In order to help people navigate through the piles of fiction I have written:

SO IN CASE THERE IS SOMEBODY I HAVE NOT YET SHOWN THIS TO:



Came from a post in capslock_khr by emmayori , who I do not know at all. But I cannot stop laughing at this.

Dear Subway workers:

When I ask for some spicy brown mustard on my sandwich, I do not want to drown in it. I just want a little bit of mustard. A hint of mustard, to tantalize the senses and perfectly compliment the taste of the turkey. I do not want to bite into my sandwich and taste nothing but mustard. We have had this conversation before. Stop giving me an ocean, and then complain that that's the standard amount of mustard they always put on a sandwich. I do not want standard. I want a little bit of mustard.

Also stop giving me weird looks when I ask for a bacon and turkey sandwich. That is a viable combination of sandwich meats.

Sincerely,
Me




...I notice also I am out of Vanilla Coke again.

Procrastinating. I have no desire to work on either Russian or Journalism. Therefore, old meme!

o1. Grab the nearest book.
o2. Open the book to page twenty-three.
o3. Find the fifth sentence.
o4. Post the text of the next five sentences in your journal along with these instructions:
--Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
--Tag five other people to do the same. (Nah, just do it if you want to)

Out running errands today I had to make a stop at the Office Depot to buy pens, which is always a dangerous thing for me because I am a sucker for pens and notebooks and binders. But walking down the art supply aisle I felt a really strong desire to start drawing again. I used to attempt to draw pictures all the time and just...quit for reasons I'm not entirely clear on, probably because I entered IB and just didn't have time to do that and do music as well. I ended up going next door to the Michael's for art supplies, which is when some of the reasons for quitting art became clear to me:

1) Colored pencils are hella expensive. Just like everything else.
2) I have never ever learned how to handle watercolors, pastels, or paint with any amount of success
3) I can never get anything to come on paper like I want it to.

Never having had any formal art training, the problem with drawing seems to be a lot like my problem with writing- I can't seem to settle on a particular style of my own. Not that I'm going to give up, but I can see this is going to be a lot harder than I expected it was going to be XD

I'm glad I didn't get colors, only pencil and charcoal, though. Colors tend to make things waaaaaay too complicated right now, and I think I probably need to focus on basic lines and shading more than color. It'll be interesting to see how this goes.

For some bizarre reason these past few weeks I've been on a huge movie kick. I can't seem to decide which movies I want to watch, so I keep starting and stopping things, but I did manage to get through a few: The Swan Princess, Sleeping Beauty, 9, District 9, and Repo! The Genetic Opera. Commentary is as follows:
( I need to find better movies to watch... )





Not included in these reviews are Moulin Rouge and Hunchback of Notre Dame because they were just pretty awesome, and compared to those five I really had nothing else to say about them. I think that's a measure of how pleased I was with them. On the list to watch: Public Enemies, Citizen Kane, 500 Days of Summer and whatever else I come up with. Also Lucky Number Slevin, because I can't remember what happens.

My problem with movies seems to be that I keep looking for the same things I want in books- I want plot, I want well-defined characters, I want it to inspire some feeling or thought. I want to be impressed. To be completely and utterly honest, some of those movies I listed did that very well- I still find Sleeping Beauty moving after all these years, though it wasn't what I remembered it to be. 9 and District 9 were thought-provoking in a lot of disturbing ways. But I can't help wondering if I'm just watching all the wrong movies if I want sweeping, epic drama that really delves into the human psyche. I haven't seen a movie come out recently that really did that for me. Maybe I need to look harder.

ALSO CLICK THE KRAKEN:

Click Me!

I told parthian_shot that I was going to make a conscious attempt to start using my journal again (to push her into using hers, so you had better do it, Senpai), so I have come back to do this after I have sworn many times to come back and do it anyway. That's the problem when your life is kind of boring- there's just not that much incentive to talk about it. So I'm in college. So I'm really bored with Microeconomics. So I also need to go blog about the news for last week and this week. So trying to help pissed-drunk customers on a football game day when the lines have 30 people sucks.

