blog & collective

It’s late Monday night, soon to be early Tuesday morning by the time I finish this entry, and I’m dissatisfied with myself already. I’d think on a Monday, the very beginning of my week, I’d feel some sort of redemptive quality of a new beginning. Not really. Instead I’m strangely dissatisfied and restless. I feel like I’m waiting for something big to happen, but have no idea what.

I went out for a walk earlier, trying to burn off excess energy or something. After dodging sketchy glances from a bunch of sketchy guys smoking by the a fire pit, I ended up by the lake. I walked around some more until I found a quiet spot on the shore where it was sandy instead of soggy with drowned grasses. It was really nice sitting there for a while, just staring out at nothingness and trying not to spoil my night vision by looking into the lights.

Usually when I end up somewhere like that, in a situation like that, I slip into some other character. Anastasia probably got it right in saying that I’m a mild schizophrenic, although she said it more jokingly than anything. Tonight I realized the characters in the stories I write are easy to slip into because there’s something about them or their position in life that I yearn for. I’d rather be that character in that moment, maybe so I can say something to someone who isn’t there, maybe just to appreciate the scenery a little more. In a way, it makes my characters unrealistic; they’re based on my life but they’re a little too perfect. Then again, I’ve learned to give my characters faults, too, or give them problems that I’ve had and teach them to deal with them. In the end, whether they’re believable or not is up to someone else to decide; I can’t tell anymore.

While I was sitting on the sand watching the lake, though, I stayed me. I don’t know why, either; I was still restless, and that generally means I find something for an alter ego to do. Maybe I just didn’t feel like escaping myself. Maybe I didn’t mind my own confusion.

Now it’s Wednesday. And I think I’m over whatever my brain did two days ago. Now I really wonder what causes such random lapses of mood and brain. Anyway, since I haven’t written a substantial entry since spring break, I’ve accumulated a bunch of random things I’ve felt like talking about. Here goes.

A couple weeks ago, Ben Roth fiddled around with PHP for a while, and then messed with our brains by sitting back and letting his program take over. Here it is in all its glory: Echo Sage. Good luck. I haven’t really worked on the riddle part of it, although that’s on my to-do list. And if you can’t even find the riddle part… well, have fun with it anyway. It’s plenty entertaining.

Echo Sage successfully put me in a very bizarre state of mind, and also inspired a temporary writing stint. I started writing a weird, almost impressionistic story (Cyfarwydd on Parting Pigeons). It’s impressionistic in that I just sort of wrote whatever came to mind; it’s also a little John Cageian in that I put little things into a lot of detail. It’s still somewhat plot driven, and I’ve become a big fan of the concept. The idea is after I finish writing (which was supposed to only take a few days, but then my weird drifting mood went away and I haven’t worked on it since), I was going to turn it into a booklet form, with a puzzle at the bottom of each page. Why? I guess you’ll have to wait until I finish the whole thing to find out.

Uh, somehow on my list of things I wanted to blog about is the really cryptic bullet point “style/fashion for characters.” I have no idea what I meant.

Ever since going to Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk with my dorm two weeks ago, I’ve really really craved going to the beach. HELP. I want beach. My camera is fixed, so if I go again, I’d actually take exciting fantastic pictures. But for now, I’m stuck looking at photos from Hawaii last summer, wishing I could be on the beach staring at the sunset.

Instead, I’m making summer plans. Last summer was great, what with traveling and everything, but I can see better summers. So far this summer is looking pretty fantastic: summer job in a lab somewhere at Stanford (I’m meeting with the lab heads for two different labs tomorrow, one that does psychology studies and one that does mutant genetic screens on algae)(yes, I’m a biology nerd… leave me alone), an overnight incarnation of The Game with the help of Ben Roth, both Bens living at Stanford for the summer, Tessaly’s cabin near Tahoe, possibility of beach house in Santa Cruz for a weekend, plus my cousin’s wedding in Ithaca during the first weekend of summer and a camping trip with my cousins in late August. You can’t really top having all your favorite people around you, doing things you really like to do, and getting money for fun work. The awesome thing about having the Bens on campus this summer is I can hang out with them after work, so I won’t have to drive home during rush hour. SO EXCITED. If only Seth and Lucas were sticking around, too. Alas, I guess I can’t have everything.

Well, I’m pretty much done. I have been writing a fair amount (Cyfarwydd and other stuff, mostly planning for other stories), so hopefully soonish I can post something besides a blog entry. Photographs, perhaps. On ne sait jamais.

Also, made this desktop out of beach cravingness.

Finally a new layout! I’m not entirely sure those footprints work there, but I couldn’t think of anything else to break up the edges of these boxes.

