Memories in Paraphrase

* Moving into a one bedroom apartment. Fifth floor, southern facing windows, much larger. I'll get the layout all figured out soon. Super excited about this. I plan on saving money to get a real bed.

* The cable company will make me go 2 days (gasp!!) without internets in the new place. Fuckers.

* The cable company cannot switch my phone service over until the 30th. I don't know why. Not a big deal.

* Adam will not be able to fur the fuck out of my stuff anymore. This will make him sad, I'm sure.

* My iPod has to go to the doctor and I'm taking it to the University Village store. It was repeatedly crashing iTunes earlier, and it wouldn't sync. Everytime I plug it in, I have to restore it.

* Neighbours who do not have awesome stereo systems should not try to start music wars with those who do. It will not end well. I plugged in my 2.1 desktop speakers, put the subwoofer on his wall, and let it rip. Techno and Bollywood. Fuck you, dude.

* Level 47 on Aion, should be 48 before the move. When I get back, everyone will probably be 50, and they'll have to wait on me to go to Dark Poeta. Haha. Sucks to be them. Absinthe is finally in armor that's not pink.

* Kyle moved back home, has a new job, looking into a second part time things, and sounds worlds happier now than he has been in several months. Which in turn makes me happy for him, so it's this circle of happiness that happens like that.

* Thanksgiving will be at Mandy's place. I will still be zee cook, as to be expected. It's fun, and I never have to do the dishes. It's awesome.

* I still want a netbook. Now more than ever, because I keep wanting to write late at night, but then I realize that I'd have to boot up my laptop. With a netbook, at least, I can still be on IRC and talking to people when I have to mail off my laptop to Gateway to be fixed since it keeps overheating. Which sucks.

* Laptop is overheating when I game. Which sucks, because it's a gaming rig, and shouldn't. My daddy says it shouldn't, so I believe him.

* Already done my Christmas shopping, just have to hit the order button, which happens in December. Not sure if I'll do Christmas cards.

* I'm running a slaver ring and a crime syndicate on BDI. I finally get to knock up my elf chick. Sweet. Baby-daddy is 5000 years old. Freakin' elves.

As promised, the short story I had written a while ago. Constructive criticism, editorial remarks and comments are welcomed. Really would like feedback about the writing style itself, and the technical side of it regardig the flow, pacing and contained events.

---

First draft, second revision

January 8th, 2009

Combichrist - Sex, Drogen, und Industrial
Combichrist - Enjoy the Abuse
Combichrist - Today I Woke Up to a Rain of Blood
VNV Nation - Darkangel
Wumpscut - Wreath of Barbs
Tactical Sekt - Devil's Work

---

Waiting, she stood atop the building, the toes of her leather boots curling right over the edge, staring down at the street which was some stories below her. No hint of vertigo or fear stirred her. In fact, she was quite dispassionate of the view as she took another drag on her cigarette. It was a mild autumn evening in the city, a slight breeze the only disturbance in the cloudless night.

With a flick of her gloved fingers, the cigarette butt was discarded, its lingering spark of light falling into the abyss of the waiting street lamps. A sigh escaped her, and she jumped down from the perch to the roof, turning her back for a moment. The high powered sniper rifle sat a foot off from where she had stood, already present when she had come up to the roof. She left it on the ledge while she began to fetch the other small instruments required. A small stand, the finely crafted scope, a silencer and the two 7.62mm calibur bullets were all produced from within the long trench coat she wore. Each item fitted into their proper places, and with a sense of finality, the bullets were loaded with individual clicks.

( Read more )

So.

So many things I could be writing about right now. But only a few lines, since I can't seem to sit down for long enough to write all of those things.

There's still a lot of stuff I need to do. And want to do. And want to make of my life. I want a house, I want my marvelous, custom built kitchen. I want a couple of cats, a dog or two, and Murphy (who will not be renamed Bread). I want to be a pastry chef. But to do all that, got to straighten shit out first. Always had a reason, never had much motivation until the last few months.

I'm actually pretty happy (content!) most of the time, when not in fits or episodes of anxiety, crazy or depression; those having come much less frequent, though. I'm inspired to work on all of those things I've been putting off in therapy. And those quirks that seem to entirely wreck my universe that are mostly of my own design. I attribute this to mostly to one of the most amazing people I've been blessed to meet. I don't know how they do it, but they do, and it's incredible to me. I'm very happy to have met them, and I'm glad that they're in my life. I will no doubt go on about (----) in the future, but for the moment, this being a quick update that's not entirely about them, it's not the time.

I have hesitated in writing about (----) for a few months now, and I don't particularly know why. Sometimes, things are like a bubble and the slightest outside pressure can pop it.