Let's talk about books!

Recently after a fiasco with the bank I finally got my debit card. What is the first thing I use it for? BOOKS. NATURALLY.

To be fair...I only went in to Barnes and Noble for a copy of Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tales because I recently apped Kay from Fables only to realize the copy I remembered from my childhood belonged to my family and I wasn't allowed to bring it with me. Okay, no big deal. I have a car. I have expendable income. I skipped off to get my own.

They were having a sale on beautiful leatherbound copies of collected works of various authors. I am a sucker for beautiful books.

So I'm out $60 or so, a little more, but I now have Anderson's Fairy Tales, The Complete Tales and Poems of Poe, The Complete Sherlock Holmes and The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll in hardbound leather. With no room on my shelf for them.

It's kind of funny- I've read them all before, but I find as I get older that I keep wanting to go back and read the books that I loved as a kid. The Phantom Tollbooth is one (and it's on my list of things to buy next time I go to Barnes and Noble, which is not going to be for another two months at least so I can't abuse my debit card anymore). And then there's The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, which was the first work of fiction I ever read (and another book I also need to get). I loved Poe, even though now that I've gotten older sometimes I find him a little overdramatic and tedious. And yet when I look at my writing I find that he's been something of an influence on me. Sherlock Holmes seems just as brilliant to me now as he did when I was 12. I ended up writing one of my papers for IB English on absurdism in The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland.

What really bothers me, though, is that when my sister brings friends over- none of them have heard of these books. Don't get me wrong, if they want to read Twilight, more power to them. I read those books. They're a guilty pleasure. I read them and I laugh hysterically. I can't believe at the abuse that woman puts her thesaurus through, and I wish she would go learn what plot is. I remember people reading The Babysitter's Club when I was in elementary school (I never read those, has anyone else? Are they actually any good? I thought the premise was stupid, but then again, I was the girl who pushed aside Barbies to play Robin Hood), so I mean, it's not like I expect everyone to read great literature, and I realize that children's books aren't fantastic novels or anything. There are series designed specifically to appeal to people who just want something to tear through that isn't thought-provoking. Yet it disturbs me anyway when the only thing they read is those sorts of series, and they haven't heard of anything else and don't want to hear of anything else.

I understand people are not me. I can't think of many other people who sat down and read Tolkien's Lost Tales at age 11 and were absolutely enamored by them (IF YOU'RE OUT THERE, LET'S FAN IT UP). But I worry. I guess reading something is better than reading nothing at all, but really. Who chooses Bella Swan over Alice?



...I guess people who don't blow over $100 at Barnes and Noble in one go.

Also as a side note I am secretly proud of myself for going back to my writing exercises finally and will now be playing catch-up on them for the past two months. All in the name of art.

The last time I was here was December, yeah? Yeah. WOW. Long time ago. I could make all sorts of excuses, but I'll call it like it is and blame my absence on school. Internal Assessments and all of that. They just never go away...LIES. Because after the end of this month they can't give me any more of them, ever again! It's cause for celebration! I can see my life at the end of this tunnel! Waiting for me to reclaim it! Ignoring the possibility that it might actually be a train!

Anyway, I also realized I promised holiday stories...but my mother deleted my writing folder in the first week of January before I could post any of them, and I haven't found time yet to rewrite them. Until now, since I stayed home today with a delirious fever and decided I would get started on that again. thelovemafia</lj> , I promised you Tsuna/Shou ages and ages ago, I know. Please forgive me for being so late!

( Wallflower )

So I've been feeling kind of guilty lately about not really trying to write as much as I used to--I mean original stuff. I really wanted to do NaNo this year (but when I look back at what I was doing November, I was like "Well, hello, chemistry IAs and huge projects in almost every class." So it would have been a failure. Also I have no novel ideas at the moment, apart from the Cain story, which is still floating around and I'm still carrying around that notebook changing things and not writing it). Well, anyway, today I resolved that I would write, come hell or high water. And I conveniently skipped the football game tonight to go chill in the bookstore and ended up later on lurking in the back of my car for an hour writing this.

