This may not make any sense at all, and it's not something that I have often done with my journals, but I don't feel like sharing the negative things going on right now... simply because I don't want to have to think about them and remember how it felt dealing with them when I'm rereading entries in the future. (We all do that, right? Go nostalgia-mode on our lives as presented through our journals?)

SO HAPPY STUFF WHETHER YA'LL LIKE IT OR NOT

Tomoko's package came in the mail that she had been worrying about, even on her birthday, which proves how suh-weet she is, all the time. By the time that I ever meet her, I will owe her like 1,500 hugs, probably. 💚💚💚 A lot of these items are wonderful little works that were sold by YYH fans at the Yuuhaku Only event. Naturally, she got me a whole lotta Kurama. ;) She also got me a fancy multi-colored ink pen and eraser stick, and ughghhh, I threw my hands up into the hair and said to myself "OKAY, TOMOKO, YOU WIN AT FRIENDSHIP. YOU WIN."

🌟 We go see The Phantom of the Opera tomorrow, and it's a three-day weekend. 

🌟 I changed my revision plans again for HT ch15-18, so my motivation to work on it is revitalized. If all goes well I'll work on it these next three days and make some ground. WHY WOULDN'T I, I'M SEEING PHANTOM TOMORROW?!! DDDDD:

Like in all honesty, isn't that where a lot of writer's block comes from...? I was having problems writing this same stuff, months ago, and it finally occurred to me: if I can't figure out what the point of the scene is or how to wrap it all together, maybe it doesn't have a point. Maybe my plans weren't filled with logic and continuity after all. It's so weird that I would be thinking that already and then come up with other plans that are also half-baked/half-logical as well, but that must have been what happened. So yeah, the plans have been changed.

What sparked the plans was something that simultaneously made me excited and sad, though. I was reading some material from the first draft that happens directly after where I am in the draft two narrative, and it wasn't stuff that made me squirm in my seat anymore. It was actually pretty decent writing that you could tell was product of a writer living in that space, in their head, being present in the scene and inside the body of her narrator. There was a web of goings-on that I understood at the time, and... it was a way of storytelling that felt more free and true than how I'm so carefully constructing things today. You could almost tell that I didn't have depression yet when I was writing it... I know they were chapters from late 2011/early 2012, so I was still in the clear. *sigh*

I mean, it needed some minor adjustments, and "Erik" wasn't always saying things that I would believe nowadays to be in character, but mostly I didn't want to touch it at all. I wanted to just find a way to write until I had hooked up with that point, and then connect it and share those chapters as they were. 

It was a story I was happy to read myself, too... I believed in it being something that a reader would want to stay focused on. 

Well, okay, it's almost 1:00 in the afternoon. This is an ideal time to work on some things, let go of the happenings this week, and be content with some aspect of my life. 

Ciao,
J

🌸 I woke up at 2:00am and have been up since then
🌺 While I was working on HT I got to watch my mom wake up for work
🌸 And I had some of her coffee (at 5:00am)
🌺 Two new people joined the HT FB page! Both have the google drive link now, too!
🌸 I finished revisions for draft two, CH15

So yeah to reiterate I woke up at 2am today. Ya'll know I keep getting cockblocked from getting anywhere with writing. It's either a problem with my body, or other commitments, and yesterday it was the weather. We're having Oregon's version of a heat-wave so it's high-80's to mid-90's and I wanna die and stuff, and my AC doesn't do its one job that it has in this weather, so my room was uncomfortably warm all afternoon and evening. I was too tired to write and I had a headache again because of it.

I was like FUCK THIS

Really, I couldn't take it anymore. I was waiting for the weekend and I was not going to accept that it would be ruined by bad weather! So around 8'o'clock, I went to bed! And I said "I am going to wake up in the middle of the fucking night when it cools off around here, nobody can stop me, and I'm going to treat the middle of the night like my day off."

So I did! :D

Writing got done, I liked what I wrote, I was into it. I had a nice baked potato with rosemary and olive oil, and a matcha latte, for 3am breakfast. More writing got done. I started on CH16 revisions and have gotten somewhere with that too! HOO-FUCKING-RAY. I'm on the last scene for that and it's FUN TIMES. Later on I took a bath and washed my hair, did some laundry, chilled out, all before noon.

If I can just keep myself awake until 8:00, I think I can get my sleep schedule back in order for work tomorrow.

lololol THAT'S RIGHT, I CRACKED THE CODE, I DISOBEYED THE RULES OF TIME AND AM HAPPIER FOR IT. WRITING. YEAH.


