KL!

.015 – They let you hold weapons?

This past weekend the Florida Steampunk Exhibition East was held in Daytona Beach, Florida, which is only an hour or so away from me as the crow flies, so I had to go. I feel like I don’t spend enough time here talking about how much I love steampunk. I talk some about how I’m writing in the genre, but I don’t give it the same breathless space and time here as I do in other places around the internet. So just to catch you up to speed: I LOVE STEAMPUNK.

I love it as a genre and an artform and a dress sense. I love the endless possibility and the optimistic daring do of the people involved and the characters that they write or portray. I’m just as fascinated with the darkly tinged not-so-nice-history parts of it as I am with the bright, shiny leather and brass parts. And as you might imagine, this all lays very neatly over my general appreciation for Wacky Victorians anyway, so it’s a perfect fit for a person such as myself who loves reading and writing in the science fiction genre.

Even more specific to my urge to attend the convention than my love of steampunk in general, I had seen that there was going to be a three hour panel/class called Victorian Self-Defense. I had thought that it would be about bartitsu (which is an interesting subject in itself), so you can imagine my jaw dropping surprise when Alli and I showed up and found two gentlemen standing at the head of the room with rapiers.

We both sat down and immediately began taking furious notes. Two of our characters are kind of swords-for-the-cause in employ of the main gentleman driving our revolution, and while I had done research into sword fighting with both fencing foils (and epees) and sabers, there is little internet or book research that can compare to having two people in front of you actually explaining things like footwork and posture and timing. We spent a good thirty minutes taking pictures and scribbling diagrams and whispering back and forth to each other about how cool this all was…and then the instructors* asked if anyone wanted some hands-on instruction.

Alli jumped at the chance, and I followed. There were about seven to ten of us at the time. Each one of us was handed a bamboo rod shown how to stand and we were off. The two instructors would explain and demonstrate what they wanted us to do–things like forcing your opponent’s sword offline or giving and avoiding a beat–and then have each of us perform the action against them. The two gentlemen running the class were professional and patient and seemed to enjoy being able to have the interaction, and that made the whole thing all the more enjoyable for the rest of us.

Then came the tipping point in Alli and my’s mutual giddiness about rapier instruction in general. They acted out a throw and then had each one of us practice and perform it against one of them using the rapier. I know that logistically they had to give us the rapiers, because bamboo rods don’t have hilts with which to hold down another person’s blade, but I honestly felt a bit like I’d been handed Auryn** in that moment. The sword was a little heavier than I thought it would be and the basket fits around your hand in a way that makes you part of the sword and just. It was an awesome moment and I really want to thank the two of them for it, as well as the organizers of the event for inviting them and setting up an experience like that in the first place.

The rest of the day was kind of spent in the hazy glow of ‘oh god they let me hold a sword!’ I was extra pleased as well that Alli noted during the class that most of the sword fight scenes I’d written between our characters were actually pretty solid, technically. Not that they’ll end up in the novel because I just wrote them as character pieces, but it’s extra nice to know that I wasn’t completely off base. (Though I am going to have to make Edmund spend a bit more time with foil or rapier when he’s teaching William, even while he prefers saber himself.)

We were still buzzing from the rush of it all when we got home in the evening, so right now we’re looking into fencing clubs here in Orlando. You never know, it could be a fun way to get in more exercise and learn a new skill. It is definitely a way to have a few more of All Of The Experiences and would give me even more things to blog about.

Now for the informative part of the post!

If you would like to learn more about steampunk, there have been a whole slew of excellent articles written, but Tor does a Steampunk Week that always has articles of interest for people who are new to the concept or find it all to be old hat. The links from 2011 can be found here.
The instructors of the class gave me several resources for reading about swordsmanship and style with different types of weapons. Those are:
Chivalry Bookshelf – who publishes many out of print texts on all sorts of things, including swordplay.
HEMA – The website for Historical European Martial Arts.
The Western Martial Arts Coalition.
And the works (if I can find them) of William Wilson, Achille Marozzo, Fiore dei Liberi, and George Silver.

All of that should keep me and you guys busy for quite some time. Now I must away to work some more at our wonderful little steampunk world. It had been too long when I started in on it today and immediately fell in love with our characters all over again. Funny how that happens. And just appease the voice of Edmund in my head after all this talk of straight edges with points at the end, here’s my favorite of the sabers I’ve researched. Turkish, 19th century, housed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

* I didn’t catch their names! It’s not in the program or on the site or readily available in any search done by me in the last ten minutes! If anyone knows, please share so I can add them to the write up and also love them from afar.

