Yesterday I finished Percy Jackson’s last quest. For now, at least. I might say that it was enjoyable, but, I think that’s doing it a disservice. Inside I’m a twelve year old with a hero complex and I can’t wait for to get my first magical staff and take it out into the world. Except the world will be mostly dust and the cities that are few and far between will be made of glass. I take my time. I think about these things.

I often talk about forgetting the things you love. I do it all the time. Getting too wrapped up in the city streets or the dirt of the abandoned wastelands. I live in a tiny spot that is overfilling with things and I forget to move things aside, peer what is underneath.

In the fourth grade I remember reading Greek myth and hating Hera because she let her husband do whatever he wanted to do. Literally. I’ve read the Odyssey twice in my life. I have copies of the Iliad and Mythology in my room. On my shelves. I’ve pulled them down and started to make stacks. Ancient wars. Heroes’ journeys. Epic poetry. The things that I based my life on as a youngster. All the things that mattered and were important to me in literature. In college I forgot about these things. I studied modern lit, I studied medieval lit, I studied Dante. But I forgot about my strong feelings towards Odysseus. I forget my interest in Medusa. My style-desire for her hair, no matter how terrible that may seem.

I find half written lists all the time. Things to get back to. Things to remember. Things you once loved. It is just another few words and titles and names on a list, but I am going through the list. I am remembering these things. I am putting them to use.

They don’t call me a genre-crasher for nothing.

Most people I know like to travel through the words of YA/Teen Literature. Pretty simple but engrossing. A fairly hard thing to do these days. Plots are cleaner, more forgiving. You can read them quickly, get through them, enjoy them. I have my own shelf of them in my quiet bedroom, hidden behind action figures and old broken cameras. Used, well read paperbacks I’ve gotten from other people, like trade agreements in the backalleys. I read them. I decide to keep them or pass them along.

But sometimes, the truth is, I like to take it a step further. I go down another notch on the ladder. I step further into the bookstore. Up against the wall of the back shelves where everything is brightly colored and the sentiments are almost exactly what you see on the page.

I read Middle Grade Fiction. Stories aimed at young boys. And I like it.

Maybe it’s my shonen manga sensibilities. The years of wading through Bleach and One Piece and all those fun, action, adventure stories. All those boys who were told they couldn’t do it and then they did. All those bits of triumph and depression and the ability to just keep on going.

Twelve year olds going on an adventure? I read the hell out of that. I enjoy it. I know I’m not alone and I’m okay with that. So, excuse me while I read through the entire Percy Jackson series while I take a break from literature that’s more age appropriate. Excuse me while it reminds me of my deep deep fascination and knowledge of Greek mythology. Excuse me while it reminds me I studied the exact wrong things in college when I was there.

These things have got to be allowed, or I wouldn’t know what else to do.

I’m more or less the most thrilled I have been in a long time. I live a fairly thrifty lifestyle. Most of my clothing is handmade, I scour the dollar store for oddities, and I keep technology long past it’s prime. None of this bothers me, living my life looking out a small window with handprints on the panes of glass. I covet ever so slightly, save my pennies and each thing I own becomes woven in with me.

The big things is, right now, what I’m waiting for is the delivery truck to pull up and drop off something special. I have gotten myself my first DSLR.

After spending a lifetime of what feels like using borrowed cameras and mostly out-of-date systems, I will finally have a tiny black box that is mine. A lens to capture the light. I can put my old Minolta SLR on the shelf for a nap, I can wash off the remembrance of the scent of developer fluid off my fingertips. I can do things simply. I can put together moments and visions in a way that is my world. I can will the things I know in my head into the outside with ease.

Pictures to match words are a necessary for the storybook that is Dark Dark Cities. When it comes together, I think you will be happy.

Last week or so, Ley discussed the external, the set-up, the before-hand motion of work. It got me thinking. Thinking about all the put together things and places I exist in, the way writing happens before it actually happens. In my bed. In this desk chair. In that shower. It got me thinking that what I have right now is the best set up I ever had for writing. Better than the stark white dorm room with room for nothing or the card table set up in someone’s spare room. As much as I love setting, this is my setting. I have given myself the perfect setting.

In my room, I feel like a mermaid. Everything is tinged in teal: the desk, the bed, the ottoman. I flail around in bed, rolling with the sheets and covering my head with the pillows. It is like lying underwater. Sounds warbled, senses heightened. I keep my city lamp to remind me of the places I write about, my orange lava lamp to remind me of the dark crime syndicates I used to type about when it was the only light I had, my wall of books as my goal. My room, is in fact, filled with pictures of places first and people second. Rooftops and stairwells and trains and skyline pieces. They hover at my backside as I write.

Above all, I believe in sounds. I love music, I love post-rock. I love electronic blips and glitches, light in the form of sound. But the truth is, sometimes I can’t listen to a thing. Sometimes I have to turn the music down real low. Real, real, real low and listen to just the words as they reverb in my head. Poetry taught me to read aloud as I wrote. I stop and repeat lines. This is why I go at it alone.

I write in bed or at the desk. I write on the floor. For right now this is my dream setup. I couldn’t imagine anything else.

II.

