river_kate | Entries tagged with writing

I've been indoors an entire week now. First it was because this thing that happens where I can't stand up straight and can barely walk for a few days happened. Then it snowed and got very, very, very cold here. If I don't have to go out, why should I? Actually, it isn't the cold so much as walking on icy sidewalks. I have become terrified of falling down. Last autumn, I prepared for this. There is food stashed here; I have books and movies and my computers. I am not crazy yet; I have walked down the hall to the mailbox and yesterday I went to the bistro on the first floor and had a tuna sandwich, a red potato salad and coffee.....and a brownie to go. Almost any food that I haven't fixed myself sounds amazing right now.

My apartment was clean when my cousin visited the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I spent three days on the living room, kitchen and bathroom. She came with her oldest granddaughter who is about nine years old and they stayed all of about half an hour. They looked at me and at each other and paid no attention to my stuff. The tidied apartment made the piles in my bedroom and little paths that I walk through start to bother me. So, this evening I hauled some of the piles into the living room and will attempt to begin organizing tomorrow. The fact is that I will need to get rid of stuff and that's difficult and scary for me.

After finishing my NaNo novel, I started working on the journal-like prologue to it again, the Dark Shadows fanfiction with original characters that I've slowly been posting here. The novel is in three timelines, 1967, 1897 and 2009 at the very end, where a young woman discovers she is the reincarnation of the 1897 woman and also is having a parallel life (same soul) as a 1967 woman. I really enjoy the historical parts. Right now I'm reading a series of Regency era mysteries. I tend to focus on the romantics of the past, the furniture, architecture and clothing. After recently watching the John Adams series, I was reminded that I much prefer the medical care of today. After the rather graphic depiction of a smallpox innoculation, leg amputation and masectomy as it was done in the late 18th century, I wonder how hardly anyone survived. It was very obvious in the film that the dental care of the time left a lot to be desired too.

What started my latest history thing again was giving in and reading "The Lost Symbol". As with "The DaVinci Code", I barely recall anything of what I read. It did make me want to look into the Revolutionary War again. I am also reading "The Autobiography Of George Washington" by Edith Ellis. Edith Ellis channeled this book in 1944 at the request of Washington and it was finally published in about 2005 or so. It is way more personal and insightful than what is recorded in the history books.

I have my next painting roughly sketched out. It's of a covered stone bridge over reflecting water. I love the photo that I'm painting it from and am aware that what I usually paint has little resemblance to the real subject. I got some ready-made frames for the little miniatures I've done and am amazed at what a frame can do for a painting.

So, this is how my life's been going as everyday I've somehow not been posting here.

It's raining and chilly here this evening. I feel I can enjoy staying indoors instead of needing to be out as though it will be the last pleasant weather ever. It was nice out earlier and twenty minutes after I returned home from running errands the weather changed for the worse. Then I fell into one of those deep naps.

Early this morning I did some loads of laundry. Being in an apartment building with a basement laundry room, my clothes sometimes need to finish drying while draped over chairs, etc. Later, being in and out of here doing errands, I'd come in and get a whiff of the basil-scented detergent I'm currently using. That is very comforting to me somehow.

After years of not doing so much creatively, I've recently gotten both energy and inspiration again. My careful health regimen went out the window and I was reminded of my youth. I don't believe that creative people have to be insane or addicts and sacrifice their health for their art, but I still have much room for improvement in having a sort of balance in my life. I have been lax in my sleeping and eating habits and neglected to take the supplements that are supporting my kidneys. It didn't seem to hurt me, though. Fewer aches and pains and small bouts of happiness and amusement occurred.

I'm working on the quilted wallhanging base for the 1904 items I am going to attach to it. When I was younger, it bothered me that I don't have good quilting skills and techniques and that I didn't care enough to learn and practice them. Now, I'm not letting that stop me. I know what I want to make and I'm going to call it...ummm...primitive.

My current 4 X 5 inch painting-in-progress and the supplies for it are taking up half of my kitchen table. I like to look at the underpainting.

I had my one-use-camera photos put on a picture disk and played with the images in the editing software. I can post them to my blogger account but posting here is beyond my computer skills and that's all right with me.

