Bad Haiku

I’ve been dreading this: having to write on a Saturday. Saturdays are my longest work days, and after spending 8 hours dealing with people at the store, I want nothing more than to sit around and veg out. The absolute last thing I want to do is think coherently.

And, here’s the thing, as I said before, I have already written something yesterday to post today. So why am I taking the time to write this, especially when I’d really rather not? Well, it’s starting to feel weird posting things a day after the fact. Once it’s no longer current, who cares? Besides, I worked on my short story yesterday and wasn’t going to post anything anyway, except to tell you that I worked on my short story. Maybe I’ll compromise and let myself off the 600 word hook tonight. Maybe on Saturdays, I only have to post 300 words. There I go, making excuses again. But hey, I’ve been really good, haven’t I? And I’m only asking for a small break one day a week.

I like my short story. It’s coming together entirely different than I anticipated. Stories have a tendency to do that to me. I think I know what’s happening and where things are going, and then it all takes a sudden right hand turn and I’m left grabbing the wheel trying desperately to compensate.

And now, a haiku:

Mythbusters

Science in action

Missing eyebrow

Don’t look at me like that, you’re the one who said I should write. I blame this entirely on you. I never said I could write well, I just said I liked to do it.

Youtube videos

Asking about episodes

Never praising me

Now that was a technically correct haiku because it was 5-7-5. But seriously, that’s all people want to know about my videos. “What episode is this clip from?” This is especially true if I have already answered their question in the comments. And it seems to become more true the more I have repeated that answer. Why can’t they take five seconds to read the other comments and see if maybe I already answered their question? WHY??

OK, clearly my brain is fried. I’m going to quit while I’m ahead, and hope that tomorrow I will be able to make words into sentences again. And, you know, have them make sense.

Good night.

The Royal 'We'

I worked seven hours, exercised for an hour, ate dinner, and now I have to write something. Blah. Thank goodness I gave myself that extra day, because if I had to post something right now, I think I’d go crazy. I also don’t want to be up too late because I’m getting up at 4am to watch the Royal Wedding. (For some reason, I felt that needed to be capitalized, as though it were the title of a performance, which, let’s be honest, it will be. I mean, come on, those Brits know how to put on a show, amIright?) And why, you ask, are you going to watch this wedding at 4 am?

Let me start by saying I have shown absolutely NO INTEREST in this wedding until Wednesday evening. And then my mother told me that she remembers getting up at 3 AM to watch Diana and Charles tie the knot 30 years ago. And it suddenly occurred to me that this wasn’t the sort of thing that happens every day. We’re Americans, we don’t have royalty, so the traditions and frenzy over this wedding seems strange and archaic. But for Britain it is a celebration which unites her people. All over the world people will be watching the ceremony live, and there is something powerful about being a part of that. It makes me feel united too, even though I’ll be watching alone in my apartment. Also, I really like weddings.

I have no desire to get married, but I would like a wedding someday. Yeah, yeah don’t look at me like that. I have decided I won’t say I’ll never get married, because one shouldn’t close doors if one can help it, but that doesn’t mean I’m chomping at the bit. And I think I could arrange a party to which I wear a wedding dress when I’m rich and eccentric.

Oh, 600 words feels like agony tonight. I’m certain there were other things I wanted to write about, but I can’t think of them now. I just want to curl up, turn on Mythbusters, and fall asleep to the dulcet tones of science. I could finish this tomorrow. You wouldn’t even know. Ah the power I have. I could tell you I wrote this in twenty minutes whilst on the treadmill eating a salad, and you would have to believe me because HOW DO YOU KNOW??? OK, maybe that was a little far-fetched. And now I’m worried that you will never trust me again. I must tell you something honest.

You know that post I put up on Wednesday? At the end of it I said I was going to go to a kick boxing class. I didn’t go. My mother pointed out that it was there, in writing, I said I would go, and doesn’t that make me accountable? It should, but it didn’t. I got caught up watching this BBC show called The House of Eliott. Excellent show, I definitely recommend it. It is set in the 1920’s, and follows the Eliott sisters who are left penniless after their father’s death, and manage to open a successful dress shop. The fashion is wonderful, and the characters so delightfully British. We’ve been passing it around Otto, first to Deirdre because she had vein surgery and had to sit still for a long time, then to Annette, and finally to me. Anyway, I got caught up watching it, and didn’t go to the class. But I did exercise today, with weights and everything! I have no doubt I will have extremely sore arms. I used to have some nice muscle on my arms but now they’re just limp noodles. Is that 600 words? Yep.

