Starvation and Boredom

[queerbychoice]

Nothing tastes good anymore. I'm hungry, yet every piece of food in the house (of which, admittedly, there aren't many to choose from - just bread, milk, orange juice, canned spaghetti 'O's, ramen, macaroni and cheese, cornflakes, shredded wheat, pudding and jello mixes, and various sandwich spreads) just appalls me right now.

I'm going to drive across town, be a foolish spendthrift and buy that Harry Potter book even though it's twice the price it will be once it comes out in paperback (it's so uncharacteristic of me to waste money, this just proves what a Harry Potter addict I've suddenly become), and seek some kind of cheap but edible sustenance on my way back home.

See you around.

Comments

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I don't drink caffeinated soda if there's anything else available. If I'm stuck somewhere with nothing else to drink then Ill drink it, but I don't like it. I react strongly to it and after only one can of caffeinated soda I feel like there's ants crawling all over me.

I'm addicted to books too. Speaking of which - you might check out the fictions written by Frank sometime. He's a GREAT writer, easily one of the best I've ever had the good fortune to meet (and I'm including numerous creative writing professors of mine who'd published novels, so that's no small feat). I wish he'd write more. But then, I wish I'd write more too, so I'm being a hypocrite to ask him for something I'm not doing myself.

Do you write much yourself, in addition to reading? What kinds of things have you written?

[dlfke.livejournal.com]

i am a coffee person. i drink diet coke and cherry coke once in a long while. i've also tried coke with lemon. i like the buzz of caffeine but other drugs like alcohol don't suit me too much. i'll have a drink or two but i do not like to feel dumb or mentally impaired.

thanks for the frank link. i will definitely indulge myself in some of his writings. in regards to my own writing: i have written some fiction and some poetry but not much lately and not much i'd share with the public. shy about it, ya know? i took a fiction writing class two years back and got a lot out of it. except discipline. i need someone to force me to write. maybe join a writing group with deadlines. what do you write besides super magnetic poetry?

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

lately, i write: email, journal entries, websites. during college, i wrote: poetry (i was usually praised most highly by others for my poetry than my fiction, but i've always personally considered fiction my real calling in life), the occasional short story, and a half-finished novel which i started the summer i turned 19. unfortunately i've written less than three pages of the novel since i graduated from college (in '98) and i'm unbearably stuck and frustrated and grieving over the beautiful words which are going to waste unfinished. because, see, i'm actually amazing with the fine-tuning of words and paragraphs, yet i'm so utterly hopeless at stringing together a plot with a beginning middle and end that i can stay happy with for long enough to actually finish writing the damn thing. this is why i was always praised highest for my poetry. but what i want to convey is too complicated for poetry, poems are so short and what i want to say is book-length. only, i need to find a looser structure, i need to move more toward a "collection of prose poems" type of book instead of a "first a happens, then b, then c" type of book, i need to rid myself of my preconception that i should try to put in a plot structure, because every single tiny gesture toward plot that i ever make collapses inward upon me and drags the whole book down with it and shatters because for whatever reason I JUST DON'T FUCKING HAVE THE PARTICULAR BRAND OF TALENT WHICH FUNCTIONS WITHIN PLOT STRUCTURES and it's high time i face that and accept it and get over it and learn how to write whatever it is that my broken plotless prose poem collection has been screaming for me to leave it free to become.

it's like my book is a living child in front of me and i've been trying to get it to sit in a chair labeled "finished," and in order to put it into the chair i've been spending the last 6 years trying to bend these things that look like knees, they're these knee-shaped bumps on the front of the legs, right in the middle, halfway between the ankles and the crotch. i've been trying to bend them but there's no actual joint there, just bumps, and whenever i try to bend them i either accomplish nothing or i make the child scream or i break both its legs and it lies wailing on the floor. and i lie wailing on the floor with it, because every single one of the dr. spock baby books insist there are knees there and i'm supposed to bend them or else i'm a bad mommy, and no no no i don't ever want to be a bad mommy but what do you do when following the instructions to not be a bad mommy just ends up breaking your child's legs?

//sigh.//

that particular writing crisis has been going on since long before i graduated from college, but graduating from college also precipitated another one. i took as many creative writing classes as i possibly could in college, sometimes more than one per semester, so i was always writing for deadlines. it was both good and bad. i was horribly frustrated because writing for arbitrary deadlines set by other people was terribly awkward for me, it threw my rhythm off, and that whole business of being too weighed down with other homework to write much during the school year unless it was something i could turn in, and then summer vacation arriving and suddenly i felt i should be perpetually inspired 24 hours a day in order not to waste any of this magnificent free time . . . the irregularity with which free time was withheld from me 9 months a year and then dumped on my head in overwhelming doses for the remaining 3 months made me seasick, or whatever the writing equivalent of seasick was. it wasn't a natural way to work and i was desperate to escape college and get rid of it. but the aftermath of that horrible way of working has turned out even worse than the actual college experience, because i just haven't been able to adjust properly to working on my own and following my own rhythms.