And again!

Stiiillll late. Well, I'm tired! Sue me! >:C

A couple of fun things this time! First and foremost, just yesterday I purchased round trip tickets to LA! Going back in mid-January for almost a whole week to visit friends, grad and undergrad, and really, really looking forward to it. Seriously, it's going to be just about the most awesome (post) Christmas vacation ever. Internet or not, CRIMETY I miss you guys.

Next up, remember that writing contest I mentioned I entered last time? Well, I won! Honestly, I was surprised. As happy as I was with my entry (and I was, remarkably so), there were some really fantastic entries competing against me, and I felt honored to have my piece chosen above them all. Along with it came a prize equivalent to about $25 bucks for merchandise on that site, so awesome! I think I'll treat myself to an art print or a sweatshirt or something to celebrate. :)

And...well, I made a promise to myself that, if I won, I would share it with people who wanted it. So anyway, here's the piece I wrote on it. And dangit, it STILL didn't format it right when I posted it; it had a visual component to it too that just fell through the cracks. Ehhhh, whatever. The rest of the week kind of dragged on, so at least getting the contest announcement perked it up a bit. Overall, it's a great incentive to keep writing, whether long or short stories.

Mmmyep. That's about all of the big excitement here. Sorry for a short post, but I'll leave you with some more fun stuff to make up for it. Musical songs this time! Fast ones.




Props to the xylophone player here too...yeesh.



All right, I'm off to shower. G'night, all.

Ahh! I'm LATE!

To just about everything, but most importantly, in writing this post! I'll have to make it up to y'all, and, heck I dunno, draw you a picture next time.

See, time got away with me with all that's happened since last time, most of which y'all know about in terms of relatives and such. My big excuse is being over here house-sitting for the week, for a teacher that works with Mom and Dad. (Not sure why I don't say names; I guess I just figured they wouldn't want their names mentioned out of nowhere, especially in a post that says they're not home. You know, ON THE INTERNET, where nothing is safe!) :o

Anyway, it's been a good time as usual, taking care of the dogs and the cats and the chickens. It's much different this time in 'winter' though; basically everybody but Lily (the dog) is asleep by the time I get home from work since it's getting darker so much earlier. For some reason, this annual occurrence still seems to surprise me.... So, it's basically getting the laid eggs from the coop, getting everybody's food ready, playing with Lily for a while to burn all that excess energy she always seems to have (lucky dog!), and then getting to making dinner before shutting everything safe for the night. Today was my day off, so I got to spend a lot of time with the dog and whatever cats would approach me, heh.

Also, man! the chickens are so, so much friendlier this time! Before, they'd scatter at my mere presence, and getting them to all cooperate and go somewhere was...well, you remember that training scene in Rocky where he's chasing the chicken around? Well imagine that with four chickens instead, add an overexcited dog, and replace top-shape Stallone with an irritable 23 year old trying to leave for work on time. Well THIS time they're basically the coolest critters in the yard, couldn't care less whether I was there or not, and more than willing (HAPPY even) to be picked up and / or petted! Unless it's feeding time in the morning in which case, I'm not kidding, they'll give me flat tires and flap after me until I throw out their daily cracked-corn breakfast. Real friendly, they are, before work.

It's also been a nice chance to read and write a bit. Ah, an important aside on that: I realized that, as paralyzing as I find receiving criticism to be in concern to my own work, a lot of writers out there who post their work do so to RECEIVE criticism. OK, I'm kidding about just realizing it, but still, on most of the writing sites I frequent, the amount of actual criticism people receive (as opposed to just comments, or jibes from the internet bastards out there) is pretty skimpy. I've got a few pals that've been asking for it from the start, and all I've ever said was basically, "Oh boy! It's great! Look forward to the next!", or worse, not read it at all. Well, I'm decent at figuring out the good and the bad in what I read, so I've decided to really make an effort to give legitimate criticism to the people who really want it on these sites. Hopefully this'll make me more able to take criticism, as well as give me the guts to start posting and sharing more of my work. Lord help me, I've even joined a contest to write a short piece concerning a painting on one of the sites, due two weeks from now. I'm looking forward to it, and I think actually having a bit of a deadline will get the creative juices flowing. I'm not forgetting about the other story by any means, but I think I need a bit of a break from it. You know, come at it from another angle in a bit.

That's about all of the excitement for now. In the mean time, have some delicious culture, courtesy of YouTube!

First, a video of talented Mongolian throat singer, Peter Lai! (the text with the lyrics will disappear once he song starts, no worries).



