A Story Waiting to be Written

I usually am inspired to express myself in writing, but lately I've been using other mediums. Anyhow.

Dropped the business class! I feel a little pressure relieved... This thing should be totally doable now. "Should" being the operative word here. I'd really like to do Nano again this year, so we'll see how doable that turns out to be. I even have an idea if I do Nano.

This box of books ended up in the Word Shop. That wasn't the remarkable thing; there are multitudes of boxes that end up in the shop in any given month. There was a small book lying amongst a bunch of other old musty books, and Alliee set it in front of me as she rooted through the box. The book had a navy cover with a yellow poppy on the front. It was a book of poems in German about California. The first page was autographed by the author and looked like it had originally been given to a friend. The poems had been written between 1898 and 1906 and were organized according to subject - Yosemite, Love Songs, Nature Songs... As I thumbed through the timeworn pages regretting my poor recollection of college German, a photograph fell out. It was a small one, apparently taken with a Brownie camera. There were 3 men in the photo with a dog. After a detailed discussion with Justin about the many small things we picked out in the photo, we decided it was probably taken in the 1930's. Another thing that was hidden in the book was a pressed carnation. Most intriguing.

A Beginning, a Muddle, and an End

That is the name of a book about writing (books), which was talked about at First Tuesday. Nice to be back, and doing some creative writing. I really think we need to work on our process for choosing prompts, we didn't like any of the suggested ones so we ended up with two that weren't objected to... hah. Writers.
Prompts: "Goody" and "Blur(ry)." Here's what I scrawled.

It was a dark and stormy night. Oh wait, it wasn't. On a lonesome island in the Caribbean, it was anything but "dark and stormy." A tall bearded man sat under a palm tree, thinking out loud to himself.
"Hmm, fiction, fact, or exaggerated history? I could write about the moron under the only other palm tree on the other side of the island... But I've only got this one slab of rock to carve on, and a history of his stupidities would fill an encyclopedia."
The memory came to him in a blur - the reason the 2 marooned sailors on a godforsaken strip of sand in the wopwops [Australian slang for "the middle of nowhere"] would be forever enemies.
It was a hot day, and they were arguing over whether it was Tuesday or Wednesday [it was actually Saturday] when this box had washed up on shore. It was an old worn wooden cask, with printing in bold black letters that spelled out, "GOODIES." They proceeded to argue over what language it was, because nobody would be stupid enough to just write "goodies" on a crate that would end up floating in the Caribbean. The argument raged on while they scrounged for shells to pry the box open with...

I actually like it, kinda reminds me of a Garry Larson cartoon. The one where the one guy finds a crate with an ACME Sand Blaster, and is looking sinisterly over at the other guy, who is happily building a sand castle... Anyways, this scrap of creativity interests me enough to want to extend it, maybe even make it into a story (!), what an idea. My only problem is that currently I can't decide on what exactly should be in the box. It can't be empty, I already thought about that... Well I suppose technically it could, but then I'd have to think about some other way to bring a big catastrophe about. Maybe let the little grey cells work on that one...

Career Advice and Robbing Trains

Do What You Love. That's what a lot of people tell me. I think it's true to an extent. But like most rules, there must be exceptions... what if you love more than one thing, and they're virtually incompatible? Mine aren't completely, but it would take some figuring out to make them both work at the same time. Thoughts to chew on... What if the thing you love is robbing trains?...

The Great Train Robbery - it was excellent! Having never read Michael Chrichton before, I was pleasantly surprised with his writing style. I could really believe he totally researched Victorian culture, the way he wrote about everything made me feel like I was in it, living it. Parts of it were grungy, but it made the Victorian underworld seem so realistic. And the antihero factor. You really got to admire Edward Pierce as a criminal and supermind. Always so cool and collected, outrageous... and terribly evil. The societal issues at stake were remarkable. On reflection, it was rather like reading a Sherlock Holmes novel from the backside, or the criminal's point of view.

The cello has been tucked away in the livingroom for about a week now, deprived and ignored. The piano and the Bach Chorales have been recieving most of the attention lately, because they're part of my class grades... However, I have a little time for more challenging work; mainly the rest of the first cello suite.....

Beauty is the expurgation of the superfluous.
-Michaelangelo

Alice in Wonderland

Last week I was on an Alice in Wonderland trip, although I haven't seen the new movie. I cannot see any one thread of thought throughout the entire book, which makes it confusing, and when it ended I was like, "ok, well... that was interesting I guess." Not quite knowing what to make of it. Most books you come out of with a new perspective on life, or a different idea about some subject, but this just left me with feeling perhaps I could understand what hallucinating is like. Although I have heard that there is something in it to do with mathematical equations (I'll have to check into that), I must admit I've wondered about Lewis Carrol's sanity. From a writer's perspective, it would be rather fun to just write a book out of whatever happens to come to mind, which seems to be exactly what he's done. He must have liked white rabbits...