I am having a bit of a dry spell when it comes to creative writing, which is neither unusual or much of a bother.
When the desert decides to take up residence in my head, I sometimes power through and other times I find “less creative” ways to keep writing (like this post). I don’t let it bother me when the ideas go fooom and I am left with a cranium filled mostly with fluff. But I do keep writing when that happens because I invariably discover something I want to write about as I am “just writing”.
I made it to my fourth crochet row on a non-project (no goal other than getting more comfortable with crochet) before everything got really ugly and went terribly wrong. That’s progress beyond just beyond getting a foundation row more than five loops long. I won’t be crocheting any afghans soon, but it is progress.
I’ve been devoting more time to reading books and attempting new hobbies in my effort to reduce the amount of content I consume from the internet.
Since the beginning of September, I have read six novels and abandoned one novel after a record 30 pages (I couldn’t take the convenient miracles any longer, they were that obvious and that poorly written). The month has a few days yet and I am working on two more books. There is always a chance I’ll make it through my seventh, but I wouldn’t count on it.
If you are curious as to what I’ve been reading, check out this “living” page that gets updated as I consume, including planned and current reads.
Six books is not huge, but it is a positive effort away from social media and news that, let’s just say, feels like a low-quality circus right about now.
Have you ever started reading a book and find the descriptions of the backdrop to be too rich in the details? While in which the characters seem far too paper-thin and inauthentic?
For a few days, anyway. I’ll be doing my science-y kind of thing for work and visiting a partner laboratory in Sacramento to assess how they do things in an up close and personal manner to make sure they are doing things with an eye towards getting quality analytical results [spoiler alert: they probably are; this visit is mostly just ticking a box].
While I don’t have a ton of time to do much, let me know if you live in the Sacramento area and want to grab a coffee (or two). I might have time one evening or in the morning before I catch my early afternoon flight home.
While I do have other regrets in my life, I think those that cut deepest are those times that I acted cruelly or unjustly to someone as a defense mechanism against all the times that people treated me cruelly or unjustly in my youth.
I was bullied most of my childhood, by extended family as well as by my peers.
By my mid-teens, I was starting to be mean to certain people with the justification was that then I was doing it before they could do it to me, especially when we started drifting apart after being close. Always “as jest”, of course. Plausible deniability…
By my late twenties, I wouldn’t even let most people get closer than superficial interactions with me.
There are people, both living and deceased, that I wish I could apologize to for treating them the way I did. But how to find them? Even social media is useless for finding some of the people most owed an apology. And not everyone wants to hear an apology from me anyway. Those are the kinds of knives I used to stab people.
And while I try to not live in the past or in regrets, I do wish I could at least try to repair as best as I am able those moments where I was unnecessarily mean to another person out of avoidance of risking feeling pain myself.
Instead of avoiding pain, I now carry this poison with me with nowhere to set it down.
I re-opened a blog site from ancient history (2007-2008) and made it public again because one of my new readers requested access to what had been marked a private blog (or maybe not, but it is back “live” regardless).
It is just a catalog of quotes and poetry that caught my fancy, namely of a Taoism or Zen Buddhism bent. There’s nothing terribly exciting there unless you are into those kinds of things, or if you want a peek into where my mind was about a year before I ended up choosing sobriety as a more enlightened path than wonton drunkenness.
Check it out, if you are so inclined: Useless Tree
I originally made the site private primarily to stop a reader from demanding new posts when I had decided I was no longer in the mood to be enlightened. And then I never got back to posting on it or making the site public again when that mood passed away.
I started reading Jhereg by Steven Brust last night as part of my recent determination to create some air between my brain and various digital and social medias (streaming services including YouTube, mass-social media, news sites, video games, & etc.). I am annoyed with myself now that it has taken so long to read his writing aside from Freedom and Necessity.
I hope that no one is offended when I say Jhereg is just the kind of pulp fiction I was looking for. It is not high literature, nor does it pretend to be. The novel is a fantasy tale of an assassin and mobster, Vlad Taltos, who happens to be a second-class citizen (because he is human) in a fantasy city full of thievery, deception and double-crossings. Plus, he has magic and a reptilian familiar.
And, so far, it works — as a bit of a hard-boiled noir and fantasy crossover. A movie with similar DNA (except set in a futuristic Earth instead of a medieval fantasy world) might be Blade Runner.
Like The Witcher books I’ve been re-reading, it has an easy flow to the storytelling that I think might be missing from a lot of the more recent writing out there. Even some of books I’ve enjoyed that have been written in the past 25 years seem to be trying real hard to be “good literature” when they are, at their base, pulp novels. Or, maybe, I’m just more tuned into penny dreadfuls, pulp fiction, and weird tales and would prefer to read that birdcage liner stuff.
Sometimes I wonder if we put too much emphasis on structure, formulae and erudition, and not enough on merely telling a “ripping yarn”. I certainly don’t know. But I’m sure there are tons of opinions about the matter.
On whim and a lark, I added feta to my breakfast of steel cut oats, almonds and pepitas. I have added feta with mushrooms, sausages and eggs on my oats in the past, but was hesitant without the other savory ingredients.
FYI: It tastes damn good, it is less work, and it is better for me than adding a tablespoon of chocolate chips when I don’t want to go through the hassle of frying up eggs, sausages and mushrooms.