And next, Kseniya Simonova, who won "Ukraine's Got Talent!" with the sand art piece shown here.



G'night y'all, and good luck! :)

Just a quicky...

During the game night tonight with friends, my character's mind got switched with that of a giant poisonous chicken.



Sufficed to say, getting in character was more than a little difficult. The chicken, however, seemed to have no trouble adjusting to its new existence.

Happy Halloween, y'all.

But why, WHY is he dancing Mamá?

Sorry, couldn't think of a good title so I threw up the last thing I heard on TV....And now I can't even remember what it was from. Meh, either way, it works I think. Better than those dang goofy cavemen at least.

Weyall... two weeks have passed by quickly. Though, to be honest, not a whole heck of a lot has happened, this past week especially. I've just been so dang tired these nights, and I guess there just wasn't a whole lot going on. (Also, doing stuff is haaaard.) Still, it's my fault. Gotta get out there and do stuff if I want...stuff...to do. Yeah. Anyway, it does mean I've been able to get a fair amount of stuff done at home. Finally gave my room a good cleaning, got all the laundry done, set up some plans for the coming week, and, most importantly, got a lot of research done for graduate school.

Sounds like I'll have to wait for a while to take the GRE, but I'll be able to take it online. Interestingly, I may also be able to do the entirety of my Masters online too, but that's definitely going to be a last resort. Going away to college, meeting new people, being in class in a new place away from home...it all really made a difference in my life, and I'd really hate to cut out a chance for greater experiences. But if it comes down to it, it will be nice to be able to keep working full-time and get the degree. To tell the truth, one of the best looking options right now would be going back down south to the Claremont Graduate University, since they seem to have a lot of resources for grads from the 5C's. But for the moment, I'm just saving up and enjoying myself for awhile.

I've also managed to get a lot done on my writing, though there isn't much to show for it, heh. These last few weeks largely revolved around writing projects that weren't directly connected to the bigger story. I've been reading a lot of these goofy little online horror pieces affectionately called Creepypasta (bastardized from the copy-paste function, the way these stories tend to spread), and I've tried writing a few myself. In general, as is the case for most online literature, the vast majority of the stuff out there is pretty awful, but there are a few gems. They're generally not real bloody or grueling (unlike the turn the horror movie industry has taken over the last decade, ugh), but try hard to manipulate those basic insecurities and fears that we all have. They make you question just how safe you are, or how much you know about the world; in short, they get under your skin. Hence, creepy. I've written a bit of horror stuff before now for RPG stuff (and my favorite session I ever ran, and one of the few that didn't run waaaay over time, was basically Lovecraftian horror themed), and what I wrote isn't TOO bad, but not quite good enough to share. Also not done. But I can say it revolves around the concept of infinity, and how people deal with it.

On the big story, I've got a major question to ask you all. I've been considering transferring the whole thing over to first-person narration. It would mean a fair deal of work in rewriting, and I would have to be very careful to maintain the character as someone very different and separate from myself, but I think it would save a lot of time overall and give a clearer view of the concepts I'm trying to deal with. So! With that in mind, what do you all think about reading stories (that is, fiction) from the first person as opposed to third? Any opinions on really good first and third person stories you've enjoyed, or you thought did a particularly good job of it?

I said to myself this was going to be a short post, and I think in that spirit I'll cut it off here. To make up for the lack of overall information, please enjoy a few tasteful YouTube videos I spent waaay more time than justified surfing for this weekend:

I think this one is real...


...and this one just rocks...


...and this one is actually a pretty good 'explanation' of the Lovecraft stuff I was talking about, but in glorious children's show format!



And that's all for now. :)
P.S. I just learned how to embed youtube videos, can you tell? :D

A quick one while I'm away

Wait, what? I swear I had something clever with that title, and then...*poof*. Meh, in any case, it's that time again, and I need to make up something to write for this time. Because honestly, for me these last two weeks have not done a lot more than exist. Don't get me wrong, they've been good, and some stuff has happened, but they've just kind of moved on by, you know? Bleh, enough droning on. Here's the beef!

