I’m waiting for ignition, I’m looking for a spark

They say there is a novel inside everyone. I think there are hundreds of stories inside of me. They live under my skin; squirm and multiply in the dark recesses of my mind. I wish I could get them out of my head and onto paper in a manner that didn’t seem, afterwards, to be crap. I suppose my greatest enemy here is doubt. Self-doubt and a deep seated belief that I’m not really that good at much. Even with the evidence (hello acceptance to the Master’s Program I wanted at the school I wanted) staring me in the face.

I haven’t written anything in months.

Lie.

I’ve written a long letter, or two and not sent them.

I’ve thought a lot about what I should write.

I need to write about a few things, work out my inner workings first before I can pour this novel out onto paper, from formless shapes and feelings in my gut into real living scenes on the page. My life feels like a template, a storyboard or even a metaphor for something better. Maybe that’s wishful thinking?

I was sorting through my reams of crap this weekend. I have so much of it… but I found one of the last birthday cards that Dean sent to me. I haven’t been able to put it down and it’s sitting in my purse at this very moment. It seems kind of silly that I’m so attached to this piece of paper that I’ve not seen in a couple of years, but it’s become a kind of symbol. It was when he was strong enough to remember, to care. I know it was him because he was the only one who signed it. There was no one to prompt him to send me a card, he just remembered me and sent it to remind me that he loved me on my birthday. It’s things like this that make me wonder if I did enough. I torture myself that I could have done more to help him get back to his old self. I guess I feel like I failed him. I never seem to be where I am needed most.

I never seem to be able to think outside the box when I need to; to step outside of myself and see beyond the immediate. Why is that?

Why?

Listening to: I have the Touch - Peter Gabriel

Posted in journal | No Comments » | Tags: anatomy of pain, family, inspiration, moving, rambling, woosh

How Can I Begin

How can I begin?
So many skin
of silence upon me
Not that they blunt me,
but I have become
accustomed to
walking like a pregnant woman
carrying something
alive yet remote.
My thoughts,
though less articulate
than image,
still have in them
something like a skeleton,
a durable beginning
waiting for
unpredicted flesh
and deliverence.
I would ask
you: learn as I learn
patience with mine
and your own silence.

~Pat Lowther

Posted in Poetry, Quotations | No Comments » | Tags: inspiration, quotes, things that make you go hrm, woosh

I was the youngest and weepiest of the family, frequently sent for naps due to fatigue, and thought to be sensitive, even a but sickly; perhaps this was because I showed undue interest in sissy stuff like knitting and dresses and stuffed bunnies. My own view of myself was that I was small and innocuous, a marshamallow compared to the others. I was a poor shot with a 22, for instance and not very good with an ax. It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.

Margaret Atwood [Negotiating with the Dead, 2002]

Posted in Quotations | No Comments » | Tags: inspiration

then I wake and you’re not there

“What do you need to show me? I’ve already agreed to help you. Not that I had much choice,” Callum snarls as Sionna lead him down the corridor. He still feels queasy from travelling between.

“You have every choice,” Sionna says with her infuriatingly calm voice.

“Showing up in my kitchen in the middle of the night with your spooky doom and gloom is hardly giving me a choice,” he retorts.
“If you had told me to leave I would have had no choice but to leave you alone.”

“And just how do you propose I could have ignored the rest of it?”

“The dreams? The creatures haunting you? That would have been none of my concern if you had refused me. “

“That’s cold,” he mutters. The corridor is cold and the walls seem to seeps moisture, but it does not smell like water. It smells sickly sweet, and it unsettles Callums stomach further.

“Cold perhaps, but practical.”

“Practical.”

“As I said, we are fighting a war,” Sionna sighs and turns a corner. Light filters into the corridor but it is not the clean white light from the moon they left behind. Instead it is a strange blue light, slightly sickly and even oily – it makes his flesh crawl when it moves over his skin. Sionna pauses at a doorway and produces a key which she slides into a keyhole. The light seeps under the door, and between the pieces of frame. Callum rubs his hands over his arms absently, trying to ease the trembling that has spread from his gut.

The hinges scream as the door swings open and Callums eyes tear. The light fills the room and it takes several seconds for Callum to deduce that the light is coming from chains. There are thousands of them it seems, coming from every point in the room and converging in the center. Something hangs in the center and Callum squints into the sickly blue glare.
Sionna’s eyes glitter in the strange light cast by the chains that bind the woman; for it is a woman, wrapped like a fly in a spider’s web. Her head hangs forward, ropes of ebony hair catching the blue light as they fell almost to the floor.

“This is the one who is the heir to the Seelie throne.”