Mythbusters here I come!

Julia

PS- There was no need to get up at 4AM, because nothing happened until 6AM. Still, I'm glad I watched it.

Never learned to share...

I'm just kidding, of course I learned how to share! My mother is a Kindergarten teacher, after all. I'm just not going to share what I wrote yesterday. Yet. I started a short story, but I'd like to have more than a page to show you, so I'm going to wait until I have more. You will just have to be patient. Just to tease you, it's called "The Man in the Forest" and I have a good idea how it ends, so hopefully that means I'll actually finish it.

See you tomorrow,
Julia

Update on Life

I’m already cheating. OK, maybe not cheating exactly, but let’s just say I started this project with a little cushion in case I miss a day. I wrote the first post on Sunday so that I would always be one day ahead. I’m still technically writing something every day, but if I do happen to miss a day, you won’t even notice!

This is also already proving more difficult than I thought. Yesterday, I was working on one of my perpetually unfinished novels, and suddenly found myself wasting an hour researching Greece. It wasn’t really a waste per se, because I did use that information, but it occurred to me that maybe instead of measuring my writing by number of words I should be measuring how much time I spend working on it. Sometimes I can write several pages in an hour, and sometimes it takes me that long just to eke out a paragraph. And, some days I have more time to devote than others… Listen to me, already making excuses. I will do absolutely anything to soften the blow of failure despite the fact that I haven’t even failed yet.

It never ceases to amaze me how much I try to save myself from feeling anything, while at the same time, I crave emotional experience through safe outlets like books and television and movies. When I finish a show (or ‘project’ as James used to call it when I was living with him and Kathleen) I mourn the loss of the characters as though they were real friends. In fact, I read an article on that very subject. I probably won’t be able to find it again, but the gist of it was that we use the same parts of our brain to engage with fictional characters as we do with real people, and therefore the relationships we share with them are just as ‘real’ as our real life relationships. The article even mentioned that when a show ends we enter a sort of mourning process in which we genuinely miss those characters like we would miss our friends. No wonder people are so nuts over celebrities. We connect to the characters they play and find difficulty in separating the two in our minds.

Anyway, enough melancholy nonsense. Let me tell you what else has been happening in my life. On Sunday, I took the opportunity which good weather and being off work provided by walking around the park. I hadn’t really meant to walk the whole park (which is a 5k run, by the way) but I missed the turn off, and by the time I got to another I figured it was probably just faster to continue around since I would most likely get lost otherwise. I walked again on Monday, though not the whole park this time, but plenty to get my heart rate up and make me wish I had a teleporter. I know for a lot of people exercising can feel wonderful. They reach a certain point and all their endorphins kick in and they get this amazing high and feel like they could go on forever. I’m not one of them. I reach a point where I just wish I was home in bed and why did I come out here in the first place and goodness me my legs are tired. On Tuesday morning (which is yesterday from your perspective because of course I’m writing this a day ahead of when you will see it) I got out of bed and had to do the Frankenstein monster shuffle just to get to the bathroom because I’m so sore. But it seems to be working because I had to eat four times on Monday just to keep up with my jump-started metabolism. I must remember to pick up snacks when I get groceries today. And on Wednesday I am going to take a Kick-boxing class at the YMCA. The same class I’ve wanted to take since I joined the Y a year ago, but this time I’m actually going to do it. Wish me luck.

Julia

Stupid Title # 1

I worked on that novel I was writing that used to be a comic book for today. Since I basically started it from scratch recently, I'll go ahead and post everything I've written so far. Also, I'm very bad at coming up with titles, so for now this thing is called The Eight. I'll say again: I don't guarantee that anything written here will be very good. But hey, at least I'm writing, right?

PS-I've waited to post this toward the end of the day to give people a chance to catch up on the fact that I'm posting things on my blog again. If you are one of those people, be sure to read the previous entry as it will explain a lot.