Work is...well, work. Not exactly fun, but necessary, useful, profitable, and even slightly self-satisfactory. Donations have slowed waaay down from the cooler weather and the end of the yard sale days, and as per most things here, that's both good and bad. It means less junk and fewer unknown substances to wash out of my shirts, but also less to do and more time wasted searching for random jobs to take care of. For example, on Tuesday I spent most of the day going through all the books and holiday boxes we had stored outside the building. It was nice because it was generally kind of private out that far, and I could do it at my own pace and really make sure I did a good job; but honestly, that's really not what I should be doing in my job on a usually-busy day of the week. Similarly, we've gotten a big influx (ok, 3 people) of community service people, the majority (2) of which are only really needed outside. This means I need to find jobs for them to take care of, as I stand there in the empty rear parking lot struggling to figure out something for ME to do. Thankfully, the two I work with are remarkably diligent and careful in their work, at least compared to some of the service workers I've had to deal with before, where the time-spent-texting vs. work-done ratio sometimes reached 10 or 15 - 1. They haven't minded the crappy cleaning jobs I've had to stick them with, at least as far as I can tell. The only thing keeping us all moving is the Halloween rush; between that and some good sales, we've actually had some really good profit days. Personally, I've been kind of perversely hoping it'll rain a lot more so I can run around and move all the boxes and tarps and things. It's fun, makes time go by quickly, and keeps us all occupied; the downside, of course, is that we lose massive amounts of merchandise to water damage. A WORTHY SACRIFICE TO AMUSE MEEEEE--

One fun thing is I've had a lot of chances to hang out with Lakeport friends this week. Spending time at various people's houses, seeing movies (Real Steel, while silly and predictable as all heck, was undeniably a lot of fun to watch), and just spending loads of time talking and catching up. It's nice to have friends you can just shoot the breeze with without having to really talk about anything, you know? Speaking of which, note to self: don't talk so much around Lakeport friends. I worry I might be getting to be a bit of a bore around them. No, seriously, despite what you may know of how much I talk, around them, I talk A LOT.

Haven't gotten much done on the story lately, sadly. Time's been taken up with friends, shopping (I seem to be running out of everything this week), and trying to catch up a bit on sleep. Also on other writing projects too, at least. A bit of poetry, a couple of short papers on all kinds of topics, a few rants...the usual stuff. It's weird, I just about always feel like writing more of the big story, but every time I start thinking about it, I realize just how much more needs to be done on it, and it kind of crushes my creative spirit. I've got to get back in the mindset that none of it should be work, and all of it is something fun I'm doing just for me. Just fun, not work, and so very very easy to just pick up and chicken scratch on even for just a few minutes. I'll get there, you'll see!

Also, DJ Hero is a wonderfully fun time sink. I have no regrets about (all) those hours. Good night!

WHY DO I--

KEEP BUYING COOK BOOKS?! well, because it's kind of fun to look at all the recipes and ingredients and stuff. BUT STILL--

Honestly, I've got more recipes than I can possibly deal with right now. I think I've ended up cooking...about four of the now 100+ recipes I've got in these books and cards. I can kind of justify it in that some of them are quite old, and many of them are actually kind of gourmet (well, for me anyway), so the recipes tend to be quite in-depth and expensive to prepare. Also, many of them require, for example, '2 cups of lard.' So yeah. But anyway, I hope to make a few this coming week, and really all of this is for when I'm living on my own / with roomies and I / we get sick of cheap ramen.

On the other side of things, work continues to drag on. I say drag this time because some of these days in the last few weeks have been more than a little depressing. Honestly, pardon my French, but we get so, so much shit in the donations. We have a dumpster that's probably 6 ft x 8 ft x 15 ft, that we all take great care to pack evenly and efficiently. We filled it from 1/3 to over-full over the entire surface in one afternoon last week. 3/5 (filthy, torn, PISSED ON), clothes, 1/5 (broken, rotting, MOLDY) furniture, 1/5 other random stuff. As the lead donations processor (i.e. lifter of the heavy and awkward), I deal with just about all of it at some point. Man...we aren't a dump. Please don't treat us like a dump. Next time, I pack it into a box in my trunk and throw it on your front lawn! AND THEN MAKE MY CAT PEE ON IT!
But honestly, the people working are doing a great job of lifting morale during all this. Everyone is working really hard, making lots of jokes, being extra-nice, etc. It helps so, so much. So enough complaining! And swearing! On to the better stuff!

I haven't been writing quite as much as I'd hoped. The night when Mom and Dad were gone was the afternoon I talked about in the above paragraph at work, and the last thing I wanted to do was anything close to working. Seriously, I'm glad no one else was home, because I worry what I would have done when Mom and Dad would have cheerily greeted me at the front door. This face comes to mind. So yeah, cook super easy dinner and do nothing that night. BUT! the rest of the week has been better. I'm about 1/2 way through that big outline of it all I was talking about. Hoo, this is going to be big. But I'm looking forward to it! This weekend when Mom and Dad are at the Celtic Festival, I'm hoping to just sit down on Friday night, heat up a pizza I bought today, and just write my deliciously cheese-clogged heart out. I plan to get one full chapter done, if not more. So wish me luck!