“Why is she chained this way?” Callum asks, his skin crawling with the energy in the room.

“She has been cursed; possessed by a demon of the dark vastness. This is the only way we can bind her soul to this world and control the creature. Sometimes she is lucid, but most times she is lost to us.”

“What’s her name?”

“Nieve,” Sionna whispers and the figure in the center of the chains raises her head. Callum is struck by her ghostly, terrible beauty.

“Sionna,” the woman whispers, her voice seeming to echo and be echoed by a thousand other voices. Callum shudders at the sound, but he cannot look away. “I can see you today,” she says.

“I am pleased,” Sionna answers, and looks away.

“Can you unbind me?” Nieve asks, her voice sibilant with thousands of other voices.

“You know we cannot, Lady.”

There is a pause, but Callum can still hear the voices whispering to each other in languages that he cannot understand.

“He will unbind me,” Nieve says, only Callum knows with every fiber of his being that it is not the lady speaking. His chest suddenly feels tight and before he realizes what’s happening Sionna is shoving him backwards into the corridor and slamming the door shut. “Fools!” the voices hiss from beyond the door, echoed by the eerie rattle of the thousand chains.

Callum takes a deep and shaky breath and looks down to see Sionna gazing up at him, pressing him to the wall, fingers digging into his arm.

“You are well?”

“Fine, I think,” he gasps. She pushes herself away from his body and he suddenly feels cold. “What happened?”

“What I feared,” she says. “The demon knows you.”

“Of course it does, you just introduced us,” Callum hisses back.

“Hardly. Nieve was lucid when we entered, but the demon took power so quickly. You felt it, did you not?”

“Yes,” Callum says, and cannot suppress a shudder.

“We must hurry,” Sionna says and starts back the way they came. Callum does not hesitate to follow her.

From behind them, Callum hears the Lady scream, echoed over and over again my a million echoing voices.

listening to: Glass Tiger - Don’t Forget Me

Posted in Fiction, Sidhe, Writing | No Comments » | Tags: an alternate reality, fragments, inspiration, magic, muse, surreal, Writing

there’s a moon out tonight

Yellow moon, wolf moon, fog moon, riding high in the wind-swept sky…
There is a gorgeous moon out tonight, I love how it seems to always be looking down at you no matter where you are or how you move. This one is a deep yellow, surrounded by a halo, almost a rainbow ring where the light refracts in the moisture in the air. On nights like this it’s easy to see how people worship it; that changeable eye. It watches everything, sees everything.

Posted in commonplace book | 1 Comment » | Tags: inspiration

And I’ll remember you in the blue skies

I’m off, into the proverbial wild blue yonder. Mom’s taking me to the old country. We’re going to visit some of the places our ancestors are from. I’m excited, AND I’m hoping that the break from routine will help my brain out a little.

I think that this just might be my new theme song… it will be playing when I’m in the plane, and I’ll be thinking of you:

Citizen Cope - Hurricane Waters

Posted in Travel, journal, small things | No Comments » | Tags: inspiration, Travel

it’s a strange day

Ok, since I really have nothing intelligent to say I’m going to do a meme I saw on Elizabeth Bear’s journal… a couple of times now actually, but the latest is here

Put your music player on shuffle, and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results. The first line of the twenty-first song is the title.

It’s a strange day

keep the noise low
momentary sensory promises
before I can open my all too eager eyes
I feel a little bit left of centre

god sometimes you just don’t come through
I haven’t ever really found a place to call home
blind talking (blind talking)
oh, life is bigger, it’s bigger than you

it was me on that road, but you couldn’t see me
you believe in what nobody else does
see the stone set in your eyes
inside you’re pretending

let’s lie and say it’s alright
I’ve been alone for so long
not that I’m that hard to please;
there’s not enough, enough love

the failing sky grows darker every day
I know that I’ve been mad in love before
follow me into deeper waters
I lost my friend

Goldfrapp - Utopia

Brand New - Sic Transit Gloria…Glory Fades
Kosheen - Out of this World
Emiliana Torrini - Fingertips
Thornley - So Far So Good

Tori Amos - God
Dido - Life For Rent
Moby - Lift Me Up
REM - Losing My Religion

Royksopp - What Else Is There?
Matt Mays - When Angels Make Contact
U2 - With or Without You
Portishead - Mysterons

Hawksley Workman - Piano Blink
Stabbing Westward - Waking up Beside You
Delerium - Stopwatch Hearts
Kosheen - Not Enough Love

Ferry Corsten - Holding On
Massive Attack - Unfinished Sympathy
Balligomingo - Lust
Holly McNarland - Water

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments » | Tags: inspiration, music