Birthday

My birthday was a couple days ago, and I wanted to make a video on the day. To keep my thoughts straight I read something to read for it....which is below. The video is here, if anyone wants to see it.

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I used to think that my birthdays would never bother me, that I would grow older without being phased by the passing time. And on one hand that's so: I delight in each new white hair I find on my head, enjoying the contrast they make against the dark hair I was born with. But although my age doesn't bother me, I've found that each year around my birthday I wonder what I've done with my life. It's so easy to focus on what I feel are my failures, so perhaps I should take a moment to think about what I've accomplished.

I'm fairly decent at writing, although I haven't been doing much of it lately. Worth mentioning though, in 2009 one of my poems was published in the magazine Cricket.

I'm told that I'm great at photography. And if I may say so myself, I am pretty good at it.

I'm talented at a variety of hand crafts, such as: needlework, spinning yarn, crochet...and more, but I don't feel like listing everything I can do.

I've competed internationally with the Sweet Adeline's chorus Pride of Portland, and in 2009 we took ninth place at internationals in Hawaii.

I'm very close to completing my English degree at Marylhurst University. I spend a lot of time worrying about what a barrier anxiety and depression are in completing my degree, since I'm very aware that I should have graduated by now. But I should probably also remember that it's taken a lot of work to get where I am now.

And, I've always managed to work my way through anxiety and depression. I still struggle, and I'm sure I'll always have my ups and downs, but to have gotten past the really tough times in the past is something.

So maybe, maybe next year, I'll be able to think about all this and my other accomplishments rather than scrutinizing what I haven't succeeded in yet.

A photo of stairs that I took on my birthday

Fourteen Years Later...

I know I've written about the morning of September 11th, 2001 before. Maybe I will again. Maybe I'll write about it every few years. It's a strange time to remember.

On that day I was twelve years old, and Tall One was ten. He would sometimes sleep on my bedroom floor, I don't even know why anymore, but he'd done so the previous night. That's how it was that our mom woke us up at the same time, and tried to explain what had happened to us. There was a history of trouble in the Middle East, she said, and it was inevitably going to result in something big and terrible happening. Well, that big and terrible thing had finally happened.

I don't remember what she said beyond that. I don't remember what I said, or how Tall One responded. I didn't even know anything about the Middle East, and was shocked that something like this was apparently inevitable. But I remember watching the towers fall on our TV, and not feeling anything. I was numb. I couldn't grieve or be upset for those who had died, and I was angry with myself for that. I wanted to feel something, but I didn't. I couldn't.

These days I know that being numb is my natural first response to any tragedy. Grief will follow soon enough. But I was twelve years old, and didn't know that about myself yet, so on top of processing what was happening in our country I was beating myself up for not feeling the "correct" emotions.

There are other things I remember from that time.

I was working my way through (while skipping the "boring" parts) the novel Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, and found myself thinking that it was a rather grim book considering the events of the time. I thought I might be better off with a happier book, but stuck with it.

Even then I needed to write. My diary was missing, and I couldn't persuade my parents to take me to buy a new one, so I started a new sort of makeshift one with regular lined paper and something to hold the pages together. I needed that, as I sorted out both myself and events.

Then, there's the Star Wars video game I'd play with Tall One. Before watching the towers fall one of our favorite pass times in that game was to shoot up our own buildings. Hey, it looked more impressive than killing the bad guys. The explosions were cooler. After the towers fell, though, I just couldn't keep doing that. Yes I'd play the game, but somehow I couldn't playfully destroy our own buildings in that video game anymore.

...and looking at my two previous posts about that day, I see that I've written about each of these things before. I guess there are a few things in particular that have stuck with me.

firefighters

Although this photo isn't directly from that day, I thought it might be appropriate.

Writing Fiction

One stumbling block I've always had when it comes to writing fiction is a lack of ideas. What in the world should I write about? What's the conflict? And characters? Agh, so hard.

Or, so I thought.

In reality, I have random daydreams running through my head all the time. Have I just seen a new movie? Picked up a new book? Well, yeah, this is me we're talking about. So I'm inventing little plots based on the characters, an alternate way things could happen, making up characters who have to find their way around in that story's universe, or even throwing characters from another movie/book into the mix and enjoying in my head how everyone bounces off each other. Heck, I'll even think about how some of my most beloved characters would respond to regular day to day stuff in our world...not necessarily leading to a small story in my head, but it could.

