A Story!

Dec. 29th, 2011 09:35 pm
noctuary: (books)
This is a story for @Canannada and it is partially historically incorrect, just because there's only so much research I feel like doing. Anna wanted a bittersweet story and listed some stuff that could be included, like candles and Canada.


~

Oh, John. I write this knowing it will never reach you; yet I live in hope.

I have sponsored another expedition to find some trace of you and your men, though they tell me it is hopeless to continue to search. Perhaps they are right, but I shall never stop until I find some sign of you, e'en if it cost me every penny I posses.

I imagine you in the Arctic wastes of far-north Canada, perhaps in a tent of animal skins, living with some native tribe. You are warm and well-fed, and the children teach you their little games to pass the winter.

Do you wear furs and animal skins? Do you hunt with these people, and fish through the ice? do you think of me, and make plans to travel south somehow and find civilisation, that one day you migh
t see me again?

I do not blame you, my dear John. I have heard stories of how very cold it is in Canada so far north. Perhaps it would be all but impossible for you to make your way back alone. Do any of your men survive? I hope they do. Their poor wives.

Inglefield will be leaving soon, on the
Isabel. I have a good feeling about this expedition, John. I do. God willing, they will find some trace of you. I will not rest until you return to me - or I am brought some evidence of your death.

You may rest assured that I am not idle. I have been travelling a great deal with your dear niece Sophia. She has been a wonderful companion to me in the years you have been lost, as have the "old Arctics" that have been so kind as to brave the icy North to find you for me.

I am in Scotland often these days; the Orkney Isles are as close as I can be to you. It is deathly cold in winter, and I wonder if you feel the self-same chill in your bones.

An
d you know, John, if nothing else, these expeditions I have sent to find you have brought back such fascinating records of the Arctic. How I long to hear you read them to me in the drawing room by the fire!

God willing I will have news of you soon. For now, I will dream and hope.

Now I shall fold this letter and hold it to the candle flame. Whether in the Canadian Arctic or in Heaven I pray its essence will reach you.

Eternally Yours,
Jane.
 

~

There you are Anna! I hope you like it.

There used to be a really depressing documentary about the Franklin Expedition on youtube but I can't find it any more. :(

noctuary: (Default)
I've been MIA from here for a while. I guess I've fallen into tumblr and the nano forums and lost track of this place. Besides... this is my writing and reading blog, and I haven't been reading much lately, or keeping up with my writing.

That is to say, I hadn't. Of course it is NaNo month, so I've been pulled back into things, writing daily (or near enough). It's good to be doing that again. I even scribbled some notes for my other novel last night, and it's funny that in the midst of this mad dash, trying to cobble together a new novel, the MC of my other novel is still foremost in my mind. Turns out I knew her a lot better than I always thought I did.

At any rate, the Heathen places in LJ are pretty, um, yeah. Quiet and dead. The Lokeans community is still running OK, but I think I should poke around in this place to find some more Heathen communities.
noctuary: (Default)
So, there's a short story competition running here at the moment. Entries close on the 26th of this month. I was thinking of sending in two stories... one I haven't yet written and "Where is Sleep" that I recently posted here. It turns out I can't do that... all entries mustn't have been "published or broadcast", which I'm fairly sure means blogs as well. Damn. That means more work, and I have no ideas. I should knuckle down with notebook and pen. Speaking of pens, my signo is nearly out of ink. Fuck.

In other news, I have finally finished Titus Groan, which was written by a very GOD of the English language, at whose feet we are not fit to scribble. Wow. One day, a review? Possibly. For now, 10 out of 10, if you have not read it your life is bland and lifeless, please go forth and enrich your soul.

Dear god!

Jul. 16th, 2011 11:03 pm
noctuary: (Prose)
God, I'm feeling too critical.

My editing is over. Now the proper rewrite of the end of Novel #1 is to begin in earnest. And it is hard.

Part of me doesn't want to do it. I can tell. Part of me keeps jumping up and down and pointing at another unfinished novel, insisting that polishing that to a sparkling shine would be easier. (To be honest, it probably would be.) This is in part because I'm having such difficulty just creating. Editing, now, that I can do... Now I have my hand in, I'm an editing god. But creating? Well....

I'm a good writer. I know this. Even my drafts are pretty well put-together. Sure, a few paragraphs need re-doing, and sometimes something needs to be rewritten to make sense, and bits and pieces need to be moved around. Overall, though? It reads well. And I'm a critical bitch. So on that score, I am happy.