Unfortunately, I've given up on the Iranian accent thing for my RPG character. I've found there's no way I can do it that either doesn't devolve quickly into something probably quite racist, or is a heck of a lot of work to keep up for the many hours our weekly sessions tend to take. On the other hand, he's already caused several zombies to explode with just the power of his mind (MIND-TAKING comes later, trust me), and flown around using self-made great big bat wings with someone on his back. All-in-all, a good time!

Well, I'm going to go make my lunch for tomorrow. Envy my salami and pepper jack cheese! ENVY THEM!

Movin' along.

H'okay, this time I promise this wont be too long, as their really isn't a heck of a lot to talk about. STILL! Enough for a post. So here we go!

Work continues to roll along. Today I helped a new employee move into his home out near the Riviera. I've never actually been over on that side of the lake (that I can remember), and daaang, I out to drive randomly out there more often. It's beautiful! Based on the houses, likely fairly rich too. Bleh. Anyway, I should climb a hill up there and have a picnic or something. WHOSE COMIN' WITH ME?! C'mon!
Also, Terry, a woman I work with who was hired at the same time as me, picked out a couple of books from the big (you should see it, it's ridiculous) pile she was sorting through and recommended them to me. See, I think that she and I kind of got off to a mediocre start when we were hired, since she was a laid-off nurse with many years of excellent experience and a serious, get-things-done attitude, and I was a fresh-out-of-college guy with no retail experience who generally tended to knock over precarious stacks of donated goods. But that wasn't the bad start so much as just how dang often I tend to do something goofy when I work around her. Just one of those things, you know? Like forget a piece of something, or miss something obvious, or knock something over. Why are the hangers always at my head level?! Anyway, while we generally get along, I thought it was a really nice thing for her to do. The books are The Hidden Messages in Water and The True Power of Water, both by Masaru Emoto. I haven't picked them up yet, but I'm looking forward to it!

The story is moving along, albeit slower now. I've finished the first chapter (draft!), and, after fiddling about with a few false starts, decided to change tactics a bit. I'm now writing an outline to it all, basically a quick prompt to each chapter. I've gotten about five more chapters planned out this way, and it's really helped my codify the story better. I've had all these great ideas about things, and this has been a good way to keep up the enthusiasm while I muck through all of the necessary bits to get to them. Also, on that note, I've got a question for y'all. Would you prefer it that I keep giving you bits of the story and plot as I work on them, or would you prefer me to wait and keep it mostly a secret until a chunk of it is done enough that rereading it doesn't make me facepalm at what I was thinking? I LEAVE IT TO YOU!

On the RPG front, I didn't feel confident to try the accent yet, but I DID give my character a ridiculous awesome mustache, so...yeah. Victory, I think!

Wow. Lots of caps lock this time. Better stop before it gets WOOORSE OH NOOOO--

The bits so far!

Hey y'all! Not a whole lot to write at the moment, but hey, I promised. So! Here's what's going on.

Right now, I'm working on two separate pieces. The first is the story I was talking about in the post last week, which has now reached about 2000 oft-rewritten words.
In a nutshell, so far it's about an old man with a very set, uninteresting life (a secluded fisherman who fishes for survival rather than trade) who, after a bad storm, stumbles across a drowned body in the small harbor where he beaches his boat. He tries to pull it to shore to give a proper burial before the 'body' proves it's still alive in a suitably surprising (still revising this part) way. The formerly dead body says several things in foreign languages before surprising the old man by speaking his own, then collapses into a fit of laughter upon hearing where he has ended up before falling unconscious.
I have a lot more planned, but I don't want to give up too much of this until after I've gotten some of it down, and tt's likely the general plan will change somewhat between drafts. Soon, hopefully, I'll have a version of it to send around to all of ye. It's nothing particularly original, but I think it'll be interesting all the same once it's been fleshed out a bit. Who is this mysterious man washed up on the shore? And what could those odd tattoos over his back and shoulders possibly mean? Should the old man take him in and nurse him back to health?
Well he'd better, or else the story ends here, and I'd be miffed to say the least. >:C