As part of my initiative to be more studious and do well this quarter, I am almost completely on top of things! I understand what’s going on in organic chemistry (although I haven’t opened the textbook yet… good lecturer? DON’T WORRY RISA I’M GOING TO READ THIS WEEKEND). I finished my Java assignment that’s due next Wednesday (woohoo Breakout), which gives me time to tweak it, add extra features, and write in all the comment lines. -__-;; AND I’ve already written a solid rough draft of my IHUM paper that’s due Monday. I would edit it more right now instead of blogging, but ARG I have a bone to pick with peer editors. More on that later. The point of this paragraph is: I’m on top of things! And it’s very liberating.

Then again, there are a few things I’m not on top of, namely swimming and planning my summer. Swimming is just a matter of getting myself to wake up in the morning and go to the pool, and also getting over the fickleness of the weather. Summer is a little more complicated, but again, I just have to grit my teeth and work on it.

Now here’s my rant about peer editing. So it’s 11 PM Tuesday night, the day before my rough draft for my IHUM paper is due. I haven’t written a thing, which is fine since it’s just a rough draft. At this point I’m thinking, whatever, I’ll just get this over with. I putter around for another hour or so, write some very basic ideas for each paragraph, then set out to write the whole thing. Around 2:30 AM, I’ve finished the whole thing minus a title, plus caught up with a friend from Australia. I figure screw it; it’s late; I’m not even going to look over this thing before printing.

The next day I bring three copies of this half-assed paper in to IHUM discussion section. I exchange with two people and read over their papers. They’re not bad, not any worse than mine, and both could use some revision and expansion. So I write them some notes in the margins and a big long thing at the end of each to tell them what I think they should work on, what needs to be clearer, etc. Makes sense, right? That’s what peer editing is for. Then I get the copies of my paper back and all they’ve done is draw arrows to things and write “good” and “this is evidence” or “this is your thesis.” No kidding. I totally didn’t know that before. I didn’t want someone to point out the parts of my paper, I wanted someone to tell me what was wrong with it, what transitions needed work, which areas needed clarifying, what points were unclear. And instead I got a bunch of arrows.

Am I being super picky and demanding of my peer editors because Ms. Sutton taught me a billion things to pay attention to? Or is what I’m asking really not that much to ask?

What the potato. How is it that I’m sick again? It’s awfully similar to whatever I had last time…. ah well, nothing a little acetaminophen can’t cure. [Note: the word "cure" is used in the loosest sense of the term.]

In case you didn’t notice… say hello to Kethadros’s Halloween layout! Nothing like a little Edgar Allen Poe to get the blood chilling for All Hallow’s Eve.

Too sick to be coherent anymore. Back later…

I finished taping back together my writing notebook the other day. I had it with me in France, and did some pretty productive stuff while I was there. Unfortunately, it sustained a little too much wear and tear, and an entire page of a new scene ripped out while other pages, like the one right after the original “The Lone Wolf Complex,” hung by a few paper fibers. Anyway, my tape dispenser received much abuse in the process, but now all pages are back in my notebook, and I’ve sworn never to buy another cheap spiral-bound notebook with perforated pages. I’m thinking of getting a composition book, but most of those are wide-ruled, which generally drives me insane because I feel I am not using my pages effectively because all my lines are forced to be spaced out and my handwriting becomes subsequently bigger, which also lends itself to messier handwriting. In summary, WIDE-RULE RUINS MY LIFE.

I sort of got out of that rut from Friday, but most of the creativity has been in my mind rather than manifesting itself on paper. It’s infuriating, less so now than it was when I was writing The Gathering, which had very vividly planned scenes in my mind that I couldn’t write well enough to do them justice. Right now the new Jade League chapter is taking more coherent shape as I get deeper in, and I have a feeling I’m going to kill myself with revisions of the first two sections. I had a very instructive review on Fiction Press, which I’ve been trying to take to heart. The original chapter 1 does start out a little slow, but I HATED the attempt at an action-packed prologue that I wrote, so now I’m trying something completely different that flips back and forth between perspectives. It’s not as confusing as it sounds (at least, I hope), and at least I’m writing SOMETHING. I’m relieved that I didn’t forget how to write.

Speaking of The Jade League, I’m piecing together a new subdomain to host the chapters and miscellaneous things I’ve collected as part of the research I’ve been doing to hammer out the details. My favorite findings to date include an ancient picture of the Li River in China, and a printed ink-style sketch of the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Luckily, with the new opening chapter, I can use at least a few of the pictures I took in France for the layout. Or maybe I’ll just use them as reference images and do a detailed painting/sketch. I haven’t done anything in the drawing realm for a long time, so it’ll be good practice. Come to think of it, I found my pastel chalks from the art classes I took when I was ten or so. I love using those mostly because I can blend with my fingers. Who knows what I’ll do. I have lots of time to kill (assuming I don’t wander off to Facebook).

I found a picture frame in my room while cleaning it, so I started looking for pictures of my friends on Facebook to put in there. After much measuring and digital cropping and installing Photoshop on my new laptop (I’ve never had Photoshop run so fast before! I don’t have to start reading a book while I let it load!), I have this to show for it.

Me, weird? Never!