( The shortest short story I ever wrote... )

So I haven't written fanfic in awhile, but the last week's chapter really prompted me to try something again, and this idea was knocking around, so I figured, why not? Go for it.

( Questionable- A Fran Fic )

Dear God, what is this madness of three internal assessments in chemistry due Friday which are cramping my lifestyle and generally rendering me into a state of sleepless wreckage. Delaying all my fanfiction and regular writing and Dhieta's ridiculously long email, onee-chan, it will get there soon, I swear it. As soon as I figure out how potatoes are supposed to be encorporated in this lab. Also, thelovemafia, no fair poking the muse! YOU KNOW I CANNOT RESIST ANYTHING SHOUICHI! *promptly blows off all work to write*

But randomly, I had a project for one of my classes that ran like this: Pick a painting and write a poem about it. I'm actually slightly proud of this poem- therefore it is being posted.

The painting was "Nighthawks", by Edward Hopper:




"Though the light falls through the café windows
and at the bar a couple sits and chats
still there is a loneliness to the night,
as if out beyond the fluorescent haze
there is nothing. And will be nothing. And
my footsteps will echo along the streets
beneath the neon of a city that
sleeps within light, sleeps in day, lives in night,
in drinks, in back alleys, under a sky
that cannot be seen, alone at a bar."

It's even in blank verse...

Eh. I'm not fond of this. The idea was cool, but I didn't like the way it came out.

I am very tired, but I did finish it.

 

So I've been away for awhile, or at least...I haven't been writing much. I've been spending my summer laying around the house reading books (I'm rereading Atlas Shrugged again. Why am I reading this book again? But Howard Roark, for reasons unknown, is starting to remind me a lot of Spanner) and...watching movies with my sister (I saw Hellboy II the other day with her and my father, which sucked in terms of plot and dialogue but had really cool creatures and the elf prince had abs like a Greek statue, so I was entertained!) and also RP-ing (dropped EverNoir, but I'm playing Envy from FMA, Dino Cavallone and Lloyd Asplund at Conscripted, so THAT'S AWESOME!) while trying to get into new series, like D.Gray-Man, which I just finished yesterday.

But I've also been taking a class on creative writing for something to do, so this story is actually an assignment I had to do last week as a writing sample. It had to be based on your personal experience, or on somebody else's personal experience, so let me say right now--most of this happened to me. Only one thing is borrowed from somebody else, and even then, not much.

 

 I realize I'm really late, but...HAPPY BIRTHDAY, dame_batsie! I decided to do the Code Geass prompt, afterall, because both you and cleartempest  wanted 100S and I'm not up for writing two different stories. So that one can be some sort of shared story and I'll write her something else, too, because...I only have one idea for that pairing. And I really wanted to try writing Lelouch and Suzaku XD

 

 
cleartempestgave me G! She must think she's being funny or trying to be difficult or something...

grenville, I finished I finished I finished! I'm going to have to IM you or email you or something to let you know (or I could just call you. I actually have your number now! *evil laughter*) and I'm really sorry it took me so long, but you did request S80 porn. And while I'm glad you didn't ask for Xanxus/Squalo, this is still hard. But I'm perfectly willing to write it for you! You lurker XD I <3 you, Kit! I wish you would write fanfiction but I know you don't think you can. Still...I'm cheering for you no matter what!!!! Because I know you're going to be the next David Sedaris! (Does this mean you'll write about the lives of your family and your friends, myself included, the way he does? DO IT! It'd be amusing to see what you have to say about all of us)

dame_batsie, the prompts you gave me are so good I might have to write both...

And mujakinotsubasa, you took advantage of me! Two stories for one is not a fair trade, you brat!

 

I took a bath today, for the first time in a long time. It was fun. I played with ducks. We have some that light up when they're put in water.

Sorry it's late. And somewhat short.

Bleh. I didn't think it was long enough to warrant two posts. Part One here