Bouncing around ideas like this is just something I do without thinking, and never mention to anyone. Usually if someone asks me what I'm thinking and I say "Nothing," it's because I've got some plot going through my head involving whatever I'm doing and some of my beloved characters (probably from a Tamora Pierce novel). Saying that nothing is on my mind is easier and less time consuming than trying to explain what's really running around in my weird head.

Why didn't I think to use any of these ideas in writing fiction before? I guess it comes down to a few reasons. One is that I'm used to keeping these little stories close to me, so much so that writing them down never occurred to me. Also, they can be extremely personal, to the point that I feel like I'm showing a little bit of what's inside of me when I write them, and I'm afraid of someone wanting an explanation when I show that part of me. But maybe it's time to stop worrying about that, and just write.

I think the last reason that I don't write these stories down is because often enough they involve worlds and characters belonging to other writers. But that doesn't mean that I can't use the ideas I come up with for my own stories, with my own characters in my own world.

This is me finally acknowledging that I have more ideas than I know what to do with, and saying that it's finally time for me to start writing.

Writing

Letter From the Past

Have you ever written a letter to your future self? I've written one. Or, I thought I wrote only one. I went looking for it as something to write about here, and instead found another one that I wrote to be opened in 2012. I'd completely forgotten this second one. Here it is, with a bit of editing, due to a) personal stuff, and b) clarifying details that wouldn't be obvious to readers here.

While I'll mostly reserve my comments for after the letter, I want to mention PoP before hand so that you'll know what I'm talking about in just one read through. Pride of Portland (PoP) is a barbershop chorus that's part of Sweet Adelines International. The short explanation is that it's a group of women spread out over the globe who love to sing barbershop, wear too much makeup, wear lots of sequins, and hold musical competitions every year. My first international competition with PoP was in Vegas, and my second (and last) one was in Hawaii. I found that Hawaii agreed with me much more than Vegas, though I was too focused on the competition to really get to enjoy the place properly.

November 24th, 2007

I'm 18 years old as I write this.

I'm currently taking Poetry and Math 60 at Portland Community College. By the time I read this I hope to be working in a library, and possibly making plans to major in English at a 4 year college. I've not even begun to think about which one I want to go to yet.

I went to my first poetry reading today! It was at [I'm keeping this private], and I read my poem "He Fought His Heart" for the group. I plan to continue going to that group.

Working on music for PoP is a challenge, but hopefully I'll get better at it, and am already making progress on it becoming easier. Last year in Vegas we took 14th, and next year we go to Hawaii! I'm excited.

I'm thinking that I just might get some of my poems published. But it'll be a while before I try to go about it, I think.

I wonder -- might I be married, with kids, when I read this? Or will I still be single? Currently I've never been on a date, and never been kissed.

To date I only have one poem memorized -- Ogden Nash's "The Turtle," or I think that's the title. Anyways, I think my future self will know what my current self is talking about. :)

Well, I might add some more later, but that's it for now! 

See ya!

Sarita :P

"See ya!"

...and the above letter is exactly why I have trouble making long term plans these days. Give it a few years, or less, and my plans evolve into something else.

At the time that I wrote this letter I was pretty intimidated at the thought of going to a university. It seemed like a huge commitment (which yeah, it is) and I wasn't sure whether it was for me. So my idea around this time was to maybe get a two year degree that would aid me in getting a library job, then maybe think about going to a university. And of course I was thinking an English degree since that's what I was taking every term at Portland Community College. May as well stick with what I was already nuts about.

I'm certainly not complaining about my decision to pursue an English degree before getting settled in my own place, as I believe was assumed though not stated in the letter. But it's an example of how a long term plan I have one year isn't what I want the next year. Another example is when I picked out my Music Therapy degree, then eventually realized that it was a bad idea. I guess I just don't know for sure what I really want, career wise, though something in a library still sounds awesome.

As for poetry, Fall 2007 was the term I got really into writing poems. It all started when I turned a dream into a haiku immediately after waking up one morning, or maybe I started writing the poem in my dream. Whichever way, that opened the floodgates, and I wrote a lot of poetry until my inspiration more or less dried up. Some of my poems were good, most of them not. One was good enough to get published in the magazine Cricket less than two years after the above letter, which I was beyond excited about since it was my favorite magazine at the time. The poem mentioned in the letter is still unpublished, however, and revisiting it recently I could see that it needs some TLC.

Oh yeah, and "The Turtle"....shame on younger me for not knowing the name for certain. Come on, how difficult could it have been to remember the two word name if I memorized the poem itself?