The Eight

You know that moment, right before the zombie horde (raised, no less, by a man you thought you could call a friend) breaks down the door and kills those people you’ve come to love as a second family, and everything suddenly shifts into perspective and you realize there are a lot worse things than knowing that out of 1000 people you survived a freak industrial accident which left 992 dead, 7 now sporting equally freaky genetic mutations (aka superpowers), and all you got was a one-way ticket to tea with the Grim Reaper at an indeterminate, but most likely near future, time and date?

No?

Maybe it’s just me.

I could start at the beginning, but who can say where this all really began? Was it when a little boy named Benedict Chant was born to two of the wealthiest parents on the planet? Or maybe when that same little boy grew up and started having visions about the end of the world? Or when that little boy, now a grown man, decided he could save the world by creating an army of superheroes but instead just ended up making a lot of people dead?

No, it’s not fair to blame everything on Benedict. However misguided, his intentions were good. And to be fair, the accident that wasn’t really an accident, wasn’t his fault.

Maybe that’s where it began, with the ‘accident’. But that’s too painful to recall. It’s blurry and confused, full of shrapnel and panic. I’m not sure I’m up to the task of putting it into words. What happened after, that’s what’s really clear. Those years we spent together, the eight of us who survived, locked up on an army base while they ran test after test, (locked up, they said, for our own safety, and therefore not imprisoned exactly, just not free to leave) those memories are sharp and fresh in my mind. It was the first time I can ever remember being really happy.

I know that sounds bad. After all, as I’ve already mentioned, 992 people died in that ‘accident’. What right had I to be happy after that? And I wasn’t at first. But as the years went by, the eight of us bonded in a way unlike anything I’ve ever known outside of family. But more so. This wasn’t just a bond of blood, it was a bond of shared experience. An experience so word-stallingly huge it actually changed our very DNA. Or, their DNA, anyway, we’re still not super sure on what happened to me. If anything.

We are family. Even Michael. I mean, hey, every family has its creepy uncle, right? And every family has its disfunctions.

Listen to me, babbling on about how to begin. Why am I even writing this at all, you might ask. There are already three books about what happened, one of which will be coming soon to a theater near you. But I thought it might be nice if someone set down the truth. And, as I am the only author who actually witnessed the events leading up to the attack of the zombie horde on Chant Tower, I think that makes me uniquely qualified.

Let’s start with the cast of characters. You’ve probably already heard their names, unless you happen to live under a rock, but I’m going to start from scratch anyway. Everything you’ve heard is from the media, which, frankly, makes it rather suspect. So let’s assume that almost everything you think you know is wrong, and let me describe them in my own words.

Anzu: Perhaps the most beloved of all of us by the public. And she’s pretty hard not to love. Anzu was born in Japan to a woman named Suzume. None of us had a chance to know Suzume, who was killed in the ‘accident’. Anzu was only five years old at the time, and could not tell us why her mother had brought her to Chant Industries that day. She also did not know who her father was or where he might be now. Much about Anzu’s past is unknown. And the scientists could not adequately explain how Anzu had survived when her mother had not. Of course, the scientists couldn’t actually explain how anybody had survived, but that’s beside the point. What is clear is that Suzume bribed one of the scientists into giving Anzu a shot. More on that later.

Anzu is bright and curious and wise beyond her eleven years on this earth. She is also exhaustingly energetic, and stubborn. She’s closest to Sophie, who became like a second mother to her. Right after the ‘accident’, Anzu was listless, in shock (as we all were) and there was some concern that she would be emotionally damaged by the violent loss of her mother beyond anyone’s capability to heal. But Anzu proved stronger than that. It was the animals that helped her understand. I should mention, Anzu came out of the accident with the ability to speak to animals. I asked her once what it was like, and she cocked her head to one side, her pigtail bouncing jauntily as she did, and said carefully, “It’s like listening to music. Even when there are no words, you know what it’s saying to you. My friends don’t use words…but I understand them.” She shook her head, the pigtails whipping back and forth. “It’s too hard to explain. It’s hard for me to imagine what it’s like not to understand them, you know?”

Anzu can also grow things. At the compound where we were locked away for six years, she had a little garden which delighted her. She could make things grow instantly, but she said the plants didn’t like that, so she tried to let them grow naturally if she could. She can also control the weather to some extent.

I don’t know if there are any tests for this kind of thing, but I’m pretty sure Anzu is the most powerful of all of us. Thank whoever is listening that Anzu is Anzu, and not likely to abuse that power.

