more deep thoughts, in quick succession

For some reason, I find it hard to write when my apartment is dirty. My apartment has been dirty recently, hence, little/no writing. Also, the general state of the country has me bummed. This fucking healthcare bill, man. It's like waiting to exhale, or something. This should have been done it August, and now it fucking December! Senators man. I hate them!

Anyways, I started cleaning up my apartment, lately. It's a several day affair. Even did some loads of laundry tonight, and you know I only do that once a blue moon. I read some more recently. That's good. I find it hard to be interested in writing when I haven't read recently. The whole enterprise seems beside the point somehow. Obsolete.

deep thought

Considering how much I enjoy doing it when I do it, I really don't understand why I don't write more often.

Identity

Have you ever just stared into a mirror, and looked at yourself? An almost sublime sense of selfhood emerges. A realization that you are really you, bound to this body, and to no one else. It is both incredibly limiting, and incredibly freeing, at the same time. Truly, truly sublime. I couldn't help but smile as I did it. I seemed so... unfamiliar... as I looked at myself. Yet who could I be, but the person staring back?

...

Consciousness, the existence of such, has, I think, always been the main source of my inspiration. I am just truly fascinated by what it is, what it means. Everything I have been trying to unwrap has boiled down to this very specific question. What does it mean to experience the world subjectively?

...

I have been thinking about Father, off and on, lately. He always comes back, it seems in waves, ebbing and flowing. More intense and more intense, then less so. Well, lately, Raymond Frederick Raven has played heavily upon my mind. I have been thinking about the normal person, how their conception of a distant parent differs so drastically from mine. How they see their absentee parent as at fault in some way. That is not the case for me. It is strange. I feel that I am constantly inundated with people whose stories of parental disconnect are so much worse than mine, yet so much better. Everyone is still alive. Sometimes, it feels exceedingly, fatalistically cruel, that I should unabashedly love my father so much, and yet be denied him. Everyone else seems so unaware how lucky they are, yet I can't help but feel that, given their blindness, that it is I who should be grateful, for I knew, Before, just how lucky I was, to have both of them. And though I feel sometimes, a resentment , born of my own stagnation, I know, KNOW, that without them, specifically, I would have been dead long ago.

Thank you.

bleh

Really too tired to write today. Between last post and this I worked sixteen and a half hours within a twenty-seven hour period, and though I have been off work for over six hours now, I am still exhausted. And I need to be up at nine tomorrow.

However, I did come to a realization about a major plot point that had been staring me in the face for a long time, and, I now that I have realized it, a whole bunch of other stuff has opened up. This means changes, but it also means excellant opportunities, and a chance to tighten up the major thematic elements, by laying out the cards sooner as to what it's about, which means I have more time to play around with them, instead of just letting them twist in the wind as I pile up incident after incident. This is one of those times where you change your mind about some prior choice you made, then only belatedly realize you had it right the first time. Funny how many of those you run into. Sigh. It's too bad, the change comes way, way farther down the line in the writing process. I really want to start working on it now, but I wouldn't know where to start, and I am surrendering more and more to just letting the story work itself out on the page(other than advance planning such as this, of course). If I tried to start it now, I wouldn't know where to start.

Also, Mad Men was super awesome tonight.

Faster, stronger

I have written for the last three days. I wrote about 800 words on Thursday, around 700 last night, and just these last 45 minutes I wrote about 450. I am not worried too much about word count, just that I am doing it, but the numbers are a nice way of thinking about progress. One thing I have found, is that as I write more frequently, the entire process becomes less precious. It is easier to dismiss what I have written as junk, and start over. So usually at any stopping point I reach I have practically on my second draft, because I have done so much editing. In fact, After finishing last nights work, I realized that a significant amount of it was not really necessary, and depending on how the rest goes, I might throw out everything from that session. And I didn't feel bad about it! It was just that I had to write it that way, in order to find the way that I actually wanted to write it. It wasn't a finished process, but getting my ideas out like that was a critical step along the way.

I think writing, and probably a lot of other artistic activities (like, say, drawing) is a lot like exercising. Doing it is hard, but it gets comes easier the more you do it, and the less you do, the more it goes back to being hard again. So just doing it often enough will help you work up to doing it longer, and vice versa. Really just doing it is making it easier for me to just sit down and write.

Anyways, here's the bit that I plan on junking, since it probably won't see the light of day anywhere else. Dig those long sentences.

Last night, he had not been out participating in the festivities of Samhain. Though he could hardly have stopped the men from joining, many of them being followers of the old gods themselves, and the others, though Christians, were not above a bit of fun and lechery, he knew that Varus, being not only a Christian, but a Roman Christian, was not amenable to the Celt's somewhat looser interpretation of scripture, (as if always seemed to find room for the old gods and their holy days) and thus he thought it wise to, as the chief negotiator involved in the dispute at hand, to maintain the proper decorum desired by his host. Thus, as his men, including his brother, were out drinking whiskey and wine and bedding the local women, Emrys sat the ready in his small apartment, by the light of a single candle, in his full Centurion uniform, waiting, on the off chance he might be called for.

Last night he had been alone in his room. He was dressed in his full military garb, with his sword at his side, and was sitting upon the only chair in the room, it's back placed against the wall by the doorway. He was sitting perfectly still, his legs side by side, his hands placed gently upon his legs, and his back as straight as a post. He had pushed the table to the other end of the small room, upon which sat a candle, the room's only source of light. Outside he could hear the distance sounds of revelry: whooping, shouting, laughter, and other that, further away, but cutting through the din, the clear melody and rhythm of pipes and drums. He wondered if the people outside could hear them.