I'm stocking up on snacks for NaNoWriMo which begins in less than three weeks and hopefully, I will still feel ready on November first. I've been using my mental energy on paperwork having to do with farming, crops and insurance, which is vital but not interesting.

Trying not to rely on caffeine so much, I've been playing around with techniques from a book on auras. I don't see them but have been successful working with mine somewhat. The current book goes into how the astral body supports the physical body and shares information that is new to me. One of the areas I'd like to transform is my tendencies for mental sluggishness. Actually, it takes awhile to recover from mental fatigue.

These are the things I'm being and doing these days in a kind of wobbly way. Now that I'm not dying I want to get some plans going.

August 24, 1967

This morning I met with my new employers at The du Val Antique Shoppe. I’ll be working about fifteen hours a week, mostly doing consulting, restorations and appraisals. Today I looked at two old portraits and got a brief tour of the shop. Most of the objects are from the local area and I could feel the stories in some of them.
Later, I stopped at Janine’s place to look at her jewelry. She seems to be quite talented and was receptive to suggestions that might make her work more commercially acceptable. That could eventually enable her to work fewer hours at the Collinsport Inn. There were a couple of sketches on a corner table that were quite good but she said they weren’t hers and seemed reluctant to talk about them.
Tomorrow I am to meet with my father’s cousin, Professor Stokes. He’s quite busy but sounded genuinely interested in meeting with me. My evening meal was prepared in my small kitchen here at the Inn. I am an excellent cook and enjoy preparing my own meals. The vibration of the one preparing food has an effect and often I don’t care for the meals I get in restaurants. However, the apple pie from the coffee shop downstairs was quite good; I have brought it up here instead of lingering downstairs. People are still talking about the kidnapped girl who seemed to return from the dead and also about the attacks in town. That, plus the howling of the dogs tonight makes me want to stay in with a good book.

Here's a very short story that I wrote on another site that I abruptly quit visiting about six months ago. The story is true and has great meaning for me:

It was a mid-March evening in Colorado. I was exhausted, having just gotten off work from my retail job. I'd barely missed my bus and had an hours wait for the next one. I could either sit on the bench in the cold or loiter on my tired feet and legs in the supermarket next to my place of employment. I took turns between these two choices.

Feeling terrified about my credit card debt, I had been watching every penny since the beginning of the year. I noticed the supermarket had plastic containers of wilted winter pansies on sale in front of the store. They didn't look like much but I splurged and chose the purple ones.

They sat on my kitchen table for a few days. I planted them in a too-big pot with some used potting soil and placed them on a small table on the porch. When a blizzard came a few weeks later I worried but the pansies looked magical and glorious in all the white snow. When I would return home I could see them a block away; the color looked so vibrant. They also flourished in the summer's hot and dry weather.

One day I pressed one of the blooms in waxed paper and put them under a pile of books in my extremely cluttered apartment. In late July, my sister wrote that she wasn't feeling well and was losing a lot of weight. When I sent her a card, I thought of the pressed pansy, managed to locate it and included it. My sister's cancer diagnosis came too late for anything to be done effectively. A kind soul paid for my plane ticket to visit her for a weekend in November to say goodbye.

Walking around her small town while she napped, I kind of checked out the lay of the land. After Christmas, with all the crap involved in retail, I knew I had to take a leave from my job and stay with her. She was told she had three weeks to live at that time but she wanted to live to see another spring. She had a ceramic robin on her nightstand and a little bowl with a rock, a feather and the pressed pansy I had sent months before and she daydreamed about her connection with nature. She lived to see the robins and the peonies and the magnolias and I stayed with her for the last five months of her life.

Taking the train back to Colorado in late June, I shipped six boxes of my winter clothes, stuff I had needed while staying with her and some things she'd had that I wanted to keep. The boxes arrived before I did and were waiting on the porch. At the time I didn't know how serious my long-term environmental poisoning was; I just knew I felt exhausted. Three of the boxes stayed unpacked for quite some time. I couldn't reconnect with the community where I'd been living; I was a changed person.

A year later I moved further west. I happened to get the the moving company from hell and that's enough said about that. By the time my belongings arrived two weeks later than they'd said they would, I wasn't functioning well. It took a long time to unpack and get my new place in any kind of order.

