| update... |
[Apr. 22nd, 2010|05:15 pm] |
It's been nearly two years since I last updated, goodness. And my last post wasn't exactly the sort of post one wants to keep looking at all the time.
It's about time that I finish Ashes of Time. I'll be updating with a chapter soon, and then I'll get the rest of it down in May or June. And with that -- into the great beyond! Quite a bit's changed since my last post. I've got sucked into poetry of the snobbish sort, so late Yeats over early Yeats, Jorie Graham over Billy Collins, etc. It's certainly satisfying my taste for producing "literary" things. Maybe that'll let me focus on writing a story that's purely enjoyable for myself, which has been a problem when original fiction is concerned. It's really too bad I can't steal Rowling's world -- I'd make it so much more fun than she does. :) |
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| my story |
[Aug. 19th, 2008|06:38 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Germany | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | introspective | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Bjork // New World | ] |
(This might be a long post.)
There was a boy who got bored and decided to write. In 10th grade of high school, he started this Harry Potter story called "Prometheus Bound," which got him a lot of reviews. That pleased him. A year later, he started this fic called "Tread Softly," which got him even more reviews. That pleased him even more. He decided he liked this writing business (though not only for the reviews, of course). It was kind of cool to throw oneself into a story and pour out all this wish-washy emotion he'd never consider proper in real life. But he didn't care, really. It was fun.
All this was going to change once he graduated high school -- though he didn't know it of course, the poor thing. This boy (young man?) went off to college. Now, the college he decided to go to was very prestigious, starts with an H, ends with a D, and produces lots of self-important dunderheads. The boy didn't really know that, of course. He was just tremendously pleased with himself and not a little awed to be going to ______ (!).
By November of his first year of college, our boy realized that ______ (!) was hard. Everybody was frigging smart. All of his assignments took forever. None of the concepts were easy to understand. That was only the academic side of it. He realized that, because he was a shy sort of boy, really, it was quite hard for him to make friends, even though it was what he wanted more than anything else in the world. So he make many friends* -- close friends, at least -- and felt rather lonely and miserable (though he'd never have admitted it, of course).
* He did make a friend: a backstabbing nasty little hypocrite (BNLH) who is part of a different story.
Maybe it was the loneliness. Maybe it was the effect of going to ______ (!). Somehow, the boy's attitude towards writing changed. He woke up one day and declared, "I can't waste my time writing Harry Potter fanfic! How will I ever get published? How will I ever produce anything of true literary worth?" He decided, then and there, to write things of True Literary Worth. He fiddled with the idea of producing a Novel, but decided to start with something smaller, more bite-sized, as it were. So he began mass producing Short Stories, using Themes and Symbols that were Worthy and Profound, Deep and Dizzying. What the boy never noticed was that none of his stories were particularly enjoyable, at all happy, nor terribly... engrossing. Oh, fine: none of them were terribly good. He also forgot that he loved writing.
Then, towards the end of his second year at ______(!), several things happened that force our protagonist to reevaluate his situation. (These things would make for a very long post, but the author will state here that they included breaking up with an aforementioned BNLH, getting his spirit broken by a shitload of problem sets, and coming face to face with the fact that he was a bloody ponce.) Because of this reevaluation -- or because it made him dizzy and uncertain -- he decided to write a story, not too long and not too short, that was just for himself. It involved original characters, young adults, sex, and an awful loneliness that made our protagonist terrified to show it even to his closest friends.
But he did. And, gradually, things began to change. Our protagonist learned to become friendly with loneliness. He embraced his ponciness in some ways**, though he didn't feel like trumpeting it to the world at large. Slowly, very slowly, his short stories began to have happier endings. And he wrote some more fanfiction.
** That's another post. Ask me about idiots and this place called GA.
Anyway, the story sort of ends where it begins, although the protagonist has of course grown older, wiser, and taller. It can still be said that his pursuit of happiness is still a spectacular failure waiting to happen, but at least he's less afraid of a thing or two. Of course, unless he gets hit by a tram on his way to work tomorrow, the story hasn't finished, as has much left, just like the road that goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began... |
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| hello again |
[May. 17th, 2008|12:45 am] |
Thanks to everyone who responded to my last post! Nice to know there are cool people out there. :)
I haven't updated this in a while because: a) I haven't written any HP fanfic in a long time, and b) my ex has threatened to stalk my lj. But a) is the primary reason: AoT hasn't grown any new words for half a year now (has it really been half a year??), and I feel kind of guilty leaving a WiP dangling. I might finish it anyway. A decade from now or something. :D
But I have been writing. I pumped out a lot of (crappy) short stories, and a couple of more interesting things, some of which you might find here. The site is a gay fiction online hub and has both the truly wonderful and truly crappy. Anyway, if you're bored and curious about what I've been up to, please hop on over and have fun reading. (It's original fiction, which I know is a lot harder to get into than fanfic, but yeah... *pulls out the ABBA record* Take a chance on meeee...) |
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| nothing |
[Dec. 15th, 2007|02:35 pm] |
Ashes of Time has not gotten a lot of reviews. All I can say is that, Ashes of Time is vastly superior to Tread Softly, and people who can't tell are sophomoric and pubescent and need to grow up. TS was like masturbating -- completely solipsistic from the POV of a wishy-washy pansy who makes Hamlet look sensible and decisive. AoT isn't. It's sad that I'm wasting my immense talents on an oversized classroom of twits who can only hold two characters and one setting in their head at a given time. Someone needs a life. I need a life.