But now I'm returning to a point of pure creativity, where I'm supposed to set aside the plans and the critical eye and the inner editor and just let the story flow. And it's really difficult re-programming myself to do that.

I remember a month or three ago complaining at how hard it was to edit when what I wanted to be doing was creating. Once I hit my stride, though, editing was a lot easier to do. Still exhausting, but I could get through five pages in an hour so long as I wasn't procrastinating.

Tonight I've written about 550 words. This surprised me. I didn't think I'd get anything done. I'd like to hit between 1000 and 2000 words a day. Hopefully that would mean finishing the novel within a month or two. I realise hitting that number might not always work, but I have to keep it there because if I don't have an aim, I won't get anything done. So I've written 550-ish words tonight. And MS Word is sitting there, open, ready for me to continue. Frustration welled up - and here I am.

Why so frustrated? I feel like i don't know where I want to go next. Now I have an eventual aim in mind, I just have to circle the novel back around to meet it. My character has two or three more works of art to meet, and I have to re-assess what I want those to be. All these ideas are almost blocking me. My character is lying there on the bed looking around herself with a lazy air - and that's good. Meanwhile I, the writer, am sitting here worrying over what has to be done and how I'm going to get there. I'm not sure what to do about that.

Obviously this is my problem, not the novel's problem. Once I can set those worries aside, I can breathe and let it flow. I also have to bring myself to put down/lock up the Inner Editor, as well, and leave a clumsy sentence as clumsy for the time being. I've put a marker into the text so I know what's been edited and what hasn't. This is very difficult for me, as I've always been a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to crafting an excellent sentence, and of late I've just been writing short stories, drabbles, bits and pieces. I've been paying great attention to the craft of those as I write them. Now I'm to stop that and just go hell for leather, I squirm. I don't waaaant to. But I must.

At least I now have the opportunity once more to say to myself "2000 words a day" and aim for that. Accomplishing a word goal is always a pleasing feeling. I will feel as if I have accomplished something - for a change.

noctuary: (Clocks)

@whereisjustin aka Anna aka Justyn (that'd be how I tend to think of her) was tired a night or two ago and requested a story about being tired. I have written a story about being tired. I know all the fuck about being tired.


~ Story temporarily excised ~


The difference between this girl and me is that I usually have my laptop next to me in case of nighttime boredom and I don't bother even trying to sleep until at least 2 or 3 in the morning. Fuck you, sleep disorders. Thank god I'm not working at the moment. I remember that special hell.

I found my old folder of short stories on my computer. Some of them are fucking good. But I still think I'll write a new one for this upcoming competition. Most of them seem to involve penises, for some reason. (Don't you judge me.)
 

On Writing

Jul. 4th, 2011 09:36 pm
noctuary: (Clocks)
I've been thinking lately. About things. Writing things, and so forth. I keep picking out lines I like in books that I want to capture the feeling of, I keep nailing down quotes about the craft of writing or about literature that I want to embody in my work. I've been highlighting things. I've been working out what I love but also what I want to write, and those aren't always the same thing.

I've begun understanding some of the reasons I love writing - and not just creative writing, but journalling, blogging, posting in forums, twitter. I can express myself in writing in ways I have difficulty expressing myself aloud... but I'm getting better at the latter. I've noticed more and more I'm beginning to speak more like the way I write.

One of these reasons is that often, there is a near-continuous stream of dialogue in my head. Sometimes all it does is scream "FUCK" over and over. I channel it into daydreams, sometimes. Which means sometimes my daydreams are just terrible things, and often they jump all over the place. I could never do to my book characters what I end up doing to the characters of my daydreams. I suppose because daydreams are much more fluid. I know when I'm feeling low sometimes because of how much shit I'm putting the Day Dream People through. But when I write, the dialogue shuts up. Well, not so much shuts up - the right words come instead of random words, and they line up properly in a way that is pleasing. The babble falls into the background. I have no issues with thinking as a matter of course, but I think better still when I write, whether by hand or with a keyboard.

But highlighting. I've been highlighting the odd line, or taking it down. Only books with ideas I want to draw from - not, for example, Mervyn Peake, whose every line is a masterful creation and yet whose marvellous style and themes are different from my own.

I find myself rereading Silence of the Lambs and impressed by his style. I think he has influenced by own more than I realise.

