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Saturday, May 7, 2011

Where the ends aren't capped

I've been designing a new header and possibly a new background for the other website and I like what I already have, but I'm feeling a bit limited by it all. I want to have three backgrounds. I want to have options and space to use them. Right now all I have is a really awesome background that I have designed (which will probably just end up being a desktop background for my computer at some point) and the picture I took (completely awesome and encapsulating the feeling that I wanted for this blog in one go). In fact that shouldn't be in parenthesis. The fact is that I wanted to make it understood that this is about humanity - and how we live and what we do, but it's also about nature (hence the earthy salty goodness). That's me, I'm kinda earthy and salty. The picture is of Hadrian's wall. I took it while at Haltwhistle a few years ago. It's where the human meets nature and nature has taken a little bit of reclamation back. It's somewhere in between - which is kinda what humans are right? We walk this balance between the gods and the earth. We perceive that we have a space to ourselves, but we're really just all of it melded into one. I can't tear myself away from that picture enough to make a new background, so I made a header banner out of the idea instead. I think it went pretty well, but we'll see how anyone likes it (if anyone bothers to read my blog and/or comment on its design at all). I heave a sigh at the end of the night, but this is how it goes.

Initial thought: Design
Time: 5 minutes

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

This thing in my head

So I've got this thing stuck in my head... it's all Castor and Pollux and it pretty much has everything to do with the story I've been trying to write for the past year and a half. I'm not really sure where I'm going with it, but I've got the want to get it out - so I'm trying to go all poetry with it, but it's not really working out for me today. I wanted to post today, but I just couldn't get anything complete to come out. I started a short story memoir thing, but that didn't really get completed - the thought it needs to drive it on just isn't there yet. I also started searching for my twins connection, which actually stemmed from a search for another ekphrasis topic. I think I have one picked out - I really like it. I'm really digging the direction that I'm going with all of this. Of course it means that I'm doing that thing that authors do - retelling someone else story with different names etc, but isn't that what Greek mythology is for? I don't know. I guess I just realized that a lot of what I had down seemed to follow along the lines of a myth I didn't even know, but it could take me some interesting places if I try it out. The larger setting isn't the same at all, but I can see some interesting parallels continuing to form. At any rate, I don't have much time left and I've managed to say nothing about anything, but I'm sure I'll link back to this if I ever get my Leda poem out. We'll see how that goes. Arg! It's so frustrating when it's all up there in your head and you can't explain it to anyone else until it comes out of its own accord. Sometimes writing as a process is just maddening.

Initial thought: things stuck in my head
Time: 5 minutes

Monday, May 2, 2011

Need a place to be a free write? Guest write on Sans Serif!

We all have times when we need to get something out of our heads or off of our chests. Sometimes our personal blog isn't the place to do it. 

Free writing is about getting that stream of consciousness down - not editing and spell check and worrying how our regular readers are going to take such an unrefined post. It can be a pre-write to get the ideas going or just to help get past the writer's block. Whatever the purpose, it's cathartic and moving. 


Sans Serif is about having a place to do all of these things. It's where there's no end to cap those thoughts  - just let them run free. It's a place I go to get thoughts out or even get thoughts started. It can be that place for you too.


The best part about a free-write is it only takes 5 or 10 minutes. It doesn't cut into the time your write on your blog or do you work. Instead of surfing the internet for an hour before coming up with the inspiration to post or staring at the blank composition box, do a free write. 


But these thoughts don't need to be hidden or re-worked. Contact me on the Guest page of Sans Serif by leaving me a comment about your topic or interest.

On poetry

So yeah, poetry. I write a lot of it. I used to write a lot of it and then there was this black hole in the middle of no writing at all, and now I'm back to poetry. My first poetry was that silly junk you write in middle and high school - pretty much all about boys and praying to God that you might actually get one. Then it changed. In my junior year I started branching out into what I still think are some deeper thoughts. It was no longer about the pubescent feelings that were rocking through me that I couldn't control. I expanded my brain and my writing skills a little bit - only to stop. I stopped. I didn't really write for most of my time in college. Once in a while, I'd start doing one of those multi-person RPG sorta things in email, but writing essentially stopped. Part of it was the depression and part of it was my completely insanely genius writer roommate who should have been published at age 20, but was too afraid to show her work to anyone, so never was. Yeah. But poetry has come back into my life. I have a friend who writes professionally and also blogs. I caught onto her blog one day and thought "Huh, I could give that a go." And here I am, writing poetry all the damn time. I have other things I want to write - a novel idea that I've been kicking around for more than a year and I'd love to learn the art of the short-story, but I'm not really hitting it home with any of those. There's something about poetry - there's a completion of thought without going too far. I truly believe that it's the short nature of poetry that allows me to actually finish it, but I've not finished the other projects, so there's no telling what it is. I guess with poetry I just complete my thought. I have it down. I'm not trying to say much more than one or two things (usually just one) and so I get to complete that thought without building an entire world about it first. Which is something else I've been doing - building a world. I'm on day 6 of the NaNoWriMo prompted "30 Days of World Building". It's going along nicely. I have a lot of it already partially figured out, so this is really just expanding my mind. Part of me wants to focus on a few particular points of that world and write an entire series of poetry on it. I could do it region by region, person by person, lesson by lesson - I've got all these ideas in my head and they're all related, but I can't get them down on paper in a way that effectively relates the massive web of culture in my head unless I write history-like essays. Which I've also done and been told that I need plot - well DUH, they're historical essays about a fictional world that I've created. They're not supposed to have a whole lot of plot of than a sequence of historical events. But that's not what happens - I have all these character developments and few plot points to hinge them on. The world building is helping me to broaden how I think about plot points, so hopefully that will help. Perhaps I should just write the poetry series. Perhaps that should just be the research. Who knows. Maybe one day I'll finish something longer than a poem.

Initial thought: Poetry
Time: 10 minutes