</rant>
Please don't be offended, in case you're one of the sophomoric pubescent twits I was talking about. I was one too. (Once upon a time, a long time ago.) And all I can say is that you're even if you are one of said twits, you are still vastly superior to some people I know, especially one who should've died in a car accident when it was convenient to, a few weeks ago.
I would like to say I'm plastered on eggnog, but I'm not. Merry holidays to you too!!!
(I hope I still get reviews after this...) |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 5th, 2007|01:43 am] |
I will write Ashes of Time, but later, when I haven't as much work, or when my poetic fervor has abated a bit. I've never felt a story so alive in me.
I read some poetry criticism, and one of the things being said is that recent poetry (post 1980s) deals with epistemology. How well can you know yourself? How can you know yourself? What is being known? etc. From the little poetry I have read in the recent era, this does seem to be the case. And I do think this is the case. Look at all the poems written today that have weird forms, odd punctuation, mad structure, little flow, and non-traditional forms. Stevens may be the last person to have written a sonnet. All this seems to be a very obvious in-your-face way of saying: you don't know. With the explosion of knowledge in recent years, this seems like a necessary response.
Which is all very well and good, but it's seems pretty pointless to me if the most elaborate constructions only point to their own emptiness. It's time to create a new self. It's difficult to rely on specific traditions for the self -- someone in the US has access to Kabbalah, Japanese anime, Chinese feng shui, maybe their European roots, African-American noise (sorry -- music) from the radio, etc. Particularly with the superficial attention one pays to each tradition, there is a lot of annihilation. Who really goes deeper into the feng shui tradition than rearranging their desk or bedroom? So that part of it is lost.
But there is creation, too. Only, it's much more difficult, because one has to pull these disparate things into a personalized whole. You can't rely on your Catholic upbringing to tell you what to do with Kabbalah. You can't really go to synagogue to ask because, well, who does that, and you're a Catholic. Everybody is living on top of a crevice. What is reliable, though, is the intimately personal, physical, and moral. I don't know what Kabbalah means to me, but I do know that I am confused about it. What does it mean that I'm dancing to Europop, but I can feel my hips. My church says my stem cell research is an act of evil, but I'm doing it anyway.
Brave new world indeed. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 2nd, 2007|11:55 pm] |
I said two poems in the last post, so I shall do the second poem here:
The next Wallace Stevens poem I will attempt is called Continual Conversation with a Silent Man. It's a trickier, more ambitious poem and contemplates life and death and the contribution of poetry.
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 2nd, 2007|11:02 pm] |
One thing that happens when you join a poetry workshop is that you're exposed to the pageantry of other peoples' idols. Half my workshop adores Wallace Stevens. I don't like Stevens. Part of it is the reaction to their adulation. Part of it is the fact that Stevens kind of pops up out of nowhere in my 'poetic landscape' -- he's the grand daddy of modern poetry, but he doesn't seem part of the continuum, the tradition, as Yeats, Eliot, Pound, etc. were. (He's a bit like Dickinson. Only there's no pretensions there.) Another part of it is that he's overrated. Don't get me wrong -- some of his poems are marvelous -- perfect, even. But I don't get the sense of genio which I think is essential for greatness.
Here I'll analyze two of his poems, both of which I like a lot. The first is The Snow Man.
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| persona and poetics |
[Sep. 7th, 2007|09:31 pm] |
I've finished chapter 5; it's the longest chapter in Ashes of Time so far, and in a way it's my favorite. I have a thousand or so words on chapter 6. Knowing Harvard, this is how much I'll have for a good while to come, unless I decide to work on it next week.
Now, a bit of poetry. I'd read Su Shi's Red Cliff Expositions (ie Poetic Essays) last year, but only after reading an article on it lately have I managed to tie it into a more satisfactory poetic interpretation. Doing so illuminates a rather interesting difference in Eastern and Western perceptions of poetic persona.
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| What Do You Have To Say? - Writing: Makes Me A Better Writer |
[Sep. 7th, 2007|09:01 pm] |
Always looking forward, never backward. The sense of disgust, mortification, and helplessness when I do look back. The niggling it-wasn't-so-bad feeling when I look back after some time has passed. Trying to be efficient and reductive, asking myself if there's a reason for the existence of every single word. Giving up and going on my flights of fancy. For fiction, being more balanced and objectively aware of tone and pacing. For poetry, always pushing. Really I don't know. I wish I could something like 'Elements of Style' or 'my 9th grade Englsh teacher.' But it's just my self-perception, and how it clashes with what I see of it on paper. My ego, in short. Who needs EB White when you've got your own big head? |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 2nd, 2007|09:20 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | poetry | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Ah fors'e lui -- La Traviata, Verdi | ] |
I'd always been interested in Chinese poetry, being Chinese myself, but thanks to my deplorable Chinese, I'd only been able to read about how great Du Fu is and brilliant Li Bai without really understanding for myself. Another (very big) problem is that of translation. Every word in every Chinese poem has a myriad of connotations, far more than each word in a poem in English.
VIEW OF TAISHAN, DU FU. This is a short, early, and famous poem by Du Fu. It's short enough for me to post here.
What shall I say of the Great Peak?
The ancient dukedoms are everywhere green,
Inspired and stirred by the breath of creation,
With the Twin Forces balancing day and night.
...I bare my breast toward opening clouds,
I strain my sight after birds flying home.
When shall I reach the top and hold
All mountains in a single glance?
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