** Auryn, for those of you not into 80s movies, is the serpent pendant from The Neverending Story that guides Atreyu on his quest.

April 16, 2012 7

.014 – April.

Before I launch into the recap of first quarter of relative failure I wanted to share the link to a short write up that Sierra Houk did about the Wrong Opinions About Movies Podcast that I am lucky enough to be on with my friend Matthew Bowers and my writing partner Alli Martin. It’s great fun for me to be able to discuss movies with my friends on the internet, but it’s even more fun if other people get in on the conversation. Today we recorded our Titanic episode and in the coming months we’ll be doing a whole slew of Batman episodes with special guests in preparation for The Dark Knight Rises. If you like movies and wrong opinions give us a listen!

So, back to March!

Words: 5,776

Flubs: That is a depressing number and I know it. I would feel bad about it, but most everyone I know also had a bad March, word-wise. Divided we blunder, together we procrastinate! March was a rough month in general mentally, which isn’t an excuse, but it is part of the problem. And now that I’ve rooted out where I am I can start to rebuild and get back to the important things. The writing things.

Looking back at my Impossible 2012 Plan, this month I have failed at: completing Volunteer Vampires, finishing the rough of my parts of of The Steampunk, and submitting a second poem for publication. I haven’t started a second short story either, but I’ve decided I need to try and be less ADD about everything that directly affects the rest of my life. We’ll see how that goes.

I will continue to be ADD in the day to day, though, lest you’re concerned I’ll stop derailing conversations with ridiculous non sequiturs. Worry not!

Follow Throughs: But I DID start the second round edit of my friend’s manuscript and submit a poem for publication. In case you missed my yelping when I got the news, that poem was accepted! I will have a steampunk themed poem in the fall issue of a small online poetry zine–which I will link back to when it goes up–and I am very excited about it. The non-writing people around me don’t understand my excitement, because it’s not “really being published”, but I don’t expect them to. My writing friends understand and I feel personally like it’s a good start and a small victory in the war with myself, so I’m excited. I wrote a poem! People didn’t hate it! I now need to carry that ego boost into a forward momentum and see what other things I can churn out that people won’t hate.

Words to date: 24,411

And onward to April!

I am going to finish the draft of Volunteer Vampires THIS WEEK, even if it kills me. Alli knows where to submit it for me posthumously if I do die. Barring that unfortunate possibility I am also going to write at least two more chapters of The Steampunk and edit half of my friend’s manuscript.

I can do this. Deep breaths. One railway tie at a time. Or at least, that’s what I imagine my ~~good luck~~ hard work charm telling me.

April 9, 2012 0

.013 – My hair’s favorite band is Bloc Party

There is a short OpEd piece from the New York Times making the rounds on my twitter feed. It’s all about how the author thinks that adults should read adult books and leave the YA to the pre-teen girls. I’m not going to link to it, because such a ridiculous and obviously baiting statement doesn’t need any more traffic than it’s already getting. And while I realize that his opinion is ridiculous and obviously baiting, there was something else about it that caught me up short. The author states that he himself is embarrassed when he sees adults reading YA and seems to somehow believe that his personal embarrassment should jump from him to the reader. He clearly finds his feelings and opinions to be more valid or informed than that of the poor soul caught up in what he assumes to be a poorly written dystopian world.

I grew up in a pretty small town and I am very familiar with this kind of skewed mutual embarrassment. The kind of embarrassment that you don’t really feel until you realize that the other person thinks that you should be embarrassed. Then you’re almost obliged to give in to it out of propriety. It took me moving away to college and several years of making poor decisions based on the wants of others to realize that this embarrassment was a thing that I could actually control. Without getting too deep into the philosophy of it, I had the all too mundane realization that I am my own person and free to make my own choices. What a relief that is, to know that I can do things that make me happy and not have to answer to anyone else with a twig up their hind end about my happiness.

I recently got a pretty daring haircut, for me anyway. (I always want to go for the fauxhawk, and I always remind myself that I’m not quite that cool yet.) While the response to it has been largely favorable I can still hear my mother and the people I left behind in that small town commenting on it in my head. How silly and frivolous all of these brain phantoms find me. Why don’t I just grow up? Why don’t I stop wasting my time on concerts and writing stories about steampunk vampires in space and playing around on my movie podcast? Why don’t I settle down and have children and buy a house like an adult? I do wonder if the writer of the New York Times piece would agree with these voices. And then I remember that it doesn’t matter, because I’m happy. I can read YA in public. I can wear ridiculous clothing. I can get all the stupid haircuts I want, and anyone who wants to bring my happiness down must not find as much joy in such things as I do and therefor really aren’t worth my time.