I'm 25 now. And it freaked me out for a while. I think I'm okay with it. I told (----), about something in their life, that it's a transitional period, that just because things are crappy now, doesn't mean they always will be. And really, it's the same thing, about my life. It's just easier to tell someone else that, than it is to believe it yourself.

Mandy and I went to the ballet a few days after my birthday, because they were performing Swan Lake, and it's been one of my favourite pieces of music for ages. I cried at the end of it, it was so moving, so beautiful. I will probably make an effort to go back and see Swan Lake everytime it's performed at the PNW Ballet after that. I really enjoyed the performance. I still mean to go to an opera at some point, but there's only two I really want to see, namely Don Giovanni and Aida.

My lip ring's been healing up pretty nicely. I got my ears all gauged up to 18s, including my cartiledge piercing. I thought they would all hurt a LOT more than they did. It was very anticlimatic. I'm thinking of maybe gauging my lowest earring to 14 or 12 to put in some of the more interesting pyrex "squid" pieces of jewelry. I'll have to look up some pics later. This being a quick update before I lose the determination to write.

I quit the WoW guild I had helped build and ran for the last 5 months. Pointedly, it had gotten to be a lot of stress. When I spend the first half hour or more of every nightly conversation with (----) bitching about it, it's gone too far. It wasn't fun anymore. It was more work than it should've been, and I shouldn't have been the only person busting their ass to make it all work out. After nearly a 2 month ultimatum, it's how things fell out. I admit to quitting in a fit of utter frustration and some what emo-ness, but it wasn't a huge surprise, and shouldn't have been, for the officers that it happened. I'd been saying I wanted to if things hadn't changed. And they didn't. In the two short weeks since I quit, the whole guild has fallen apart, which, in my opinion, pretty much underscores the fact that I had been single handedly running the guild.

Anyhow.

Lastly. quarla might need a traveling buddy for when she moves out to NY in late July. She asked me if I wanted to come, and offered to help pay for plane tickets to Socal and then back to Seattle. I'm heavily considering doing it, as it'll be a blast driving cross country again, and to see more of the sights (and maybe peoples along the way, dmoira). And it's a chance to see everyone back in NH whom I haven't seen since I graduated high school in 2002. I have no doubt that I can convince someone to meet us halfway in Burlington, Vermont to make the Margo exchange so I could go back to NH for a week or two and then fly out of Manchester or Boston to head home. It would be awesome to see everyone back east again, it's been so long. I need to email my dad about it, and see about his plans.

And that's all I'm committing to for right now. Once again, I'll try to write more again in the future, but I say that alot, and it never comes through.

Everyone keeps telling me that I ought to update my livejournal. Well. I can't even say it's everyone, because the number of people who read it are few and far between, so I guess that's just a bit of an exageration. Either way, not really a big deal? It's healthy for me to write, and I really should be trying to write more. Sometimes, I just sit at the keyboard and not write. Or I do something else, but essentially, it's the same thing and it's not writing.

Right now, however, there are few other things for me to be doing. I'm in the car, on I-5 and we'd just crossed the bridge into Washington.

I slept rather well. But that could've been the awesome pile of pillows, or the fact that I was drunk at the time. Either way, I slept well, even without my nightcap of jaegerbomb, which is just as well when you consider that taking a shot of an energy drink right before sleep is counterproductive.

It's Easter weekend. At Olivia's birthday party, Mandy had asked if she and her boyfriend, Darren, could come over to Cory's place for Easter. Originally, Cory hadn't had any really big plans for Easter. Our family's got 2-3 holidays that require get togethers. And Easter really isn't one of them. But then we decided anyway to go over and do something, regardless. A quiet, small affair, without much ado.

Mandy messaged me a few days ago to let me know that I could hook a ride with her, Darren and Tina on their way to Portland. It only occurred to me on Thursday, that if they were going all the way to Portland, who's to say that I shouldn't come with them and harass Melanie and her husband, whom I had never met? Which was exactly what I did.

Melanie and I got together, and waited for Melanie's ex roommate, Melinda, whom I had known and was excited to see too, to come and meet us. We had snacks at some restaurant's happy hour and chilled out before going back to Melanie's place. Stephen, he husband, was at work. We chatted, eventually got some liquor, and started watching Pan's Labyrinth, which I had borrowed from Mandy, but like a retard, had never actually bothered to watch until I was supposed to return it. After Melinda had to leave, Melanie and I nursed our respective girly drinks for a few hours before Stephen came home, which is when we started doing shots. I learned new apprreciated for Jaeger, and tequila, and that there is a huge difference between good tequila and nasty tequilia.

We didn't have a lot of time to hang out in the morning, but we had stayed up late, and had a good time nonetheless. It had been 3 1/2 years or so since I had seen Melanie. I had never met Stephen, whom she had started dating a few months after I had last seen her. So it was good to catch up and hang out and just chill out. And of course, meet Stephen. He seems like good people, and I hadn't anticipated having much in common with him, but we did. He's a scifi geek and can, at the least, appreciate the gaming thing.