There has been a lot of talk about a person’s ten rules of writing around lately.
Here’s what I subscribe to:

1. Find you space, make it your space. If it doesn’t work, move on and start from the beginning again.
2. Keep a notebook by your bed or in your bed. The best inspiration comes in bed. It comes when you’re half asleep.
3. Write everyday, no matter what. Write about yourself, about what you like. Write fiction. Write a letter. But write everyday.
4. Be active, stay active. You don’t think of stories on your walks, but, it clears out your brain so stories can move in.
5. Find your friends that don’t live in this world, the same way you don’t live in this world, discuss the hard parts with them.
6. Get on the floor, write by hand, write large, use big paper, write in the word processor, try not to get caught up in the mechanics of things and just write.
7. Read and watch things. Look at art books. Look at photography. Inspiration just isn’t in other’s words, it’s in other’s things.
8. Put together things how you see fit. Don’t struggle with method and constructs.
9. Learn to quell the anxiety, the need to share instantly and calm down your need to procrastinate heavily. Some days are better than others at this.
10. Don’t let yourself have any excuses. Just write.

III.
There should be concrete evidence this week regarding some projects that everyone should be getting excited about. I’ll let you all know the minute they pop.

“You want to go home and do what?”
“You actually like that stuff?”
“Really?”

Yes. Maybe I have to say it a bit louder, a bit stronger. Maybe I have to ground my feet into the ground and put my hands on my waist and maybe, just maybe I have to wear a track jacket and my running sneakers while I do it.

I like the Olympics.

I have always liked the Olympics. I will never not like the Olympics. Yes, I am an Olympics fan girl.

That means, of course I remember when Tonya bashed Nancy’s knee in, I watched all of Phelps’ races, and yeah, of course I was quite the fan of those good looking Russian male gymnasts a few years back.

I get all nervous when ice skaters are about to do their jumps and twist and turns. I get a little teary-eyed at the tacky-but-engrossing biopic pieces between coverage. I am twitter commentating every single fashion choice, every single win, every single loss.

I am an Olympics nerd.

So yeah, by next year I won’t be following Ohno, Weir and Celski’s path as methodically as I am now. But let me have it. Let this Star Trek watching, Fiction writing, antisocial nerdgirl enjoy her Olympics.

Don’t raise your eyebrows in total confusion. Don’t ask me twice. Suspend your belief for just a moment and consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe…

I totally dig the Olympics.

so if you’re wondering why the updates are slow, well, that’s your answer…

I picked up a journal and ripped out it’s insides. They are for taking apart and putting back together. I have piles and piles of paper and I sat between those piles and piles of paper and pulled out the ones that fit just right. I glued my fingertips to the broken signature seams and filled the gaps in on the parts of my life I rather forget. I laid in the white space but I wasn’t sure what to write. What to say.

Evolution.
You are never ready.

Ten years ago I read Nicole Blackman’s Blood Sugar. It changed my life. I don’t believe in idols, but, if I did, she would be mine. I would sew those words into everything I own and push them under my skin. It is an obvious choice. You see it now, don’t you?

In the white space I laid out, the only thing I knew to write was what she once told us, lost in both a song and language. I steadied my hand in my best writing I wrote the words (Clear and more concise here. Clear and easier to read).

And I thought about how much of my life is planning. How much of my life is trying to get things straight to be done right. How much of my life is waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Even when I think I am not waiting, I am still waiting. How much I need a reminder not to wait. Not to be afraid. Not to plan again and again and again.

Under it I wrote my list for my evolution. What do I need next. I breathed on the page and the hidden things I didn’t want to admit to myself about the way I need to be living my life appeared on the page. The tiny steps not written down anywhere else, words drawn in on top of pictures of graffiti-ed buildings and damask patterns.

The truth is, I do not know where I want to go from here, but that needs to be okay. I need to be easier on myself. The truth is, I won’t know how to prepare because I do not know what is coming. None of us do. But everyday, each one of us is going on and on and on and on.

My small goals are small. They fit in my tiny cups of water. It is all I can do for now. This will have to be okay.

For now, this is my evolution.

Sometimes, I like to take note from my partners in crime. Today this post idea comes from Lorelle of Phoenix Rising, based on her post, “Why I Want to Be a Writer“.

I have never not written.
I will never not write.

I have an obsession with all the places I have yet to be. An obsession with all the places that have yet to exist. It’s a certain obsession I can’t put aside. I can’t forget about. My mind creates places and then creates people to put inside those places. I give them tiny lives and I watch them surround one another, intersecting and falling away from one another. It is pattern play.

I have always had stories, I have always fictionalized myself. There was no part in my lifeline where I decided to be a writer. I tried to shrug it off and push it aside, but it always comes back. It doesn’t haunt, but it’s this perpetual feeling of heaviness in my body. If it is not what I am doing, I feel wrong. Not incomplete, but wrong. Incorrect. As if I am going against the matter inside of me.

I am a writer because I believe I have too much inside of me and it has to get out, out, out. Because when someone else sees it and it makes sense to them, I have a sense of understanding. Of peace. I made a connection. Writing is my connector. Connector, connector. Every story is a connection, every line and word and paragraph. I like the puzzle of it. I like putting it together. There are subtle details and revelations I didn’t know at the beginning that keep me at it. If at the end I put everything together in a tight, neat collection of words then I am pleased. It is how I know I am a writer, because I will keep at it.

Everything, everything goes together. Words, situations, characters, settings. Stories emerge. Everything goes together, me being a writer. Stories will emerge.