I've been coming across a lot of... I don't know, discouraging matters, I suppose. A lot of "don't expect to get anywhere", some of it from blogs of actual writers. A lot of "you will have to be a whore to become big or make any money". I appreciate the realities of life but if I accept them as inevitabilities rather than obstacles to be overcome I'll bury myself in doubt and lose all my dreams to the abyss of It's Hopeless To Try.

I need to do something like reread one of Amanda Palmer's blogs and remind myself that Art Is Worth It. Because it is. My greatest hope is to share that with others through my work.

noctuary: (Default)
I feel very guilty. I haven't been doing my exercises the past couple of weeks. I know, the only way to get around that is to just pick up the damn book and start over. I haven't done yet. But I will, just give me some time. As soon as I finish this post - I swear.

It's Yuletide, and a time for telling stories. Hopefully I'll get some good reading done this week, and some good writing too. It's all a part of the rich tapestry that is my religious tradition. Or whatever. I'm still not waking up anything like the time I want to and I often feel tired and frustrated because of this. I miss out on most of the day, which is not something I want to do; I may feel more awake at night, but I also don't feel particularly like working once it hits a certain hour. I'm also pretty sure that the "no liquor before five" rule should be changed for those of us who get up after noon. You know. Pushed back.

Sigh.

noctuary: (absinthe)
Sometimes I look at what other people take from prompts, and I feel like I don't have any imagination. Whatever they come up with always seems to much more rich and interesting and original. Then I look at myself and think myself a poor writer - "what sort of a writer has talent with words, but no imagination??" and get mopey and depressed. With non-prompty,-non-writing-exercisey short stories, I tend to have trouble coming up with ideas at all.... Short stories in themselves are difficult, because of twist endings and implied meanings and so on, but I like the freedom of construction and function they can sometimes present. They're exciting to do.

Today I took a prompt and did something I consider Interesting. That, along with my okay-idea-but-poor-execution drabble from the day before yesterday, make me think this collection of exercises could turn into a trove from which to pull ideas and concepts and drafts to shape into proper short stories one day in the future, when I feel the need to craft one and can't think of an idea. The little purple leather-bound book (jasart, pretty, soft, nice to hold and have but not the most satisfying to write in) I've been writing these things in is slowly turning into a trove. Not a treasure trove as such because there's going to be a lot of dross in there too. But a bible of ideas and possibilities for the future.

It's exciting, and I like that. I just have to keep up the scribbling of exercises and prompts, and allow myself to be truly free with whatever I scribble, because it doesn't have to be perfect or even good for me to use it for something great in the future.
noctuary: (Default)
Today's writing exercise - a 75-word drabble I may post in the future... or hell, at the end of this post - struck home one of my personal problems when it comes to writing short stories, and that is that I'm rarely sure when to stop. I often reach a point where I feel an end could be, but I'm unsure how to bring it about. I often also have more to say, so I keep going. Often it does come to a satisfying end, eventually. But one thing that often concerns me is whether something has been overstated. Do I ruin the story by keeping it going past the original point of "I-feel-like-the-end-could-be-here"? Is everything after this point just belabouring the idea, or spelling it out for the reader unnecessarily? Or is it the other way around.... if I stop too early, is the reader left wondering "what the fuck was that meant to mean?"? Am I failing to explain myself properly? Am I selling the story short (sorry) by not letting it breathe and take shape over more pages?

God even this post is awfully written today. It's just been an evening for it, I think. Forum posts a mess, brain all over the place with the wind. The wind is blowing a gale, and quite literally. It's fun and exciting and makes one feel warm and cosy, but it's just possible that it has also addled one's mind.

I think in the case of my vignette, I am happy with where it finishes - but I feel like there could be a lot more to it. I may well work it into a good short story in its own right. Of course, reading over the vignette itself, it's really awful.... Looks like it's a project for the future: to rewrite the entire thing as a genuine short story.
noctuary: (Default)
A success, in that I wrote something. It's shit, but it's something, and it's done and that's all I expected out of the situation.

A man dangled from a cliff. Another man helped him up. Princess Bride quotes were exchanged.

Then I thought to myself "Man, it's been fucking FOREVER since I've seen that movie".

Today is dooooone. DONE. Today sucks. God.
noctuary: (CDFreidrich)
My "Writer's Book of Days" has arrived. I admit I'm a bit disappointed with the quality of the paper - I'm the sort of person to whom that sort of thing is important - but it was half price, and the content appears to be as good as I hoped it was. Or at least of the type I hoped it was. Time, of course, will tell.

