" by Florence + the Machine:

count down

I have seven days until I have two four-six page lit papers due.  I have six days until my final draft personal essay is due.  I have four days until a second draft of my personal essay needs to be done.  I have three days until I have a short literary analysis due.  I feel like I have been reading The Canterbury Tales in Middle English forever.  I also feel like I have been saying "I feel like I have been reading the Canterbury Tales in Middle English forever" forever.  But I am over the hump.  The Wife of Bath and her ginormous prologue is done.  Two more (much) smaller tales, and I can start that essay (if I can decide what I am going to write about).  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is longer, but it isn't in Middle English, and I have read it before, once upon a time, so it should take as long to read.

I am worried about my personal essay.  It started off in my head really cool, and what came out in the first draft was pretty much crap.  Some good ideas, I think, but it ended up being more personal than I intended.  Maybe more personal than I am comfortable with.  The problem is that my readers say they want more of something that I'm not sure is there.  The original purpose of the essay was to show, in sort of snapshots, how books have been not necessarily instrumental in the way I have developed as a person, but present in the way I think and see the world.  If I focus on the couple of aspects that my readers seem to like, I feel like it will be making a correlation that I don't believe in, which would be misleading the readers, and I don't like that idea, not in this essay.  One major problem that I will have to fix regardless is that there is no common thread other than books.  It was noted, and accurately, that each couple of paragraphs felt like entirely new essays.  But I am not sure how I am going to fix that...

when is it copying and when is it being inspired?

Just a super quick post as I put off going to bed.  (for some strange reason the word "super" has begun to creep back into my vocabulary...)

I am a writer.  But I am also a reader.  I probably read more than I write.  I don't know if that is a good thing or a bad thing, and that isn't the point of this post anyway.  Sometimes when I am reading I see or notice something that I am just like "holy shit, that is amazing!"  and then I wait to beats and say "I wish that I had thought of it first."  A specific example would include the daemons from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass).  Because there are some ideas that done once are genius, but done even one more time by someone else makes you look like what you are.  A copier.  The book that brought this up is one that I haven't actually read, though I ordered it today.  House of Leaves by some dude that I can't remember right now.  I was flipping through the book and just the layout is incredibly...messed up.  One story in the main text, a second story happening in the footnotes, then pages where the text goes vertical or around the edge, or just a single word in the middle of the page, or footnotes, but no text, or...you get the picture.  And just looking at it makes me want to do something like that, but I feel like I can't because this guy got there first.  Does that make any sense?  Or am I being too sensitive about it?

Taking My Breath Away

I have been thinking a lot about my favorite books recently.  Partially because the essay I am writing right now is trying to analyze the effect that books have had on some of the pivotal moments in my life.  I don't know how well the essay is working, but at least it is making me think, right?

Anyway, back to my favorite books.  I started a list the other day, not of books that I like, or even love, but of the books that while I was reading gave me shivers, made my breathing ragged, with excitement, with anticipation.  Books that made my chest feel light and hollow, like bubbles of some intangible thing was trying to make me expand with the sheer amazement that the books provided.

(these are in no particular order)

1.  I have to start my list with Contact by Carl Sagan.  Not because it was the first, but because it is one that is important to me.  I already discussed this book in a previous post, so I won't go much more into it.

2.  Bel Canto by Ann Patchett.  This book thrilled me.  Not because of the plot or the setting, nor for the characters, though they were all very well done.  The opening is a high class birthday party for a Japanese business man in the house of the vice president of a small unnamed South American country that wants to cater his favor.  The action is a hostile takeover by a group of guerrilla rebels.  The plot is the two groups, captors and captives, blending until lines are being forgotten.  This book thrilled me because of the language.  Possibly the first novel I have ever read where it was the language that I love more than anything else.  Don't get me wrong, I love these characters, their plight entrances me, and the ideas entrance me.  But I have a feeling that I love them because the language is gorgeous.  The language is simple and yet lush, at the same time.  It was like the beautiful song of the title, every word soars higher, until the unpredictable and yet inevitable end.

3. The Riddle Master of Hed by Patricia McKillip is a fantasy trilogy.  McKillip is a master of describing things without you even noticing.  You are reading, and suddenly realize that you know what everything looks like, but you aren't quite sure how.  She also amazes me with the fact that her plots move slowly, but she somehow still holds interest.  I attribute this to her incredibly complex characters.  Riddle-Master is my favorite of hers, though it is hard to define why.  Part of it is probably the way that magic, rather than being portrayed as something otherworldly and strange, is like water, air, or fire.  It is simply a part of the world that though not always taken for granted, is generally just there.  It can be simple, for instance, a character learns to transform himself into a tree.  But there is no magic words, no hand or wand waving.  The magic is simple.  If you can think like a tree, you can become a tree.  Stand in one place, let your thoughts reach to the sky and your feet into the earth, and one moment you are a man, and the next you are a tree.  And the magic of the story is all like that.  Simple ideas that blossom into awesome from one word to the next.

4.  The Catch Trap by Marion Zimmer Bradley.  Those familiar with Bradley probably won't recognize much of her in this novel, though there are some themes that might carry over.  It is not fantasy, it is not science fiction.  This is a novel that consumes me because of the characters.  I fell in love with them, and I felt everything that they did.  And it wasn't just because of the two main characters.  The novel centers around Mario and Tommy, two circus performers in the time at the beginning of the end of the age of the traveling circus.  They are trapeze artists, and they fall in love.  The two main characters are compelling, but they are surrounded by a large family of smaller, yet also complex and interesting side characters.  You feel that each one of them has their own story, and it is a fascinating story, if only the "camera" angle was a little different you might be able to have an entirely different novel.

That is all I am going to do for now, I will revisit this subject later though, with some more of those books that took my breath away. :-)