Today was a really nice day at work. I took more CBD than usual and noticed the difference it made: I was calmer and more clear-minded, and had lots of easy interactions with customers. I also really enjoy talking with some of my coworkers, and one of them I gave my number, so she and I can get together, have a drink and a treat, and read some of our writing aloud. We were both saying we enjoyed doing that.

Anyway, yes, as stated in the title of the entry, the cosplay is coming along.

Yesterday, the test square of fabric arrived for the Hatter suit, and like... you have no idea how happy I am that it was suitable for the costume. All the work I've been doing to draft the suit pattern, including making the mock-up, was going to be for naught if I didn't find the right fabric. I decided on something called "Ponte", short for ponte roma, which is often a mixture of polyester, rayon, and elastane. There is a blazer in my closet with this combination, and I liked the way the fabric felt, so I googled those three things until I found a name, and luckily that sort of thing was available on a custom print fabric website. P R A I S E  T H E  L O R D 

The company, Contrado, is also really quick with its orders, so I have confidence that I can order the suit fabric and have it by next week, and start making the actual thing! ahhhhhh! In the mean time, I just have to finish painting the buttons (and buy more to paint), and problem solve with my pants pattern. Last weekend was my first time drafting a pair of pants, and they turned out... not terrible, but not great. 

Also arriving by next week is the vest fabric. So I imagine a lot of exciting creation is going to happen soon. 

Besides all that, I will need to sew spats. Not super concerned about this. 

I will also need to trim the bangs off the wig (which are not needed and would have been hidden under the hat), so I can craft some fake eyebrows. hahahaha It is rather hilarious, the lengths I'm going to, with this one. 

One may think I still have a long way to go, but it doesn't feel like it. It feels like I'm over the hump, because I knew ever since the beginning of the year that I would need to spend all this time learning how to make the clothes I needed, and do practice garments -- and I did! I made three practice garments, even. I've learned so much, and I'm, well, a little proud of myself for that. I feel like I am not really a beginner anymore with sewing, and I have skills to build off of, and projects don't seem super scary and confusing. I used to not even be able to imagine that, but here I am. 

2021 has just been a really great creative year so far. A lot got done, and I helped myself grow. Well anyway, I'll shut up now. It's my weekend now, and I just want to chill out with my purple lights and ambient videos, get a good rest, and wake up to start tackling my new to-do list. Which includes: 

1.) Ordering the suit fabric.
2.) Cashing the check the junk yard gave me for Betty *snifsniff* sorry Betty 
3.) Groceries
4.) Buy moar buttons and paint them
5.) Make the spats
6.) Do my research on Doordash so I can get ready to register as a driver (woot!)

Also, this weekend, I really want to make some lasagna. Sounds tasty. 

-J

Would you believe the other morning I cried that HT wasn't done yet? I cried. It wasn't much, but clearly repressed frustrations bubbled up out of me, and I can tell you why.

Because it's turning into that person at the party whose presence is no longer appropriate... in a way. I mean it's like that type of person, but they're your family member - you love them and wish the best for them and they're invited for dinner whenever they like, but they're visiting a party you're having with friends who're your age, and you're certain they won't have as good a time as everybody else.

I was just thinking about how things have changed ever since I left PCC and left home. NIL is supposed to be around, CP4 is a fresh script even if it's for a long-lasting idea. I'm pushing forward and growing to love new things. I'm growing as an author and writing about older people. So I realized, uncomfortably, how desperately HT should've been finished within that time capsule. I love Phantom, I love that story, I want to make a movie of this story, I just think this novel ought to have been done when it was so big in my life, when it was more representative of me. Even while I finish it, the themes between the lines are that of me in 2007 - early 2011.

But I reflected upon why it hasn't been done - and I can't help but think the bigger reason is how thoroughly I was uprooted. It's true we should be able to bring a book with us anywhere and read it and submerge, but it's a little different when you must create cohesively that world in which to escape. Life's transience just fucked with me. It's a complicated project (and my only novel) - to write it, I needed to ground and center, and then be able to spread my mind to the sky. Ever since I lost my house, I can't ground, I can't open my mind. I feel like where I live is where I take refuge and hole myself up. I guess subconsciously I'm too stressed from change and lack of space to work out creative problems that big.