I’m preaching to the choir here, but YA is a LARGE umbrella. Stephanie Meyer is not JK Rowling is not John Green is not RL Stine. If you don’t like Twilight (paranormal romance) that doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy Looking for Alaska (young adult literary). If you don’t like Harry Potter (fantasy) then you might like Goosebumps (horror). Just like in adult books, there are different shades of YA literature with different intended audiences. Honestly, while I wish I’d had Looking for Alaska as a teen, its message still rings true to me in my adult life and I’m very glad to have been able to read it. I don’t personally think I could work in YA, given the types of stories I’m tempted to tell, but I greatly admire the writers who do. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is one of the most devastating and beautiful books I’ve ever read, and it’s only made better by the fact that it’s accessible to a younger crowd.

I almost pity people with the attitude of the New York Times piece. How heavy must all of those societal restrictions they’ve built up around themselves be? How boring must their very serious adult conversations become after a while as they circle around in the same, stagnant pools of approachable thought? I think they must miss out on an awful lot, with their lists of approved reading and watching and listening. It’s one thing to find something simply not to your taste, but it’s another thing entirely to look down on a whole genre simply because of the way it’s marketed. Hey, if you try something find you don’t like it, at least you’ve given it a go and not written it off from the start.

I’m going home in two weeks. I’m going to flaunt my ridiculous haircut absolutely everywhere and take pride in having allowed myself to become who I wanted to be, even as the adults around me try to make me someone else.

March 29, 2012 6

.012 – #ChangeWriteNow and in the Future

I have a friend who takes stealth pictures of me even though I’ve asked her not to many, many times. It’s annoying as a general rule not to be listened to, but the reason this bothers me so much more than any other thing of the myriad of things my friends refuse to stop doing is because the end result is photos of me, and I’m hideous.

(One she snuck at Epcot last weekend.)

By which I mean of course, I feel hideous. I’m fat(ter than I used to be by at least 70 pounds) and unattractive and it drives me nuts when people tell me I’m not because I know I am. I know it. I don’t want people to argue with me. I’m not looking for attention or pity, I just know who I am and what I look like to me and that’s what matters. It would be ridiculous to deny that a lot of that feeling is internal. I’m becoming increasingly frustrated with all of the ways in which I let myself down and that only adds to the pile of things I find disgusting about myself. So at the last minute and almost on a whim I joined the second round of Change Write Now.

I’m not a competitive person by nature, but I do find that a lot of times I’m motivated by simply feeling like I’m a part of something. I don’t want to beat my team members, but I don’t want to let them down either, and that’s huge for me. For the past two weeks I’ve had more water than I may have had all of last year, a mere four Cokes overall, and I’ve been eating better and cheaper (read: not takeout). It’s kind of amazing how much I find that I want to do these things now, after just two weeks of having to be conscious of my decisions. I’ll have soda left over from lunch and give it up in favor of my afternoon water. The boyfriend doesn’t even know who I am anymore.

All that said, there’s still major room for improvement. I need to get over my internalized fear of the gym (and a lot of things really) and just get back into going in the mornings. I’m going to try again tomorrow and see if I can’t actually drag my sorry ass out of bed at 5:30. I know I feel good when I work out in the morning, but I still can’t make myself do it half the time. That’s almost as messed up as my self-image. It’s not just working out I mistreat that way, though.

For instance, I also know I feel good when I’m working on my stories. I often feel like I can conquer this real world if I’m keeping things in order in my made up ones. I know that if I sit down and write I can finish things which can lead to publishing things which can lead to my ultimate goal of a writing career, the only type of career I’ve wanted for quite some time. I don’t want to be rich and famous, I just want to be able to pay my bills by doing things that make me happy.

And yet…sometimes I don’t finish things. Or if I do sit down at all I let myself be overtaken by a feeling of ineffectuality and give up before I start. This month has been the lowest production month for me this year, even while I’ve been keeping my mind on and working on other things that I need to get under control. Why, even though I’m almost thirty, do I still sabotage myself? Why do I maintain an undesirable view of myself and let it stick? I can’t control what other people do or how they see me, but I can control me, and I’m still the person who sees the worst in me all of the time. I need to stop. I need to stand up and take control and just become the person I want to be without giving in to the fear of failure. It sounds so easy when other people say it.

