Inspiration
Tag: life
Solstice
Summer is not my best season.
I don’t have much heat tolerance, and the summer months are spent chugging electrolyte mixes while waiting for the hottest part of the day to hurry up and be over with. Popsicle’s are not so much a treat as a necessity around here.
Of course, there’s nothing quite like sitting outside on a warm summer night and listening to the crickets. Sometimes, the best part of life can be found in the quietest of moments.
This year, I’m going to play as hard as I can, heat tolerance be damned. I’ve got a big freezer and Popsicle’s to spare.
Happy Solstice.
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The practicality of popularity
While mega popularity is a fun daydream, in practicality, I don’t think that I’d enjoy it at all. Having people read my books just because everyone else is reading them feels rather antithetical to who I am as a person. It’d be a great way to be completely erased.
Then, of course, there are always the ones who feel obligated to create entire websites devoted to tearing apart your novels and proving that you are a bad writer after all. The harshest part is, those websites are usually right, too.
I’ve dedicated a lot of time to practice and research with my writing, and I try very hard to produce quality; but ultimately, I chose to be a wife and mother first. I still have plenty of sensitive feelings, and stumbling across the wrong criticism at the wrong time could hurt deeply. I’m just doing my thing to express my soul, and I just want to live my life with my husband and kids.
Obscurity is safe and comfortable.
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Sameness in ideas
Like most writers, I have several ideas on the back burner in my mind, but if I reduce them all to a one-sentence summary, I start to wonder if I really have just one idea in different clothes.
On one hand, readers like to know what to expect from an author. Sometimes, we really want the same core concept dressed up in different colors. There are plenty of professionals who churn out a gazillion books that are all fundamentally the same, and they make a good living doing it.
But am *I* like that?
I care about free creative expression, first and foremost for myself. Is the evolution of my mind destined toward sameness forever and ever? Do I even make any sense?
Will I eventually grow bored of Mr. Perfect marrying Ms. Beautiful? Or am I too enamored with the simplicity of love and family to ever grow tired of it?
I’ve had a fairly tumultuous life, so enjoying stability feels a bit weird to me. Perhaps I was meant to land in this wonderful place, or perhaps I still have more stormy weather to endure while I continue to evolve further.
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Religion
I’m what is called an eclectic Pagan, though I think of myself more as an obsessive cherry-picker.
Religion fascinates me. When I was 21, I made plans to move far away and get a degree in Religious Studies, but it turned out that I was destined for something else. Instead, I now have a large collection of books ranging from the Liber Null to Doreen Virtue.
I’ve dabbled in all sorts of magic, and I have a deck of Tarot cards that I consult regularly. If something doesn’t work, I move on to the next; if it does, I add it to the ‘eclectic’ part of my Pagan practice. All I really care about is finding what resonates with my soul, irregardless of what shape it takes.
I consider the religious beliefs of others to be sacrosanct, and while I will discuss why I do or don’t believe in a particular thing, I respect that everyone has their own path to follow. That’s also part of my beliefs.
All of my stories have an esoteric element to them, and they all happen in the same spiritual universe.
Light Eternal, for example, is pretty heavy on the spiritual stuff. So much so, honestly, that I don’t expect it to gain any sort of attention until after I’ve published a few novels. However, it was exactly what I needed to write at the time, and it’s a good foundation, so I went ahead and put it out there.
I’ve been a bit shy to say all of that right out. I’ve had very mixed reactions to this particular aspect of my personality, but considering that it’s an obvious part of my writing, it would be disingenuous of me to try to hide it.
So there you have it, I love religion. I’m just not picky about which one.
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Trading Yesterday – The Beauty and the Tragedy
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Catharsis
Once, during a particularly stressful point in my life, I decided to get drunk. I chose an evening when I was alone and not likely to be disturbed, and settled in with my favorite bottles. After four shots of sugary liqueurs, my stomach called it quits.
I spent the rest of the evening hunched over the toilet.