I'm going to start, hopefully, writing a piece a day. Some of them might fill in the backstories of some of my novel characters. Some might be new short stories with new characters. Others might end up being incorporated into novels half-written. Others might wind up being journal entries. few will end up being posted here. If I don't like the prompt given in this book, I might take one from one of the communities I'm a member of, or from the book of prompts I have. Regardless, I hope doing this will help both with my writing practise and with fleshing out my novel characters.

There are other things to work on, too. I keep stalling on my way through "The Ode Less Travelled" and should get some proper poems written that aren't sonnets. And, of course, I'm working on finishing the novel properly. I have less than 20 pages left to edit now, which itself is scary. I don't enjoy editing but I also don't know if I'm ready to run out of what I've already written and come to the point where I have to set aside my editing hat and put on the creating hat once again. The prospect is frightening... and while I don't want to get mired in short stories to shield myself from Finished Novel Land and the concerns of sharing and publishing that come with it, it could also be true that exercises here and there might bolster my creativity so I can finish it off.

And this sounds silly - or maybe not - but I think I need for these to be private. I might be going to put this novel out into the world for all to see, and perhaps one day, a book of short stories - Tales from Montmartre? - but these exercises, private, in a special private journal. Maybe shared on occasion, but written specifically for me. I always write for me, but often worry over how good this is or that, and who I can or should show it to.... these can be just for having.

Meanwhile I should be reading over the notes I took when I visited the Louvre last year, but I can't bring myself to do it. I feel a particular angst regarding them, for some reason. And, yes, as should be obvious my now, I am still writing this blog to avoid actually working. I mean, I've edited four or five pages today. I don't theoretically need to work any more today. But I want to (yet I procrastinate). I don't feel like I've accomplished anything today. I need that extra something, to help get the angst out.

noctuary: (CDFreidrich)
I don't want to edit today. Reading over a page or two of last week's editing has made me feel filled with angst and overly emotional, not properly melancholy as it should. I don't want to angst today. I'm not on top of things enough to angst today unless I'm pouring out angst in word form. Gaining angst is not the way I want things to go. Maybe a short story or a bit of a drabble later on, to satisfy today's Work Output Requirement.

In other news, a book I ordered from Book Depository arrived today. It left the UK on the 19th and arrived in my letterbox in New Zealand on the 23rd. Plus we have to take into account that NZ is half a day ahead of the UK. So that's some damn good quick delivery, especially since they deliver for free.

The book in question you, oh Reader, may well like. It is called "Q and A a Day" and consists of about four lines in which one is to answer a question of the day. Then when one has completed the year, one goes back to where one started and answers the questions again. You can watch your answers change across five years.

Which is good enough an idea as it stands but the book itself is beautiful. Thick but compact, hardcover, with thick, gilt-edged pages. It's a pleasing thing to hold and a pleasing thing to own. The cover is bound essentially in brown paper, and embossed with black. It looks marvellous.

I will save beginning to write in it until the Winter Solstice, which is upcoming, but I am impressed that it arrived so quickly.

Humn.

May. 20th, 2011 10:32 pm
noctuary: (Default)
The Schedule went pretty well yesterday, although I didn't get enough exercise in. But the lack of sleep the night before set me sleeping through my alarm this morning, so... so much for today. One soldiers on, however. At 10.30 with very-nearly-two-glasses of wine down my gullet (yes, Inebriati reference) I don't feel particularly inclined to doing any work, lest I scrap the whole thing and just have the two main characters having sex.

That's not meant to be how it goes! (In fact I should probably rewrite that entire page, or even two or three.... I get the idea I only wrote it in the first place to fill in my wordcount.)

Things I want to do right now:
Get drunk and watch noir with friends
Make friends who like to do things like get drunk and watch noir
Find a hard-boiled PI to fuck

Not necessarily in that order.

The little mood bat looks a lot happier than I currently feel. He's all "WOOO TEQUILA" and I'm all "I want to have angry sex with a PI from the 1930s. Fuck you, little bat." and "wine is good, but I am discontent".
noctuary: (Default)
I have written a Schedule.

The Schedule is to ensure that all the stuff I keep telling myself I'll do more of actually gets done. And the schedule says that from 12 to 12.30 I am allowed a break, and I am having a break to write this. Even though I am 45 minutes behind schedule, cough cough.

The Schedule is as follows!