♥, J

Yeah so, everyone's having a great time right now and all I'm thinking is "summer sucks. The 4th of July is a boring holiday. It's hot and uncomfortable. My body is swelling from the heat and exacerbating my IBS. PLEEEEEASE, OCTOBER, HURRY UP." But it won't hurry up, it's going to get here when it feels like it.

The last 24 hours have been good, though, like, all things considered. 

The Phantom of the Opera (ALW/Broadway production) is touring and will be here in Portland next month, so to get myself all revved up for it, I kicked off a month of daily Phantom trivia posts on my HT facebook page. Ironically, I will probably try not to talk about ALW too much, since there are plenty of other interesting things and I'm realizing not everyone HAS READ THE BOOK? WTF, WHY NOT? This is the source material? It's awesome? If I can get one person who hasn't read the book to read it because of intriguing trivia posts, then I will be happy. 

Luckily, the discourse this has generated has also got me ready to tackle more HT. In fact, I was able to sit down with it and not be horribly confused, so that's good. I started adding things that I had wanted to add and get a feel for what the story is going to be like once some revisions are made to the most recent events. While I was doing this, I was also having a conversation with a reader-friend from the FB page who was also working on her story. I have a feeling that she looks up to me in a way, because she told me she has started her own page, set up a Google Drive to share chapters, and was asking me questions about how to get her work more exposed, so I'm hoping I've set a good example/offered good advice.

She was saying how she'd written "a few chapters" in the last week and had been going through older chapters changing stuff to fit in "new characters" and such, and it kind of surprised me, though. Like, I don't know the quality of her work or the degree to which she thinks it out, but for me it's a huge fucking deal to complete a few chapters -- that's more than 1-2 months of work typically. My pace is about a page an hour. loolol And new characters? Forget it, I ZONE IN FOREVER on the ones I've got. Changes of any kind to past events also make me very sensitive to how they might possibly affect the present -- it's like that time travel trope where you don't want to end up being your own grandma or some shit. It's an ordeal for me to genuinely decide "okay, this chunk of narrative has to be hauled back on the operating table," and I try to avoid that by overthinking and over-editing in the moment. 

There isn't anything inherently wrong with this approach, as far as I can see. This reader-friend might have gone through 10 drafts of her aspiring novel so far, but I feel confident that my second draft really is as set and polished and properly thought out as Patrice said, whether or not she finished reading the print-out I gave her. All that over-thinking and doing a page an hour... well, I think I'd prefer it to writing ten whole drafts that I wasn't happy with because I breezed through them, unable to make up my mind what the story was even supposed to be like.

But yeah, anyway, we were both up to the same thing, with very different attitudes about it. All the while, I sat in the living room with the curtains parted, breathing some fresh air, sipping a hot drink. It was nice. I open tomorrow at work, but if it's possible to do that again tonight, I want to. It was a slightly different environment that may have been unclogging my head a little, if you know what I mean. There is no comparison to making ground with a writing project. Last night held a little glimmer of hope that HT wouldn't be stuck in a quagmire. Working on it, getting lost in it again, would definitely make summer past by more quickly.

-J

P.S. Unrelated but TOMOKO GOT MY PACKAGE and we squeaked back and forth at each other in joy and merriment. I love herrrrrrrrrr

I'm hesitating to write my usual year in review, where I count the pages and document what I actually accomplished last year. I'm hesitating to do it because so little will be written down, and I'm also hesitating because in all likelihood I'll have the same goals I did last year, since I.... um.... didn't accomplish any of them?

Happy thoughts, happy thoughts...

THIS happened!:



And THIS!


He still has never spoken to me, so they were very unexpected gestures. You know what I found out about Wesley now that he's added me on FB? His wife is Japanese. lol I'm so curious now if he can speak any Japanese! Apparently they got married in 2000, so I'm a little confused if he's been married twice or if Richard was mistaken when he told me he was married back when they were working on the show, and she was actually just his steady girlfriend (although being steady for eight years is kind of a long time...) I also learned his birth year, which means while shooting AIW he turned 29. Twenty-nine! That's so damn young. lol I remember being just as shocked to learn that Patrick turned 30, but mostly because they did such a good job at making him look old. Actually, it's kind of adorable, because now that he's getting older, he looks more and more like Rabbit. lmao

Anyhoo, now that the site has officially gone public on FB (but not tumblr yet), I'm kind of just waiting around to see if anyone else will find it and contact me. It was really sweet and well-meaning of Wesley to share it so people who knew he worked on it could see it; I wish the others would do that, too, but oh well.