Sophie was born and raised in Athens, Greece, where her family owns a bed and breakfast. She learned English at a young age, as well as French, German, and some Spanish from the number of guests she met there. In her own words, Sophie described her family thus: “After one of my great-uncles was killed for being associated with the communist insurgents in 1949, my family decided to stick their collective heads in the sand and remain firmly neutral with regards to anything of interest. They decided just to run their little inn, make the tourists happy and not get in anybody’s way. Which, naturally, made me run screaming off to America the second I received my invitation from Chant Industries. If there was even the slightest chance that invite was real, and I might actually get the opportunity to do something in this world, I was going to take it.”

Sophie was 28 at the time of the accident, and had never been further from home than the city limits. It isn’t difficult for me to imagine her chomping at the bit to get the heck out. Sophie is incredibly intelligent, especially when it comes to computers. She’s also somewhat naïve in regards to the practical things in life, and I worry that she has learned essentially everything about the world through computers which can create an odd mixture of cynical know-it-all and innocent no-practical-experience-all. She projects a world-weary stoicism, but inside she’s a sensitive little girl, liable to get her feelings hurt at the smallest slight. She also has a vivid imagination which helps her create the elaborate illusions of light and color she can now project as a result of the ‘accident’.

The scientists spent a long time trying to figure out if she was actually creating these hologram like visions, or whether she was affecting the visual part of the brain of those around her. They have yet to come to any useful conclusion.

The Challenge

A high school girl, who has never before shown an interest in photography as an art, decides that she will take a photo every day for a year. At first the photos are bland, ordinary representations of the world around her. But the more she looks through the lens, the more she sees, and soon, the photos shift to something more. With just one photograph a day she discovers a previously unknown piece of herself.

A similar story, about an author (I forget who, but my sister could tell you) who wrote a short story every day. One would have to believe that out of 365 short stories, the majority will be trash, but even if only a handful of them are good, it would be worth the effort.

Thus the challenge: to write something every day for a year. Just writing that sentence sends fear galloping up and down my spine. Could I really keep that up for a year? Maybe a smaller goal would be better. Say, a month. But then that feels like cheating. Besides, I didn’t say that I had to write a short story every day, just something. It could be anything, really. It could be a few pages of whatever book I feel like working on at the moment, or it could be a blog entry about my daily life, or it could even be a rant about how I have to write something that day and oh woe is me I don’t know what to write. And, let’s be honest, that will probably be the most common form this exercise will take.

I’m also not promising that any of it will be any good. As I said, the majority will probably be trash, but the idea is to improve, isn’t it? I have always loved to write, and felt that if I could just stick with it, I might actually finish something someday. But I only wrote when “the mood” struck. And more and more often, “the mood” refuses to strike. Hmmm. I’ve just taken a break to read an interesting article on forming habits. I had remembered hearing somewhere that repeating an action for a certain number of days made it into a habit, but I couldn’t remember what the number was, so I looked it up on ye old interweb. The article (which can be found here if you’re interested: http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/09/how-long-to-form-a-habit.php) references a study which showed it took an average of 66 days to form a habit. Much longer than the commonly believed period of 21 days, which was probably the number I had been quoted. The article goes on to say that while 66 was the average, depending on the activity, it could take anywhere from 18 to 254 days to form a habit. More complicated habits, such as doing sit-ups every morning, took longer and more will-power than simply drinking a glass of water with every meal.

Will writing ever feel like a habit? Or will it always require great force of will on my part? Even this little introduction is beginning to feel excruciating. Every word dragged from my fingers as I struggle to make coherent thoughts.

Well, I’d best move on to the rules of this challenge. As I said, the writing can be about anything I want, though I will try to write the occasional complete story. Complete story. You hear that Julia? That means you can’t just peter out in the middle. Even if you have to spread that story out over a couple days. Which brings me to the next rule: it must be at least 600 words. That equals about a page. Which, when you think about it, is really NOT THAT MUCH. A page should be easy. I will also post it on my blog, which should keep me honest. I won’t necessarily post the entire thing, especially if it’s part of one of the books I’m perpetually writing, but I will at least post that I did write something, and what it was, and why I’m not sharing it.

Well, this has taken me right on through 700 words, so, I guess that means it can be done. See, that wasn’t so hard.

See you tomorrow.

Julia