The other is a bit of what's known as 'fluff' for a character I'm working on for an RPG campaign a friend of mine (Max Brooke for all you who came down for graduation) is running this fall. Without going into it too deeply, in RPG terms 'fluff' is character background and explanation that generally has a negligible effect on the overall abilities or mechanics of the character itself beyond how the person playing the character should act (as opposed to 'crunch', which would be all of the character's traits, abilities, equipment, etc. and affect how effective the character is in moving through the world.) It's all done on paper (or in this case, via computer), and it's a load of fun with the
Anyway, the campaign basically has the player taking the role of either a famous legendary figure from history or a modern-day wizard folks who summon and control the hero. The goal is to have them beat the heck out of both each other and various characters the creator has made until one is left as the victor. Some examples of heroes that have fought before (it's one of those 'happens-every-decade-or-so' things that the participants work hard to keep secret from the public) include Hercules, King Arthur, Cú Chulainn, Medea, Gilgamesh, Medusa, and many, many more.
I tried to find something off the beaten path, so I'll be playing as Jābir ibn Hayyān, the most influential Alchemist of the age and one of the first practical alchemists ever to live (remember the Philosopher's Stone from Harry Potter? One of the biiig goals of alchemy was making that, among other things.) Don't feel bad if you don't know him, I didn't either. Real interesting guy though, have a look. Anyway, using the bit I've found about him, I need to write a brief story of his life and experiences from his point of view, filling out the bits that aren't known and generally just making him into a real human character. You know, someone you'd want to buy a beer with after a hard day at work. I'm almost done with the first draft of this, and really enjoying it. I'm debating whether or not to learn an Arabic accent for when the campaign actually starts though. Thoughts on the matter, anybody?

Whew. On to real life! Work continues to grind on at Hospice, nothing real exciting to say there. Tomorrow's likely going to be nuts as people bring in all of the post-Labor day garage sale leftovers, so at least it'll move along pretty fast! Here's hoping for slightly cooler weather. :)

Also had a wonderful time at the Sonoma Mountain Zen Center Bazaar this Saturday. I'd been meaning to go to the center for literally like half a year now (apologies to Kate for that), and it finally worked out. Mom, Dad, and I drove down there to meet Kate, eat some tasty food, gawk at the beautiful, terribly expensive wares, and generally just have a heck of a good time. Mom keeps talking about how it was way out in the boonies, but it didn't feel like we were that far out to me, and honestly I kind of liked how quickly one could get out of the city of Santa Rosa into such lovely scenery. Oh well, hopefully I'll be able to spend the night over there and go to a real program soon.

Today (Monday) Uncle Doug took us out on a tour of the Cobb Geysers and facilities, which he had a major part in building from the ground up in the 80's. It's pretty incredible up there, both in just how pretty the landscape is and in just how much work has been done up there. He says it's incredible in the winter, when the cold air makes all of the steam from natural and built steam releases condense into these huge clouds that just cover the landscape. Could you imagine just walking along a pine valley and having big gouts of mist and steam flowing out from under rocks and dead needles? Sounds amazing, hope I'll be able to go some day. Then we went back and barbequed, which is, in my opinion, the best (and ONLY) way to end a good trip like this one.

Weeelll, I guess that was actually plenty to write about. Think I'll put off finishing that last bit of background work for Jabir until tomorrow, and go make my lunch. Talk to you all soon!


(A Buddhist monk walks up to a hot dog cart. The man selling the dogs asks, "What'll it be, buddy?" The monk places his hands together and respectfully bows his head before replying, "Please, make me One with Everything." Bah dum tish!)

Here's to more than twice-a-year posts.

Hey y'all. So yeah, it's been quite a while. Sorry about that. Hopefully from here on in things will get better. See, I've realized something since school has been finished and the usual great stimulation of 4+ excellent classes and constant good conversation with world-class peers has given way to moving heavy things for a living.

I really, really need to keep writing.