10a.m.: Get up. Coffee, clothes, ready-to-face-dayness. Checking of twitter, etc.
11a.m.: Writing work. Novel editing or assorted other work such as poetry practice, short stories, etc.
12p.m.: (That's now.) Break. Meant to be going outside, stretching etc. but instead I am writing this post. Surprised? Me neither.
12.30p.m.: More writing.
1.30p.m.: Reading. (Something I do far less often than I feel I want to. Now I have a special time to do it in.)
3.30p.m.: Language work. I keep wanting to re-learn French and Latin, so I do that here.
5p.m.: Pagan reading. Personal note-taking or book-club reading.
6p.m.-whenever: Relaxing, eating, TV, internet. Also incorporates any further reading, writing etc I feel moved to do, including journal-writing and so on.
Midnight: Last opportunity for writing spurt. Wind-down. Prayer, possibly meditation (also an option during the 12p.m. break that I am currently pissing away on teh internets).
2a.m.: sleeps.

Went to bed just after 2 last night. Could not sleep for three and a half hours. Drifted off sometime before 6. Seriously?

I'm going to try this "sleep at 2" for a couple of weeks and see if I can get it to work. If I'm still struggling, and surviving on four hours of sleep (which I suck at) after a couple of weeks I'll re-write the schedule so that I can sleep enough to feel alive. Right now I am mentally exhausted and I can't believe I used to live like this constantly when I was working full time. Sure I get up late in the day, but I'm not lazy. I have a fucked up sleep phase or something.

And now I have procrastinated enough. I have.... seven minutes before I am meant to start writing again. I feel like falling asleep.
noctuary: (CDFreidrich)
A short little thing from a prompt that caught me. (I have been browsing Book Depository for a book to inspire and reading through a few previews. This one doesn't seem like something I'd want to buy, but one prompt did set me thinking.)


She sat behind a table in the café with tears in shining lines down her face. Wet blackness made a mess about her eyes, her mascara like ink smudged by a careless hand.
          She cried, and sipped her tea and didn't wipe her tears away. I suppose she felt she owed them the chance to see the world.
          She cried without a sound. Any sobs had long since died away and their harsh echoes hadn't touched the café walls and their hanging prints of Picasso and Pollock. Yet new tears still fell, unashamed, from each blue eye.
          From time to time her eyes would close, just for a beat. Then she would turn her face towards the steamed-up window and watched the blurred shapes that moved with such mad haste on the other side.
          When she left without a word through the café door I went to collect her payment from the little silver dish beside her cup. There I found a note, €20, and another in red ink writ on the bill:
          "Lies".


I'm not sure about that "writ" but I needed another syllable in there, but not two, so I couldn't use "written" and "upon" looked clumsy.
noctuary: (Letters)
One of the reasons I have been so slack the last couple of days (I tell myself as my eyes wander back to the Youtube tab, where another episode of Cheers beckons...) is that I have reached a page wherein I had apparently, writing my first draft, discarded my inner editor entirely (as is recommended) and just tried to get words down.

Fine.

But now I am left looking over the work and finding problems with every stilted sentence. I pour over thesauri because every paragraph has two or three words that just don't fit. I copy the odd sentence down into my notebook and sit with furrowed brow, poking and prodding, occasionally stabbing at the paper with a pen over and over and throwing the notebook across the room. I am tempted to print out these few pages just so I can have the tactile relief of balling them up and tossing them away.

It is frustrating: the right word proves had to find. This is the time I thought of to myself when writing the first draft, "That word doesn't sound good, but I'll worry about it later". This is later. Later sucks. All those bits and pieces, all those fragments of sentences I am so inclined to just worry about later cannot be pushed aside.

It is hard work. Each sentence needs to be teased apart. New sentences need to be inserted there, old ones need to be removed or totally remodeled. I can spend ten minutes on two or three words, trying alternatives, rearranging them, finally sighing and giving up only to stop halfway through the next paragraph and come back to hammer at them some more.

It is discouraging. I enjoy reading a half-page and thinking, with a warm glow, that I am a genius and that writing at top speed at 5 in the morning apparently works well for me. I like taking a paragraph that's already quite shiny and polishing it so I can see my face. Finding a page of dirty, tarnished paragraphs is disappointing.

But still. This is what we sign up for. And it may be frustrating, difficult and discouraging but when it is done I will feel I have actually accomplished something of merit. In the mean time, I think of my open word file with dread, and my mind tries to find me something else to do.
noctuary: (books)
The worst thing about not writing is that, though I am procrastinating, I don't feel like I can permit myself to procrastinate at anything productive. I procrastinate by buggering around on forums or reading webcomics. I procrastinate by playing spider solitaire while I watch comedies or documentaries on Youtube. I don't procrastinate by doing the dishes, or sweeping the floor, or even by playing computer games or reading.