Change Write Now has done wonders for making me really think about some of the choices I make and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to carry them over. In the meantime, when I do get out of bed in the morning, whether it’s two hours early or thirty minutes late, I’ll just continue to recite the mantra written on my whiteboard. It’s a song lyric from a band that has sadly broken up, but it’s a good reminder of the person I can be. I can be relentless too.

March 25, 2012 0

.011 – To know absolutely nothing is certainly human.

Australia! I don’t know very much about it!

Back in February a local writing friend sent me a link for a steampunk story call. The woman who is editing the anthology wants stories from the Victorian period set in almost any place but England or the States. She has a specific list of location wishes. We’re not in any way obligated to fulfill those wishes, she just wanted to point out areas which aren’t typically covered by people writing in the steampunk genre. I took a gander at the list and decided that it would be fun to set something in Australia and it would give me cause to do some reading and learn more about the area in general.

My basic starting premise was to deal with a young woman who had been born into one of the native groups (my reading suggests different attitudes towards whether using the term aboriginal is currently culturally correct) and then had been ‘rescued’ by some of the European settlers and raised by them. The story itself was to pick up when she learns some of the truths about who she is exactly and denounces her white family to leave and find her true home. (Ostensibly to touch on the idea that no home is really ‘true’, because I saw Garden State one too many times or something.) Over all the story would be kind of an adventure and she’d pick up a lady sidekick who she may or may not develop feelings for. Anyway, I felt like all of this would be a good way to break down the themes of colonialism, race, gender, and sexuality.

The problem I continue to run into is that I really know very, very little about Australia, and while I’ve done some reading, it’s hard for me to get a good feel of the place during that period. I think it’s simply that I haven’t been steeped in it throughout my life the way I’ve been steeped in period work from the US, Canada, the UK, France, and even Japan, so it’s just not as comfortable. Also, as a denizen of the internet, I’m extremely wary of committing the very issues I’m trying to write about. I don’t want to fetishize her native background and I don’t want to be too disparaging about either the native peoples or the European settlers. I feel a bit like I’ve taken my usual old tightrope and moved it from the skyscrapers over New York to Niagra Falls and the change in view below is throwing off my comfort in performing the feat.

So the question becomes, do I get an Australian tutor to teach me about their perspective on the issues of the time period, or do I simply give in to my fears and change the setting? I know I could come up with something interesting set in Germany, say, that wouldn’t leave me with this many uncertainties. But then, it might not cover the themes I want to cover. It certainly couldn’t cover them in the same way. (Unless there were Roma in Germany at the time. Although, that wouldn’t have as much to do with colonialism in particular.)

We have to query the story before we can send it in, so this worrying might all be for not if she doesn’t except the query, but that just makes me want to choose the right mixture of setting and issues all the more.

Anyone out there want to give some informal history lessons?

March 19, 2012 0

.010 – March

Oh hello. I half expect this thing to be gone when I can’t get back to it for more than a week. Which is silly, considering it took about four years for that stupid Angelfire site with my college poetry on it to finally disappear. (I lost the password. It was pretty harrowing there for a while, guys.) Anyway, half of March has happened, and that’s rude. While January and February seemed to have blasted by March is practically limping along. It feels like it might never end. On one hand, that gives me so much time to write! On the other hand, it’s just rubbing in how much writing I haven’t done. But first thing’s first, back to…

February.

Words: 8,627. Yes, merely a measly eight and a half thousand. A backslide that might never end.

Flubs: In looking at the things I wanted to have done through the end of February I have not: a) finished a draft of Volunteer Vampires, b) let alone have one polished enough to submit somewhere, and c) have not made it halfway through the rough of my half of the Steampunk novel. And that’s all incredibly depressing. I can’t feel too bad about Volunteer Vampires though, because I’ve definitely sorted out where I’m going with it and just need to sit down and put one word after another on it.

Follow Throughs: I HAVE, however, written one poem for the express purpose of submitting it to an online poetry zine and have gone about polishing another one up so I can either submit it to a magazine or enter a contest with it. I know, contests are what people with talent and faith in themselves do, but I am knee deep in faking it until I make it over here, so I might as well go for broke. I’ve also started another short story for a call requesting lesbian steampunk fiction set in places other than England and the States. We’ll see if I can settle on where that’s going and get it suitably polished. It seemed relevant to my interests at the very least.