One thing I've realized, though, is that A LOT of my traffic are using mobile phones. I mean at least half, if not more of my traffic has been mobile, and a lot of people from California and New York. It's super unnerving. I can't ask them what it looks like, so I'm put in the helpless situation of having my fingers crossed that I look like a competent coder. ighghgHGHGHgh....

Onto other subjects. Writing. You know, that thing I used to do. Specifically He's There.

Once stuck, always stuck, is the problem right now. I'm looking for other people who can take the burden of offering feedback off of R & A because they so don't deserve to feel like I threw the position of editors on them. Someone is coming to mind whom I might ask to look after the rewrites (or maybe she has seem them already; I can't remember), but I think I need to put chapters 5 and what I have of 6 up so I can get some help. I gradually stopped working on these last year because suddenly I didn't believe in myself anymore by chapter six. Something very important was about to happen, but I wasn't sure if I was doing anything right, and so I began walking around in the dark, plotting things that weren't making me go "OH YEAH, THAT'S GOOD". You can tell in chapters 1-4, and maybe 5, that I believed in myself and was having very vivid imaginings... so to have that come to a halt all of a sudden was hard. I'll post plot and writing in a little while and try to convince people to offer their opinion, which I'm sure will be like pulling teeth.

I didn't really write anything else last year. I started an AIW fanfiction that got almost nowhere, and even though I love the idea of working on and finishing it, writing in a vacuum just isn't fun. Writing without inspiration from others, and writing just so I can post it and get no response aren't fun. The other stories I've done, there was a lot of energy behind them, a lot of conversations packed with laughter, and little moments and situations pulled from here or there that built up scenes and sequences, long before I even wrote them. It was almost just like connecting the dots and fleshing out the bones. And once I'd done that, there were these things called friends I had who were excited to read it and see it all incorporated. I almost think I need a social life back before I can progress creatively. This sucks.

Maybe my 2015 goal will just be "have friends again." "Join a fandom group for something else." I don't know.

Oh shit, this entry got depressing!

Bye.

-J

Well, I'm sitting here having a really late breakfast and I thought I'd let some thoughts out now that there's time.

So, both Script Frenzy and National Novel Writing Month attract different types of people. Among them are those like myself who have no idea if they'll make it because they know they aren't exactly prolific (much as they love their ideas) and there are also those who know they're going to win because they can punch out lots of stuff in little time.

In the forum at Script Frenzy, a poster from my area assured us that we could finish in eight days from now even if we had 0/100 pages because it was still possible to put everything on hold, sit on your ass for hours, and write all the way to the finish line, even if it wasn't necessarily fun. He's probably right, but I disagree with the sentiment.

I mean, as far as I know, those who punch out pages end up with sub-par, or just plain bad, writing. From experience, I know this - urging yourself to write write write past what you want results in just meaningless stuff where the heart is gone and it's not even fun to re-read. Some people don't consider this a problem because we're all supposed to revise and make second or third drafts anyway, but I consider a heartless first draft to be a problem.

I also get the feeling that I'm a little bit "old fashioned" or idealistic compared to other writers. While I've spent the last five years developing He's There (and surely another one), another writer has spent the last year revising a complete story eight times. I've met a number of writers, even, who work at this rate, and it always surprises me. They don't seem out of the norm, though; I feel like I'm the one who is bizarre in the writing world. I definitely keep progress on my work in the forefront of my mind, but I don't just push myself to write. I push myself to be inspired to write.

I cannot write unless I'm inspired. I refuse, even, to craft anything without love, and it slows me down. Even if I end up taking long breaks from stories, I look forward to their bursting back into my creative sphere and consuming my time and thoughts.

So, I would not recommend what this writer suggests - to try to fit 100 pages into Script Frenzy, to win and to be proud of your accomplishment. Because I would ask "what are you really winning at?" What accomplishment will you be proud of? That you forced yourself to write 100 pages of shitty, rushed, heartless material for characters that are supposed to mean something to you? I would rather lose Script Frenzy with 50 pages of great material.

I'm not gonna lose, though. :D

Well, I shouldn't have, but I started a drawing for Nosferatu in Love that's begging to be colored. My script needs a poster!

♥,
J

P.S. My mood is uncomfortable because the weather is too warm today. It's making me all icky!

Somehow half of yesterday was me staring at chapter 42 going "I just don't know what the fuck to do. I want to watch Futurama. Apparently I'm not as excited about this story as I thought," and the other half was me working on it for a number of hours, nonstop. I have nine pages now.