(My sim is more successful at getting her novels written than I am, that's for damn sure. She makes me feel inadequate. Which is ridiculous.)

But I cannot procrastinate by reading, because I am plagued, constantly, by the niggling guilt that I should be editing. I cannot bring myself to pick up a book because I think "No! I shouldn't be doing that!" and instead of enriching my mind and soul I play solitaire while half-listening to a documentary about some guy digging up the Taung Child.

I sit here with a ridiculously long list of books I have, over the past three years, bought and not read. Or read half of, and left off, and not come back to. I have a borrowed copy of Cassandra Clare's "City of Glass" that I've had sitting on the shelf for about two years. My friend may never get it back; I don't often see her, and I am notoriously bad at remembering to return borrowed things. (I do warn people not to lend me anything. Do they ever listen...?)

Aside from the ever-growing pile of spiritual works, the "To Read" list is as follows:

FICTION:
City of Glass
Gormenghast
Dracula (something of a re-read; I read most of it years ago but don't think I ever got to the end, and I'll need to read the whole thing over. Plus I have a shiny new edition.)
Titus Groan (nearly done!)
Winter Rose (read half of it, it suddenly got depressing, put it down to be picked up again when I was feeling less hormonal and never got around to it)
Wuthering Heights (I left it in the UK. Hopefully it is in a box and on its way.)
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell (Also winging - or sailing - its sluggish way across the seas.)
Exterminator!
The Big Sleep (I feel like I can only read this while in the bath with a glass of wine at hand. Thankfully it's nearly cool enough for pleasing baths again.)
Mysteries of Udolpho
Delta of Venus
Beowulf (alright, so not quite "fiction" so much as "epic poem" but whatever.)
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
The Long Goodbye
Possession
Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass (haven't read it since childhood and would like a reread. Plus, new edition, illustrated by Mervyn Peake!)
Justine
Ladies of Grace Adieu
Woman in White
Junkie
Tenant of Wildfell Hall (started. Not too far into it but enjoying it so far.)
Melmoth the Wanderer (started once, ages ago, and had to return to library. New copy now on its way with the rest of the UK box.)
Notre Dame de Paris (aka Hunchback)
Count of Monte Cristo
Changeless
Coraline
Jane Eyre

NON-FICTION:
Amo, Amas, Amat and All That (yay Latin!)
Hammer and the Cross
Queens Consort (got partway through, got distracted. Need to start it over again, I think.)
Everyday Drinking
Folklore of Discworld
Henry, Virtuous Prince (about a third of the way through.)
Great Dinosaur Discoveries

Add to that a list of twenty seven various assorted books regarding religion and witchcraft, from history to comparative mythology to Llewellyn-esque crap. Yesterday I started "the Spiral Dance" for the first time. I'm one chapter in and hope it improves, because it's really shockingly bad so far. I don't tend to like Starhawk's work as a rule because I'm not fond of her voice, but I am disliking this more because of her very poor ethics, her sexism and her bigotry more than a dislike for her writing style.

And this entire post made me feel a little like I'd accomplished something. To the extent that now I draw to a close and think of my work, sitting there untouched on the desktop, with a slightly lessened pang of guilt. This wasn't productive, in the same way as actually reading any of those books might be, but at least I haven't been pissing my time away on solitaire.

Remind me to get up early tomorrow morning. I tend to get a tiny bit more work done during the day.

noctuary: (Default)
As if I needed another blog. Yet here I am. And why? Well - to essentially express my occasional frustrations, and even more occasional successes, in the process of writing, rewriting and editing a novel. Additionally the occasional foray into the joys of art generally, the trials of art personally, snippets of poetry or short stories and even bits and pieces of photography. I came here, to Dreamwidth, because of its intended purpose as a creative space for creative people, which appealed. And because it came well-recommended.

I am given to understand there is an intelligent Pagan community here on DW, which I may dip into also. Religious posts will probably rare, and they will all be FO to particular individuals to keep the rest of you from feeling at all uncomfortable.

For now, I'm attempting to edit this journal style to my liking and tracking down some icons, as it seems improper to use those I've accumulated from time on LJ.

On that score - if you, the reader, know of a community or icon journal or mood theme set I might enjoy, please plug it in a comment and I will hasten to check it out.

Many thanks.