Words To Date: 18,133

March:

I received the second draft of a friend’s novel manuscript in the mail today. I spent a good number of hours last year reading through her rough asking questions and making suggestions. This one I got hard copy so I can mark it up to my little heart’s content. I’m excited to be doing it, but I know I’m going to have to be more strict about what I do with my time through April and May so that I can get it all done.

In the meantime, the rest of March needs to be set aside for some serious word churning. By ‘the rest of March’ I clearly mean ‘after the 18th when the Boyfriend is back at his home because he’s horrible for productivity’, but it doesn’t sound as snappy. I’ll have twelve days to submit that poem and finish rough drafts of two short stories. I feel kind of terrible for putting the Steampunk on hold, because I was chomping at the bit to get a final outline of it and it’s all I really want to write most of the time. My one consolation there is that my co-writer is also busy writing other things, so I’m not really holding her up.

Now if only I could stop feeling like I was holding myself up.

March 14, 2012 4

.009 – Beginnings.

It’s four days into March and I have yet to recap February properly. I didn’t want this year to feel like it was slipping away, but I guess I don’t really have control over some of that. And what do I do when I lose control of things? Ignore them! So here, instead of my plans for the rest of March, are some responses to an exercise a friend put to an online writing community I’m a part of.

Working from Thanks, But This Isn’t For Us: A (Sort Of) Compassionate Guide to Why Your Writing Is Being Rejected by Jessica Page Morrell, she suggested that we write several openings to stories that we didn’t have any intention of completing and that were outside our typical choices of genre. I chose three genres I have no current interest in writing in, decided to set them all in the field pictured below, and had at it. Because I don’t intend on trying to publish any of them I wanted to place them here. Feel free to comment or crit on any of the snippets, and as a bonus, see if you can guess which one was my favorite.

Period Romance.
The landscape of the countryside was slipping away and blurring into one continuous bleeding red field before Cady felt calm enough to open the letter she’d been gripping tightly since she left home. It had been cowardly of James to not come see her in person, but she supposed that there was wisdom in an absent goodbye as well. After all, neither of them could be certain that she wouldn’t take to London and her aunt’s teachings, and if she did she wasn’t likely to want to return and be a farmer’s wife. Although, in books there was often a romantic wistfulness associated with working the land. Still, she knew the realities.

She turned the envelope over finally and slid one gloved finger under the sloppy seal he’d used to fasten it. Several crumpled red poppies fell out into her lap. The letter itself simply said: If you don’t already know what these mean, you should soon. I will give you anything. Don’t forget.

. . .
Murder Mystery.
Ingles found summer murders to be tedious. Even his lightest linen jacket was too warm for the sun that beat down the open fields in the middle of July. The sweat on the back of his neck was distracting. The clashing green and red of the poppies waving mildly in the warm breeze was distracting. The way the local inspector would not simply stop talking about decency and morals and the way god fearing people should and should not act was distracting. About the only thing that Ingles didn’t find distracting about the scene of the crime was the corpse, which had apparently had the decency to be killed by a blunt object to the temple in a tidy way without causing a fuss.

. . .
Literary Fiction.
The poppy fields were offensive to Asa. He claimed to think that they were beautiful flowers, and he could ramble for nearly half an hour in his deep, rusty voice about the curvature of the hill the fields rested on and those hills surrounding it, but it never sounded quite genuine. It was almost as if the primary beauty of it all–the bright redness of the flowers nestled amongst their green stalks under a blue sky holding a fierce yellow sun–was the most offensive thing about it. It wasn’t beauty for the sake of beauty anymore, it was beauty in remembrance of the war. Even in those days he was old, and could remember the time before the war. He claimed that there were other bits of beauty that would have been more appropriate.

“Crooked smiles,” he’d say after several minutes of quiet. “Why does no one share a crooked smile around a cigarette in remembrance? It’s surely what the soldiers would have wanted.”

March 4, 2012 5

.008 – Admissions.

This morning I told a barista that I was a writer. He was kind of giddy and riding the high of talking to a professional graphic designer, which is what he wants to be, and I commented that I understood that feeling of possibility that comes from talking to someone who is established in your chosen field. He asked if I was a graphic designer too, and I said ‘no, I’m a writer.’

It came out so timidly that I had to repeat it, louder this time, which probably garnered me some looks from the Lazing About In Borrowed Armchairs Reading Papers set. I don’t know if it actually did, but the thought that it might’ve made me feel uncomfortable, like I’d shown up naked. I left quickly after that and spent a few moments in my car taking deep breaths and coming to terms with the fact that I had just told a complete stranger that I wrote things.