I have a lot of things. I'm aware that according to Feng Shui, dried flowers have dead energy and it's not so great to have dried things around. I get that. The little pressed pansy survived all the moving and drama. Now, almost five years later after I impulsively purchased the wilted pansies, the pressed bloom is in a pretty dish in an antique curio cabinet that belonged to my ancestors. Sometimes when I'm feeling fragile, insignificant and non-contributing, I sometimes think of the pressed flower there. When I look at it, it's a touchstone, like reading a book. It's life was meaningful and it did great work.

The last several hours have been spent in clearing out other blogs and journals. One account is deleted and two have had all their posts deleted except for a few photos in one and the following poem in another. It was written on April 19th of this year. It is only the second or third poem I have ever written without being forced to for school. I can barely read poetry, it is so, so intimate.

Sometimes You Let

Sometimes you let
people sit in the dark
or in the dimness
stewing with their secrets
and their old talismans,
their formulas,
failed alchemy,
thinking
that they know it all,
feeling
that it's all crashing down
and wondering why.
Shoring up their persona
brittle, crumbling slats
of decaying picket fence
and cool arrogance
to KEEP YOU OUT!
You are not at all
what they imagined
a friend would look like.
The tower of Babel
tries to be insidious
and you
keep on moving
towards what's juicy
and towards the light.

This was a very peaceful day and I slept for most of it. I am experimenting with taking a natural product that was formulated for use in bioterrorism, I believe. Some people with chronic fatigue and Lyme disease are trying it with good results. It has goldenseal in it which is not meant for long term use. I am on day three of a two week trial and it is certainly doing something. I have less pain, odd twitches and I am very sleepy during the day.

When I wake up from these naps, I realize that I've had strange dreams; I can't even begin to describe them.
This evening I wrote a paragraph for my fan fiction novel. It is slow going lately. I decided to give my heroine a love interest, which will be tricky for me because, well because I can barely imagine what that is like anymore. I have the man's name and I will give him a mansion to live in based on Lockwood Mansion in Pennsylvania. I just watched an "Old House Tour" video of it.

Reading some other random journals here I see that my writing is way more deliberate than the writing of other people. I am unable to think of other descriptive words; deliberate is the only one that comes to mind. Well, I am grateful that I can even put sentences together. When I walk it often feels like I am walking on one of those swinging foot bridges. Many times it feels like I am doing something in a dark room with someone flicking a light switch on and off continuously. It usually isn't that extreme but close enough that I choose to be careful and deliberate.

The last few days I've been a recluse, reading, napping, snacking and working on my novel. Sometimes it just feels awful to be out among people. I don't know what I'd be doing if I didn't have the novel to focus on and keep my mind in somewhat working order. Yesterday I checked the word count in the document I'm preparing for my little vanity Blurb book and it was less than 9,000. I'm recalling how daunting the 50,000 word requirement to win NaNoWriMo can be.

This morning I was having some of those really strong snapshots and films from my past. It's like I could close my eyes and be there. Some of it makes me curious because one event is about something someone else may have done, yet it's like I carry the burden of guilt. Just as I cleaned up the kitchen full of dirty dishes a little while ago, I could use some of my energy clearing tools to let go of some of this debris. It's something I'll need to coax myself into doing but this day is by no means over.

When I stayed with a friend in Hawaii two years ago I adjusted to the ways of living out in the bush. Water for showering was the rainwater caught in catchment tanks. For drinking water, we took big glass jugs and drove to areas where they could be filled with city water from taps that were out at the edges of the parking stations that were there for that purpose. There was a compost area in the backyard, an area to burn things and the rest of what they call rubbish was collected and taken to a huge landfill. You'd drive up and wait your turn to throw your rubbish down huge chutes.

During the last few years I've let go of many people who used me to dump their problems and unpleasant emotions on. I was raised to allow that and as an empath it's been a challenge for me to learn skills in dealing with this sort of thing. When my health began to be my number one priority it became even more important; I had no choice if I wanted to stay alive. Some people just don't want to let the dynamics change at all.

