May 2004 Archives

Ok I found that poem from college I was talking about. Didn't take long once I got off my ass and looked in the only place it should have been. Wasn't near as good as I remembered it. (I guess I remembered the personification fondly, but I don't feel like I did Her justice with the words I chose. Not even close. But hey, I was 19.) But I resisted the urge to edit the crap out of it (verrrry tempting) and have posted it here as originally scribbled in pencil in my notebook with the shiny blue holographic cover.

Nobody mock my poetry now. I would have to come and find you and kick you in the shins, hard. I'm sensitive about these things.

Invocation

State your intentions, Muse. I know you're there.
Dead bards who pined for you have said
You're bright as flame, but fickle as the air.
My pen and I, submerged in a liquid shade,
Much dark can spread, on days and over reams
But without you, no radiance can shed.
Why rustle in the dark, when fledged with fire?
Craze the night with flails of light. Reave
Your turbid shroud. Bestow what I require.

But you're not in the dark. I do believe
I swim, like squid, in clouds of my own make,
To you, offensive. To us both, opaque.
What's constituted so, only a pen
Can penetrate. I have one here; let's go.

--Neal Stephenson (from the book Quicksilver)

Ok someday I'll learn how to use trackback and all those fancy MT linky things but for right now, just go here:

When you go to bed at 2am, 6am comes way, way, WAY too quickly.

Is it really better to be busy than bored? I think so...although I could do without the stress migraines (and all the other fun physical symptoms of stress).

Hi, my name is Julie, and I'm a parensaholic. (And yes I think generally the shorcut term "parens" is more fun than the slightly clunkier plural term "parentheses".) Because really I prefer embedded speech, and asides, and even footnotes (would that I could get away with it in fiction writing...). Linear? Moi? I could never (and why should I, here in my own writerly stream of consciousness playspace?).

Arrrrr. Eli playing pirate in his PJs.

Mostly this is just a test to see if I can figure out how to upload images to my blog. But who doesn't like a picture of a kid in a pirate hat? (And no I don't want to be spammed with comments from humorless hateful people who say they don't. If you don't like my kid, hell, if you don't ADORE my kid, get the fuck off my blog. So there.)

"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention."

--George Orwell "Why Do I Write?"
(first published in "Gangrel, No. 4" in the summer of 1946.)