I have to wonder, even, if I'd still say it was inappropriate for the story to be around, if I could just write it at home, in my old neighborhood, and go to the park - the place which always helped me when I was blocked. I haven't been there in months and months.

Anyway, HT-angsting aside, I'm certain CP4 is not going to be written in one go, even though I feel sure I will have half done by New Years. I break up my time and try to keep away the stress, so January is up in the air. I'm looking ahead and wondering, actually...

What's scary is that next term will be a year from when I was conceiving NIL; when all the Nosferatu ideas were truly sprouting up. A year isn't much time; I'm just surprised it went by. I don't know if I'll do NIL, or if I'll pressure myself to do HT, or if I'll bust my ass homerunning CP4. OR, do I want to finish another AIW fic? At least I've got ideas instead of no ideas. Some writers are stumped all the time - meanwhile my entire creative career has been me trying to catch up with my blasted ideas.

*sigh*

One thing at a time, though. 100pgs of CP4.

2012 has been a very inspired year. That is a magnificent reality that I can only hope to maintain in 2013.

Night J-kittens,
J

Hi guys. Update time.

I guess I've been gone for a month, haven't I? Well, I can safely say that I didn't finish anything that I was supposed to, but the term started up, I settled into my schedule, and writing should be calling to me again, especially since it's my favorite month. I think I'm actually going to need it to get through this term, because so far I'm only enjoying my Hitchcock class with my favorite teacher.

I could muse about how I've felt like a bad writer for thinking of projects but not working on them, but I won't. I just want to look forward. Here's what I hope I do this term and in winter break. Until the end of the year, basically:

1. Finish Trying Tuesday. (One more part. *crosses fingers*)
2. Make posters for all of my AIW fanfictions.
3. Design an AIW fanfiction ebook, with an illustrated cover.
4. Write HT
5. Make more HT illustrations.
6. Write NIL
7. Finish Tearin' Up My Heart.
8. Plan CP4.

And I really don't care which order or how much time I spent with each thing as long as they end up finished.

What's likely going to happen within the month is numbers 1, 4, and 7. Or so I hope. :)

Well, that's sorted. Toodle-loo.

Finals are over, Spring Break has started, and I am not taking the time for granted!

Between watching Charlie Chaplin's City Lights and reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, I planned a large portion of the pilot episode of Nosferatu in Love, put together a livejournal layout and soundtrack for it which are being tested at my unused community unknowncolorx, and I did two profiles for my modern-day Ellen and Hutter. Hutter's was a much rougher sketch than Ellen's - hers was begging to be colored.


(I would be remiss in mentioning that it was Fleetwood Mac's "Silver Girl" that inspired the picture.)

I've taken some time to contemplate on her, too. I mean, I'd better!, given that she's the second main character and I have to know who I'm dealing with if I plan to write 100 pages of script, starting in... just a week from now! My gosh, it's already so close.

I think I'm very comfortable adopting her as a character. A little while ago, when I made my first posts about being obsessed with Nosferatu, I was saying that I didn't like Ellen or the performance of her done by Greta Schröder, but I've warmed up to both of them since then. Now I just have to have a believable interpretation.

I decided she might have a case of depression, for reasons she doesn't entirely understand (and often people don't.) It's not because she's in an unsatisfactory marriage, which she admits guiltily because she really does love Hutter. They try to spend lots of their time together, and neither do very well on their own, but they're still a mismatch of personalities and interests.

As far as she knows, the reason is also not that she lacks direction - she has goals and dreams like everybody else. She never went to college, but she wants to, and with her own money, not Hutter's. Although, at the same time, she has bouts of severe pessimism about it, thinking nothing would come of it.

Then there's the issue of both ignoring death and ignoring life. She ignores the fact that life is temporary and is only as good as you make it, but does so guiltily and by habit. Her fear of feeling alienated keeps her in the house a lot, or close to it. She's very clingy with Hutter because it was only a couple of years ago that she lost both of her parents, and she doesn't have other close family or friends. She's always been afraid of the dark, but this sent her overboard.