The last post I wrote was a kind of desperate effort of writing something selfish just for ME during the rush of finals, and probably honestly shouldn't have been posted. But hey, there it is, and I'm not going to erase it now. It's just as much an expression of what I need to do than any of the other posts from before, if much more scatterbrained and less well-thought-out. I think the problem with that post was where it said that I don't have the patience for drafting and rewriting. I seemed to think that I suffered from an excess of personal expression and stimulation, and perhaps at Pomona, with classes and friends and high-speed Internet everywhere all the time, I did. Nowadays, where the only reliably great conversations I have tend to be with Mom and Dad (and they are great conversations, thank you Lord for such awesome parents), I really need an outlet for creativity. And, perhaps even more importantly, a criticized outlet for creativity, i.e. someone to look at my work and tell me how it could be better. Teachers and classmates did that before; now, when all of my writing tends to be more story and less academic, there hasn't been much in the way of any real advancement. I'm a harsh critic of my own work, so at least I have that to help my writing improve, but you all know that peer review is an immensely superior means of making progress. That's why all the good schools and universities promote it so much.
So far, the only things I've ever posted were a few pieces of (awful) poetry to an online art site called DeviantArt (a completely public site that's not nearly as bad or dirty as a name like Deviant Art would suggest), so a lot of work has either sat and rotted on my computer or been erased altogether. I've met a lot of good people there (including more than a few I know in real life) who liked my older work, and push me to do more of it, and I've just generally hemmed and hawed with half-assed promises. It's cringe-worthy to me to think I've waited this long, but now I think I've finally realized just how much I need to write to stay happy.
Well, tonight, I sat here in Dad's massage chair and wrote about 1000 words of a story I've wanted to write for some time. I revised it and looked at it along the way, so it took me quite awhile (comparatively) for those 1000 words, more than a few hours. And I had to stop myself to make sure I took a break. I'm in better spirits and I have more energy than I've had since summer began. Heck, I felt good enough to write a blog post.
So, I've got a deal for you all. I promise, here and now on my sacred honor, to write at least one blog post every two weeks for the foreseeable future. In return, you all put up with posts that may be filled with ramblings on what I'm writing IN ADDITION to what's generally going on in my life. Aaaand I'll even promise to make the quality of the posts to come much better than these last two.

So what do you say? Sound good?

Because, sometimes you just gotta write.

(Bit of a warning: a different flavor of blog post than the usual ahead. I'm just sick of not seing anything new here for so long.)

You know what I mean? The thing is, it’s been a damn long time since I’ve felt anything close to this; the inch of dust in my blog can attest to that. Just about the entirety of my writing creativity recently has been taken up with character back stories for the various DnD, Dark Heresy, and other RPG campaigns. And believe me, it’s been a lot of fun, and more than a little enriching for ideas on actual characters to write. Invariably (though I am unsure as to whether it is how they are written or how I act them out), they are well remembered amongst the group. Or, to perhaps be closer to the truth, each of them stands out quite clearly in my mind, and a few of the more ridiculous ones in the minds of friends. Vertson, the first and the unspeaking (due to my shyness) Avenger; #4, the sociopath assassin out for the greatest good of mankind (one of the most fun to play); Michael, the empathetic ghost with a phobia of cars (no comment); Kaidhar, the big fuzzy guy with the shield and too many morals (and tragedies, I do love dem tragedies); Dario, the smooth talking degenerate (not as fun as it sounds) and his eternally pissed-off hunter, Xandric (more noir than you can shake a knuckle-duster at); and finally Yk’Syrk, the giant bug with a taste for…well…anything it can find (and anyone, but keep that on the downlow.)

But for goodness sakes, I‘ve gotten off-topic. See how easy it is for me to spend way, way too much time on these guys? And that’s even mentioning Nerezza, the NPC with more back-story than each of these guys combined. Man, that was a good night for writing. Now, I’m getting something similar, most likely because of the amount of homework I have yet to do and my less-than-useful presence in concern to the group I’m working on my senior project with. But let’s not talk about that, ‘s despressin’. No, instead, let’s talk about what any of this can mean.

Flat out, it’s what I enjoy doing. But also, I flat-out don’t have the patience for it. Draft after draft, fixing, revising…it’s just beyond me. Tell you a secret? I haven’t written a draft that wasn’t required for a paper since middle school, I kid you not. Any time a teacher even pushed us to make an outline, or brainstorm, or come up with a plan, I just basically through down a few ideas on a piece of paper, promptly lost it in my backpack, and started writing. This is not to say that my grades haven’t suffered from such habits, especially now that I’m past high school. As it stands now, I’ve just got the last big paper to write, and then every piece of writing I do after that can be my own. I think, maybe if I get to choose exactly what I write, I’ll enjoy it a lot more. But the worry still remains, the same thing I thought about when making things in sculpture class last semester: I have this preconception (or perhaps misconception is closer) that writing or creating art for money somehow erodes the quality of said art. No, quality isn’t the right word; spiritual fulfillment? Inherent worth? Bah, something closer to those two. The point being, any serious writing would probably be enjoyable until about week two, after which I start complaining and go play Wii. Am I doomed, then, to only writing character backgrounds and half-stories?