I left half a bottle of Malibu rum at Mel's place. Which means I need to go and collect it. Thinking of going to visit the weekend of my birthday if Cory and I don't make plans for a joint birthday thing.

Which brings us to the present, being in the car, driving back to Washington, and to Olympia, to hang out for the rest of the weekend at Cory's place. This was the first time that I had met Mandy's boyfriend, but he's pretty easy going and seems like a good guy. I guess I'm the only one who dates odd and strange people...?

Things have been a bit quieter for me, overall. With perhaps the notable exception of last weekend, prior to actually going to Cory's place for Olivia's birthday party. I woke up, and for inexplicable reasons, I didn't feel like going to Cory's place for the party. Despite being rather excited to see Olivia and watch her open presents and everything of the sort. It was a rather hard thing for me to even explain, and I don't think I even did, not even when I was trying to explain it to Regen in my next daily session with her. I went through quite a range of emotions that morning.

I called Cory, to try to tender my regrets for not going, or to ask her to convince me otherwise. In between serious strings of conversation, she commented on how Olivia would know that I wasn't there now, because she was old enough to recognize people. Emotional blackmail! Which was on a less serious note of the conversation, of course, she wasn't actually trying to guilt me into coming. There wasn't a real reason for not wanting to go, but there we are, and there was no explaination, and even now, really isn't.

I had made the decision to call and let Mandy know, who was going to pick me up on her way to Olympia.... Which reminds me, I had originally meant to go to Oly the day before, on my own, and I had been out cold until 3-4pm, which thoroughly and effectively scratches those plans. It's why I was going down with Mandy the next day. Anyhow, I had called to let Mandy know that she wouldn't be needing to stop in downtown. She told me that she was going to come and stop by anyhow, just to check in on me. When I got off the phone with her, for some reason, I started to cry hysterically. I was deeply upset by something, but for the life of me, I couldn't begin to explain. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and I am well aware of it.

Telephone tag with my sisters, to let Cory know that Mandy was stopping by, and for company until Mandy did show up. And then we sat around for about an hour, going through the photographs I had recently discovered in one of the boxes I had moved out of Cory's house (finally!) and had rescued from the mess that is our mother's house a few years ago. To spare the meter, Mandy wanted to go check on the car, and we did so, driving around the block. We saw the best little toy store ever, which is only really 2-3 blocks from my place, Magic Mouse Toys. It's where I had picked up my pirate flag in the old place and hung behind Murphy's cage. Anyhow. I suggested we stop there to see if I could find something for Olivia, because shopping for a three year old is a lot harder than you would expect.

I'm not sure how this turned to deciding to go to Olympia after all, but it did, and we went back to my place, so I could throw a few things into a bag to go. We were going to stop at Magic Mouse, but I changed my mind (again!) and told her to just get on the highway, because I didn't want to change my mind again until it was too late. Which is how I ended up going to Olivia's birthday party anyhow. I don't regret it. I came home that night as that Mandy decided to leave early to work on her paper due on Monday or Tuesday.

I started DBT two weeks ago, finally. It seems that once again, I'm moving forward in my overall progression of plans with finally getting into the group therapy part of DBT.

Trying to be aware of all of these things is difficult sometimes, more difficult than I would've thought possible. It seems so silly to even say so, but there it is.

Written Saturday, posted now, incomplete because I realized that if I didn't post it now, it may never get online. Incomplete, for another day, I guess.

Oh, and the newest Birthday Massacre album rocks.

Ahem. The five things every aspire writer must know are:

1. Great writers are voracious, omnivorous readers.

2. Spelling, grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure—all those things that bored you most in junior high English class?—these are the tools of your trade. Learn them and use them well.

3. A first draft is just that. Revise, revise, and revise!

4. Write the story you love. You can't control whether or not anyone else will love it, but if you do, it will show in your writing. Besides, writing is hard, and a lot of the time it's boring! If you're just trying to churn out something to please what you think is market expectation, then what's the point? Love what you do; do what you love.

5. If you're thinking about becoming a writer, you're not one yet. Writers write. Don't worry about writing badly. You will. It's part of the process. Don't worry; be crappy. Some writers have to write ten bad books before they have one that can sell. Others get it on the first or second try. What's important is that you are writing, reading, getting into good writing groups, and learning how to take feedback. It's the only way you will ever get better. If you want to be a writer, write!

-- Writing the Series: An Interview with Lynn Flewelling, by Moira Allen
Copyright © 2005 Lynne Jamneck
http://www.writing-world.com/sf/flewelling2.shtml


Interesting. I like.