I described Giry as a "female face" in the doorway that made Lily's nerves subside and suddenly I was in the moment and I ran with it, even though I had a lot of German Cinema reading homework. (I still haven't done it.) Then, just after I'd made my tea, some douche in the apartments nearby started playing Rock Band loudly enough to vibrate his organs and the sound was so distracting. The sound of TV or radio is always coming out of my roommate's room, so the living room was just as bad. I had nowhere to go, so I closed myself into the closet with our washer and dryer and sat on top of the washer. Eventually, I got to go back to my room, which was nice because my foot was going numb.

Anyway, I was enthused to start working on it, and enthused to finish it, but I feel like I'm contradicting myself. I feel like I feel one way when I write a chapter, and another when I start a new one. It hasn't been good, spacing out this story so long. I keep evolving as a person, I keep having new things happen to me, and it makes it harder to understand what I aimed for whenever I started an idea or situation that needed continuity. Writers deal with this problem often, I'm sure, as many write novels for years... I'm just bad at it. I'm bad at most things to do with writing.

I'm going to go and alter things around. I worry I'm confused about something.

Damnit, writing stories is haaaaard.

He was a maniac without a nose,
She was a vapid bimbo from Sweden

Phantom humor, sometimes I just can't get enough of it. XD

Anyway, I'm without computer right now. The one that I'm using to type this is being loaned to me by my computer guy until they can find out what's wrong with Hermy. Unfortunately, while it's sleek, clean, and has internet, it randomly shuts off. He warned me that there may be something wrong with it, but we both agreed that it didn't really matter given that I'd only be using it for three days.

I was going to begin writing He's There with it at the park, taking advantage of my last week here in my home, where the park is close and I still feel comfortable, but because of this shutting-off problem, it's impossible. The fact that I'm here writing this entry is a gamble in itself.

But! The reason I decided to stop by is that I'm trying to work on my to-do list as well as I can, so I started revising CP3 (without Kate's help) and got through three parts. Already, it's become funnier and more coherant, and I'm looking forward to Kate seeing what I did and maybe adding to it if she feels like it. This is probably what I'll be up to until I get my computer back, so I'm going to see how far I can get.

Overall, I feel really lazy about 2011, not getting to He's There until the last quarter, but I promised myself I'd be dedicated to it this Autumn. I always always always try to think of things optimistically too, lest I end up wallowing in disappointment with myself or having unfair standards. Life has gotten in the way. We're selling our house of all my life. I just haven't felt like writing for some reason.

But hey! CP3 will have a website and CP4 will have started. Two of my goals will be done, and there's still opportunity to do others. It's all up to me to find time in between my four classes. I only need to be fueled by motivation. I'll be motivated as long as I keep my mind on it. They say an active body stays active. The same goes for minds, right? Nothing made me more excited to do He's There work than just reading the book, or watching a movie. And then Halloween is right around the corner, and I need to get to work on my Lon Chaney costume!

I've gotta work in AIW again too. I feel just horrible that it was a whole year ago that I wrote a short story that I loved and then just stopped with that. What about Hare and Rabbit switching bodies?! What about Hatter buying that jacuzzi?!

Even when I don't write because I honestly don't feel like it, I'm still lonely without it. I still always wish that I did feel like it. I think that's how I know I'm a writer and not just somebody "trying to do it" as I might say when I feel I wasn't prolific enough. A writer is someone whose being is defined and shaped by the fact that writing is in their lives. A normal person, I think, wouldn't feel this way, the way I do, if they just gave up stories. They wouldn't mope around, feeling empty. lol Nor would they feel so godamn triumphant, and dance around the house, just because they got back into it. I still remember doing can-cans when Chapter 24 of He's There was finished in August 2009, a little before I had a writing streak during NaNoWriMo. Those moments are awesome, but only writers have them.

So, at the end of the day, I have to feel good knowing those moments are in the future for me, even after a year like this. Which isn't over, by the way! Think of it that way. I'm never really out of control. You get back what you put in.

Well, here's a bar I can hope to fill in the next few days! (Edited!)

5 / 15 words. 33% done!

♥,
Jennifer

I just had an interesting experience.

As I was waking up, I saw the stripes of sunlight going over my room and one particular stripe had the face of my Michael Crawford figurine/music box. And he was just staring at me like "what the fuck are you doing with your life? You're forgetting something, you BITCH." And I noticed that right behind him was his shadow, all perfect and hatted, looming right over my body in my middle school graduation picture. It was really cool looking!

And now I feel guilty for not writing lately. At all. I have to make up for that during spring break.