I'm still unmarried and there are no plans for kids, but I'm definitely not single and am lucky enough to be very much in love with an amazing man. ♡

Have you ever written a letter to yourself? Future or past? What did you put in your letter?

Writing Goal

New goal: Write a blog post every day for the next two weeks.

This is an idea that's been bouncing around in my head for much of the last week. My reasoning behind it is that I'm just not doing some things that I want to do these days, one of which is write. And while I don't want to commit to a long term goal, I think I can manage a short term goal of two weeks.

I stopped writing for a couple reasons reasons that I need to call bullshit on myself for. One is that I feel like I have trouble coming up with ideas for blog posts, and the second is that I wonder who will want to read much of what I do come up with to write about. Come to think of it, the latter could be making the first worse. It's my hope that hitting the "publish" button on this blog every day for two weeks might help me snap out of this.

As to what I'll write about, I don't know for sure what all I'll cover in the next two weeks. I figure that if nothing else, I can write about something nice that happened within the previous twenty-four hours, even if it's something I don't think anyone will be interested in reading about. (I can be a pessimist at times.) At least I'll be writing. And someone might surprise me. (Maybe I'm a pessimist who tries to be an optimist...?)

In addition to writing every day, I may finally publish some of what's lurking in my draft folder. Some of the things that I started writing, but decided no one would want to read, go back to over a year ago. While a few of them definitely won't be relevant to where I am right now, it might be worth finally sharing them.

Writing Novels

Over the years I've made various attempts at writing novels. When I recently retrieved my books from storage (remember I put much of my stuff in storage when I moved back in with my parents a couple years ago?) I discovered that I had placed my previous attempts at writing my own novels along with those boxes. Or, I at least had tidbits of each writing project. A couple of them were written on previous computers that I shared with my mom, I think, but I at least found outlines or notes on them with my books.

Ospella

I don't know how I came up with this name, though I suspect that it had something to do with my obsession with ospreys at the time. Ospella was majorly inspired by the Redwall series by Brian Jacques, complete with an abbey (or fortress?) named Ospella that was home to woodland creatures who had to fend off an unbelievable bad guy named Barblood. I may have been a little too inspired by Redwall, even having a hare who was obsessed with eating, and I called the youngsters dibbuns.

I don't think I had thought this one out very well since I don't know how it was supposed to end, aside from glorious victory for Ospella, and I only have about fifty handwritten pages of it.

Vanessa and Her Rats

A teenage girl finds baby wild rats who were orphaned, and decides to raise them by hand. Her friends help, and (completely unrealistically) they grow up to be great pets. (In reality, even hand raised they'll be too wild to be good pets if the parents were wild. But I didn't know this at the time.) Let's just say that I was extremely enthusiastic about my pet rats at the time. I was also really excited about Girl Scouts and decided to have the girls earn a Girl Scout badge during the book.

I think that I only have an outline for this one, and was writing it on a computer whose whereabouts I've lost track of. I figure it's around somewhere...

NaNoWriMo

Once upon a time a friend persuaded me to try writing a book for National Novel Writing Month. I have just a few notes on this one. It consists of two countries with new tension between them, a guy who's a bard/poet, and a lady mage who's also a warrior (and vegetarian...I was vegetarian at the time). They bring about peace somehow, and there's a dragon who helps at times. I also wanted a bit of romance, which I recall my family teasing me or giving me a hard time about, but I was trying to stretch myself. I don't think that writing romance would be easy for me.

I had no clue where I was going with this, it crashed and burned pretty quickly, and I'm not sure where the computer I was writing it on is. This was really my last proper attempt at a novel before this summer at a novel, and it was at least five years ago.

World building notes

I guess this doesn't quite count as a novel since I was just world building, but a novel was (is?) the ultimate goal. And I don't know, the NaNoWriMo thing may have been placed in it...? I have a notebook with twenty-five pages of notes about this world, and it's influenced some by Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea cycle. In particular the First Language and the dragons are similar to what you'll see in her Earthsea books.

My first entry in this notebook is dated 12/12/2004, the second to last is dated 9/29/2005, and the most recent is 9/3/2014.

Those Who Passed On

Summer classes may have fallen apart for me due to the anxiety problems (it was impossible to handle school for a while and I still don't know how to get completely back to normal), but my genre writing class got me started on writing what will be my first completed novel. Let's just say that it's urban fantasy influenced mildly by the horror genre. Oh, and there's a small but ancient dragon living with the heroine. Because I like dragons, and because everyone needs a dragon who perches on top of a cat tree and argues about whether you should have pizza or rare steak for dinner.