Seasonal Plume

I haven’t been able to write much this week; I’m not entirely sure why. I felt quite inspired early this week too, so it’s a bit saddening that I just haven’t been able to get myself to write non-journal things. I suppose it’s partly because of:

1. I get home tired — I spend around four hours a day travelling to and from work;
2. I don’t know what to write, exactly, and I just sit in front of the computer with my head completely blank; and
3. I’ve been feeling down and rather depressed and can’t for the life of me make more than very maudlin depressing poetry (which shall never see the light of day).

The coming week doesn’t seem too conducive to writing, either. For one thing, my dad will be flying to different (local) places throughout the week, so that means I will be commuting to and from work, as opposed to hitching a ride with my dad. That adds an extra hour of travel time between home and office, and that means I will be spending six hours on the road. I leave home at six, get to work at nine; I leave work at five, and get home at nine (that was four hours, but yeah). It’s very draining, in addition to work, and to other sundry stuff I have to deal with during the week. :( I can’t stay up late since I can’t let myself sleep heavily on the way to work (and wake up where?). Help! :((

Plus, a lot of things are vying for my attention! I want to release the next version of my Enthusiast script soon, so I have to work out the last few bugs for that. But before I release that, I have to WordPress-ify Indiscripts first. And before I do that, I have to make sure my custom downloads organizer can handle being included in a WordPress-powered site! I think I’m ending up making a completely new version of the downloads organizer. @-)

We did peek in Powerbooks tonight, and I saw this book: The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Carol Joyce Oates. It looks quite interesting and promising–I read a few bits and pieces and it reminds me rather like Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write, which I have raved about before (haha!).

Well, we shall see what happens this week. Sigh, the paragraph I quoted in this entry really does ring true. :p It’s hard to get back into things once you’ve slacked off. :(

That is why I hope you can…sit for some time everyday (if only for a half hour, though two hours is better and five is remarkable and eight is bliss and transfiguration!) before your typewriter,—if not writing, then just thoughtfully pulling your hair. If you skip for a day or two, it is hard to get started again. - Brenda Ueland in If You Want To Write

The above is an exerpt that’s often repeated almost everywhere, in different ways and words. And I agree, and in a way, I try to live by it, although what I usually do is a bit of journal writing, and not usually leisurely. Obviously, I’ve been wanting to get into (fiction) writing again, and have been looking around for various things to write. Unfortunately, I never seem to exactly get into writing; whenever I sit down and look at writing ideas (I loved writing collabs while they were popular!), I try to start but I end up thinking, oh no, I can’t possibly write about this. Which is, I suppose the very thing Brenda Ueland is always railing about in this book.

In any case, I’ve seen a lot of ideas and websites online that are pretty nifty, such as Oneword, 100 Words, and numerous drabbles contests and communities. Of them all, I like Oneword best; I think the pressure of writing something related to a word in sixty seconds make me just plain write, and for some reason I always feel like I like what I end up writing in these exercises. For example, for Oneword today I wrote this:

the window pane was brown, smooth and hard against my elbows, while i looked outside and dreamt of sunny blue skies and dark blue water, of smiles and sunshine and brown skin. it made me think of happiness, of joy, of laughter and madness, of the days when

And I liked what I wrote. It’s not connected to anything other than a single scene, a single feeling, a single event, made up as I wrote (pane—window pane—brown—people usually lean on it while looking outside—scene looks like person is daydreaming—nice daydream—sunny— and so on and so forth). I like the way I wrote it, more specifically.

I’ve come to the conclusion a long while ago that the short pieces of, uh, shortshorts that I write in a style similar to the one I used above, is what I personally loved writing when I was writing creatively (as opposed to journal writing). (See here, although I mean to move that to somewhere else… not yet sure where, though. :P ) However, I’ve felt very, very torn about this, and continue to feel so up to now. Almost everywhere I read, it’s always about using verbs, and action, and to cut less on adjectives and adverbs. An opinion and guideline that I actually agree with. But whenever I try to get myself to write in it, I usually don’t like what comes out.

Or maybe it’s just that I really am out of practice. Sigh. I suppose the style I like is useful and pretty for shortshorts and poetry, but never for something more substantial.

Moo, back to square one?