One day when I was carefully explaining my need to take better care of myself to a dumper, I saw a vision in my mind of a huge landfill with a sign on the barred and locked wrought-iron gate saying that the landfill was closed. There was a another sign set away from the gate that said "future home of Kate's abundant garden of friendship". That helped me get through the conversation. One of the tools I use to clear my aura is imagining a violet flame burning away debris. A few days after this conversation, I saw a huge violet flame burning up the rubbish in my imaginary landfill. That's what I'd see for awhile and then I gradually forgot about it. This morning I saw a lovely park and gardens with benches, flowers and little nooks for having tea. There aren't people there yet but this is way better than a rubbish heap.

A little while ago the FedEx lady delivered the one copy of a Blurb book I created. It brightened my day although I can see how some things could have been done differently.

After being unable to figure out the requirements for the complimentary Create Space book for last year's NaNoWriMo novel mentioned in the previous post, I attempted to figure out how LuLu works. The novel, which is in a Word document is a combination of copy/paste from a LiveJournal account and direct writing in Word. The formatting was not acceptable to Lulu; it seemed there was a question of owning fonts.

No one I know is permitted to see this novel because the usual part about resemblance to people and places living or dead is not true in this case and there is some wicked, unflattering resemblances to people who have been, and some still are, in my life.

Next I registered for a Blurb account and downloaded the free software and through trial and error I created one book. Since everything about the process is so new to me, I could have messed with it endlessly. In the end, it came down to fun and curiosity over moving closer to better quality.

I chose a style that is meant for slurping a blog into a book and is set up for printing numerous 4-color photos. When I attempted to download my Word document into a black & white text book, all the different fonts I'd used showed up. Being unmotivated to retype the novel in Word and unwilling to spend $200(!) on having someone format it for me, I just slurped the blog; the size of the book is not the best for fiction.

Not having a digital camera, a few months ago I had photos I'd taken with a one-use camera put on a picture disk. For the first time, I downloaded or uploaded or whatever, the pictures and played with the cropping, etc. software. I added a few of those to my blog plus three I found on Flikr that only asked for attribution.

The text can be edited right in the bookmaking software and I accidentally deleted a whole page and simply left it out. The most glaring thing I would change is that the text is only right-aligned and the left side is raggedy. The new fan fiction one I'm writing is being done in a blog because I use two computers; I'm also typing it in a Word document where I can have the text aligned on both sides and use comic sans MS font. Online, I've learned that some people despise comic sans and there is even one group focused on getting it banned. It is my favorite.

Anyway, this has been worthwhile for me and I think my next effort will appear to be even better.

This year I've barely thought of NaNoWriMo. Oh, in May I did do some crash editing on last year's novel in an attempt to accept the CreateSpace offer for winners, but was unable to figure out the formatting thing.

Last year, I hadn't ever heard of it until October 24th and I impulsively joined with no plan at all. It was fun and way more difficult than I expected; I did the 50,000 plus words but the work wasn't good.

Briefly, I'm healing from something that affects my brain and thus, my writing skills. There was no plot, barely any dialogue and most of the other few characters were referred to in the third person. So, never again I thought. Unable to visualize anything or anyone normal in my imagination, I considered it a one-time thing.

Earlier this spring, I became curious about twitter. I amused myself by creating an account for Dr. Julia Hoffman, a character in the original Dark Shadows series. One of the most entertaining activities of my healing journey has been watching the entire series on DVD again.

After awhile, I attracted a few followers who weren't spammers and found my way to a very small rpg site, something I'd never participated in. With practice, I found that I could actually write dialogue and then amazingly, whole plots would come to me. That's the first time I experienced what I'd only read about happening to writers.

Then, I thought up a character to kind of represent me to interact with the Dark Shadows characters and began writing a little backstory. There's still not much dialogue, but it is brilliant compared to where I was at last year. Also, it's very enjoyable and adds much to my daily life.

Seemingly out of nowhere, I began looking forward to NaNoWriMo again and discovered that fan fiction is allowed. So, I guess this is how I will learn to write. By November, I hope to have learned enough about my created character to be able to do a 50,000 word novel with dialogue, plot and characters.

I will be rather shyly posting what I've written of my fan fiction so far. This seems like a lovely site, what I've seen of it.