I wasn’t miserable at all. It actually felt cathartic, to purge out all of the sorrows that I had endured in such a dramatic fashion. It was the only time I’ve ever experienced peace while vomiting.
Now, on those good days, when I can crank out over a thousand words in a comparatively short time, feel the same way: a cathartic purge. Those days help give me serenity and sanity with everything that follows.
Those days keep me writing.
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Inner Voice
I have an extraordinarily loud inner voice, and I took it for granted that everyone had some sort of private dialogue with themselves, until I found out differently a few months ago. Read the title of this article, which says all you need to know. I still struggle with the idea, but it also explains why so many people have assumed that if I don’t say my thoughts out loud, my thoughts don’t exist.
I started off extremely shy, and once I was labeled as quiet, no one wanted to hear anything I had to say. However, that didn’t mean that I possessed an empty mind, so I’ve spent most of my life telling myself all of those thoughts that no one else ever bothered to listen to. In many ways, I was my only confidant during my formative years, and I suppose that my chatty brain is the natural consequence of that.
I often have a monologue going on in my brain. It doesn’t matter if I’m sewing or washing dishes, I’m always chattering away with myself in my head. I can even talk to my own fictional characters as if they were real. It’s one of those things that I don’t tell most people about, since they aren’t very likely to understand — I’m sure that a psychiatrist would have a field day with me.
Ultimately, that’s why I write: the Voice has to go somewhere. That’s also why I feel compelled to self-publish, instead of keeping my stories hidden away on a flash drive somewhere. At the end of the day, I’m still human, and I still want to feel like someone hears me.
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Love Triangles
Hate ’em.
My first exposure to the idea of two guys chasing after one woman was the TV series Christy. My mom watched it, and some years later when the movie, Choices of the Heart, was released, I was excited to watch it with her. I was partial to the reverend David, and found it disappointing when (SPOILER) Christy married Dr. MacNeill instead. C’mon! I didn’t like him at all!
Later, I realized that most love triangles have a clear winner early on, and the second guy is mostly just emotional gratuity.
In real life, the closest I ever came to unwillingly becoming the subject of attention from multiple guys ended so horrifically that it was a full five years before I associated with any non-family males again, and earned me the branding of “cold hearted bitch.” It was scarring.
As a married thirty-something, love triangles don’t do it for me. All I needed was The One, and I enjoy stories about people finding their One too, so I can reminisce and appreciate how lucky I am with my husband. It’s easy to spoil happily-ever-afters by wondering what would have happened if you had married a different guy.
I don’t pick teams or giggle when my guy scores points over the other one. I don’t eagerly tune in day after day to see which man the main character will choose. Despite the popularity of love triangles, I just don’t like them. I see them as a good way to alienate others and get hurt. Not fun. Not romantic. No thank you.
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Murder, She Wrote
I’ve been watching ‘Murder, She Wrote‘ in my downtime, and I’m currently halfway through season 2.
Occasionally I think that the main character, Jessica Fletcher, is too trusting. She hands high-priced items over to the police without ever once suspecting that anything less than honorable will happen to them, and she openly talks about her suspicions and plans to whoever happens to be nearby.
Of course, since it’s a TV show, she always has everything lined up perfectly whenever the bad guy tries to do bad things, and the day always ends with justice prevailing.
It annoys me deeply. Irritates. Vexes. Abrades. Perturbs. Etc.
Perhaps it’s a generation gap, or simply all too telling of many of my own experiences, but the amount of open trust without any negative consequences strikes me as implausible and naive. I want to grab Fletcher by the shoulders and shout, “KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT!” The world is a dark and evil place, and there’s a murderer in your midst. Keep your wits about you, and maybe if you’re lucky you’ll survive into the next episode.
But that’s not the world portrayed in the series. That world is comparatively innocent and unrelatable for me.
That said, I do very much enjoy the episodes about writer culture. Them’s fun.
By Autumn Rain 