That’s all it means though, right? I write things. I write things all the time. I even finish things sometimes, which I have the rejection slips to show for. So I’m a writer. Yet it still feels fake when I say it, because I don’t have the validation of a publishing credit, my FBHS senior class paper aside. It still feels a bit like an excuse when it comes out. That’s a personal thing, I know. I have friends who hate the word ‘aspiring’, because to them aspiring means that you never actually put words to paper–or Scrivener, or whatever kids put words to these days–but to me aspiring feels like a shield. Don’t expect too much of me, it says. All these words amount to half things, it says, they’re unreal. That’s a pretty terrible attitude.

It’s time I started thinking more highly of myself. If I focus I can probably think this accomplished me into being. (Hell, it worked with Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter. The universe did that just for me, don’t you know?) I’m working on being published, but that work is writing. I write things. I’m a writer. There, that wasn’t so hard.

*takes my chai and runs*

February 29, 2012 2

.007 – All the experiences.

As I mentioned in the video post from yesterday, I was in jury duty last week. It was my first time showing up for a summons–I was called twice for my home county while I was here for school and both times my mother had me pardoned–so I didn’t know what to expect. I certainly didn’t expect to actually be placed on a jury. The entire week was a surreal blur to me. I was there, and I was paying attention, but it hardly feels like any of it actually happened now that I’m removed from it.

That happens to me a lot. I’ll finally realize an event that I was either hoping for or biting my nails over and in the end the replay is merely a car crash. I mean to say, I almost blank out and don’t remember any of it at all. I found it very true to my own experience every time a person on the witness stand mis-remembered something or amended a statement. I do that every day, it’s just that most people don’t have enough invested in the proceedings to call me on it or even care.

I like to say that I want to have all of the experiences, by which I mean I would like to do as many things as possible in as many places with as many people as possible and be able to chronicle them somehow. I want to be able to tally them up at the end of my life and say ‘look at all these things that I’ve done’. (Yes, in this scenario I AM still quoting The Killers in 60 years. Don’t be too harsh on old me, it could easily have been Bright Eyes.) And even before that point, I’d like to be able to call on things that I’ve learned and apply that knowledge elsewhere. That’s the best way to play this game, right? Observe and conquer?

Of course, the flip side to having good experiences is having bad ones. Every time I complain about something that I perceive as having gone wrong the boyfriend is there to remind me that I did want to have all the experiences and that whatever it was was certainly an experience. Not that I’m generally very forgiving of that point of view in the moment, but he’s right. ~~Don’t tell him I said that~~.

Being a lawyer, as far as I could tell in my seat as Juror #4, is two parts fifth grade science project and three parts community theater. They have to present you with the facts in a biased way and highlight only those things they want you to see. There are often bar graphs. They have to wrangle the story and they have to try and drag it about to the place they want it to end. Their very diction is designed to make you feel a certain way and fill in other people’s experiences with your own background. I must say that it wasn’t lost on me that I essentially do the same thing, it’s just that no one critiques me in real time and no one has to pay me a large sum of cash if I achieve the desired effect. It would be nice if they did, and god willing one day, but you know what I mean.

In practical application all of those experiences help me write more well-rounded characters as well as becoming more well-rounded myself, but I think my hunger ties in deeper than that. I think real life can teach you structures that reading cannot. Some people are carefully rehearsed. Some chaos is merely the final resolution of a long chain of carefully placed events. And most importantly, not everyone’s story is important to the centralized plot. Real life unfolds in a way that writing can’t, because of a need for specificity, but that doesn’t mean that incorporating some of those threads can’t make a textbook plot feel like it has more at stake. I do like a little chaos and a lot of strings in reserve, as I’m sure my writing partner can tell you.

At the end of the day, even though I feel like I want to have all of the experiences, I know that rationally I can’t and shouldn’t. There is not enough money in the world to make me exchange coming home at the end of the day with a clear conscience and crawling into bed to watch anime until I pass out, or dither about with a poem’s structure until I can’t keep my eyes open, for being in that witness stand come morning. Perhaps the game should merely be to have just enough experiences to be able to infer the ones you don’t want to have. Not that I can control that either, but regardless of which side of the counsel I find myself on, I pledge to myself that I will keep my eyes open. I never do know when knowledge will come in handy.

February 27, 2012 4

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