As a side story to Orlok's attempt to woo her (most ineptly), she and Hutter will be trying to figure out how to have a fulfilling marriage and communicate effectively. She will realize that, through that haze of depression, the world has to have an equilibrium of good and bad, and it's not a dark place because of the bad. She'll realize she has a husband who means more to her than anything else, and she would protect him by any means. Her way of coming to that is being so confronted by death, and also a control of her own death, in a weird way. I read a review for Nosferatu that said watching it is like being in the same room with death. She will be often in death's presence. She will finally confront it, oppose it, and finally choose it, and lure it into her own trap, of life. Does that make any sense?

Yes, despite that this series is half comedy, it's also half drama, contemplative, and a homage to its origin, which means she has to do away with Orlok by means of cross-elimination. It's funny, in that regard, because she will be choosing Hutter by choosing Orlok. There's something rather intimate about dying in the same room together, aware of it, and the cause of the other person's death!

I've really made this sound very dramatic, though. Truly, Nosferatu in Love will make you laugh hard if you have a sense of humor similar to mine. Orlok will dance, in his rigid little way, to music he hears in his head, Hutter will hurt himself trying out a new coital position once Ellen tells him she's faked nearly every orgasm since their honeymoon, and Ellen will wake up in a cold sweat after a nightmare about she and the Count in a field of flowers.

To my experience, comedy is hardly achieved when characters are used as vehicles for jokes, however. It's why so many things on Comedy Central during the weekend are utter Scheiße, and why typecast comedy actors have faces you just want to punch. Comedy comes from shared experiences; shared personalities, and shared problems. The realer you can make people, the more you will laugh (at least I think), to the point where a tiny context-less joke may merit a chuckle, but that same joke, to do with a close friend, graduates to a serious knee-slapper. In the case of Orlok, turning him into a comedic vehicle is downright disrespectful. A balance of poking fun at eccentricities and thoughtfulness about its subject is the most appropriate decision if I'm really going to do a re-imagining of one of the most (at least academically) respected horror Classics. There are those who nod to it all the time with visual techniques, but people as obsessed with it as I am, if they are really going to create something to do with it, have to full on bow as if they're praying to Mecca. (take that joke lightly, Muslim readers, if you please)

I feel really glad I made this post. I feel full-on inspiration and a sense of purpose, and opportunities in every direction to exercise my creativity on this thing. I feel it as deeply as if I were writing He's There.

Script Frenzy, here I come!

♥,
J

It looks like I've entered another stage of forgetting that I have a story journal. Pardon me for that! (Or I think I'm asking myself to pardon me.) Now shouldn't be the time to forget about it given that, while doing absolutely no writing, I have been more charged with creative juices than usual.

However!

I fully intend to write again. I was waiting for the moment when it was appropriate, you know, since I'm working on a storyboard and trying to experiment with costume-related stuff... Then it hit me while I was visiting my mom's this weekend - I want to write again! No, not He's There... I mean I do, but...

I've decided I'm going to get to work on Crystal Palace 4 and a mysteryyyy script. Or, scripts, I should say. I'm feeling in the mood to be snarky again and develop characters, and I think the mystery project will actually allow me to work on CP4 with fresher more innovative eyes. I'm not going to stop myself from, but rather encourage myself to put in dance numbers and random little twists, which I think have often been missing from the Crystal Palace series.

Anyhoo! The new script is to be a series. Although it moreso straddles a series and a serial because it will be within a set amount of time with certain development, and if I saw it as like a TV series, I would press that it only lasted two fantastic seasons. I don't think now is the time to explain publicly what exactly it's about, though, because I should first sit down and work out what it will be. I get (hilarious) pieces of it here and there, there is source material to work off of, but I still lack the structure and meaning of it all.

The only thing I will say because it's so obvious is that it has to do with my favorite vampire.

That said, I won't be able to get to working on it (or CP4) until Tearin' Up My Heart is all finished, which the universe isn't allowing me to do until after Wednesday, when all of these things are due. (I shouldn't even be making this entry; I should be writing an essay.) The day I'm free to get back to my creativity couldn't come sooner, even though I can't write right away. I'm looking forward to making a big post following Tearin''s finish all about it, and the shots from the movie that inspired all of its own, and so on! Hopefully there's someone here to read it.

I sound awfully whimsical and air-headed in this entry. I'm really tired, so that's probably why. I needed to write this, between the essay, to give myself some positive feelings, I think, and hope that these plans will be realized, not just thought about. Thursday night. Thursday night!

It's tearin' up my hearttt!

-J