My New Blog

If I have the need to write something that doesn't tightly have anything to do with my current projects, I will continue to post on this blog. But mostly, I will be keeping track of my creative process as sort of an experiment. So anymore blogs you wish to read,

go here:

http://creartwriter2.blogspot.com

How's it going?

We say it every day. Hello. Hi. Hey, what's up? My personal favorite, how's it going? But, as pointed out in Waydowntown, you might as well be saying hello to a rock. It's just so fake. And every time you say it to someone else, it gets faker. Yes, faker. Maybe you really do care how they're doing. But then why treat them with the same respect you treat the people you say hi to when you're just trying to be liked. Or just trying to look cool in front of other people. Throw in a reference to something that happened before and try to make it sound urgent and put a question mark at the end, and you'll really seem cool to people who don't know you. How's it going? It's not that I don't care how it's going. It's not even that I don't like you. It's just that our society has incorporated "throw away lines" into everyday usage, we can think of nothing else to say. Be polite. We get so worked up about trying to mind our manners, we don't ever be ourselves in passing and show that we really do care. If we do at all.

Finished

Jeigh was very happy that she had finally finished the first draft of her novel, Haven. It had taken her almost a full year to come this far. It'd been screaming to be written probably longer than she knew. Now, some serious editing was to come. She'd already added an entire page and a half to the beginning, a risky move, but a neccessary one.

Here are the end results:

words: 91,681
2.8 sentences per paragraph
8.3 words per sentence
4.1 characters per word
0% passive sentences (she doubts this is accurate)
82.6 reading ease
3.8 grade level

Words used:
-smile: 67 times (recently went down to 51)
..-grin: 17, smirk: 16, laugh: 40, beam: 5, frown: 10
-eye: 270 times
-look: 481 times
..-glance: 30, focus: 22, observe: 9, scan: 11, spot: 11, stare: 78, study: 1, survey: 4, watch: 74, leer: 1, gape: 2, gawk: 1, peer 1

Yes, work to be done.

If we don't write it down, historians won't know

A poem by Jeigh.


I fed my rose orange juice today
Because water wasn't working
I don't think she likes it much
But the sun has gone down anyway

The toothpaste bottle went empty
So I tried the tube from the emergency kit
When I pulled the brush from my mouth
The bristles came out pink

When I don't push the drawer in all the way
I bang my knees against it
I found another bruise this morning
I just never learn

I'm wearing my last clean pair of socks today
But I don't go home until tomorrow
I guess I'll have to wear them again
Not that anyone will notice

The pipes make a lot of noise
And the heater blows too hot
The humidifier makes it worse
But at least my nose doesn't bleed

It isn't snowing today
But I can see the paths of snowmen
Outside my window where they formed
But now lay in piles across Coate Field

I wish I were going home today
But I'm not
I should be studying for my French exam
But I'm not

--Jeigh

When the muse says, "That's enough."

Jeigh didn’t think there was such a thing as writing too much, not as long as the inspiration kept flowing. God had just sent Jeigh a message. It probably said, “Stop working on that novel and start studying for your finals.” Although it very well could have said, “The bathroom’s free. You can take a shower now.” She much preferred this interpretation particularly because that’s what she did. She’d been trying to take a shower all morning, but the showers were flooded. Ah, dorm life. So you’re wondering how it is that Jeigh noticed this message. Well, it was simple. She’d been typing her novel all morning when her N key fell off. That’s right. The N key on her keyboard. Le clavier. It just fell off. She hadn’t been typing on it particularly hard nor were her fingers sticky. And the laptop wasn’t even a year old! It just gave up and she had no idea how to fix it. It had little white things that could come up and down, but she wasn’t about to try to glue it back together without the advice of an ITS specialist. Now the key sat taped to her wrist rest as a tribute to her angry muse. God had not invented the laptop. He made trees because parchment outlasts ever-upgrading software and cheap plastic hardware. The irony of this whole thing was that the final that she had yet to study for was science, the very institution that invented this laptop. Thank you nerds of the world. Thank you for building crappy toys that only you know how to fix.

Shut up and do something

Jeigh hadn't written in a while. One reason for this was that the stupid website couldn't recognise the password even though it had saved it on default for when she typed in her screen name. So she had to change the password...to exactly the same word it was before.



Jeigh had made some progress on her novel, Haven, but was coming across a few problematic stones too slippery to step on. For one, she had a character, Percy, who was very lively at the beginning because of his interactions with the character, Biaji. But then Biaji began focusing his energy on Seyhak, and Jeigh realized that Percy didn't really do much when not prompted by Biaji. Now he just stood around in the scenes and never really added anything. So she knew that he'd have to be a pivoting point. That would be easy, but how to go back to his silent moments and liven him up without forcing him to speak?

There was also the matter of her "evil" character, Rachel Stone. Seyhak was pretty icy as it was, so how to make Rachel Stone more evil, she didn't know. Seyhak was defensive and talked a lot. To be really scary, Rachel Stone would have to be concise and leave the others to draw their own conclusions by bickering with each other.

And the climax was coming up -- the real climax, not the satire climax (she'd done that chapter already). This had to be intense, but she'd been using WAY too much dialogue lately. She'd need to cut down on that and focus on action and emotion. That would be hard after already transitioning into this frame of mind. Tell the protagonist to SHUT UP and DO something.



What else was new? This old Josh Joplin CD "Boxing Nostalgic" was exceptionally wonderful. Not that "Jaywalker" wasn't fantastic, but this one was so different and had a fancy little enhanced CD portion that didn't play on Jeigh's laptop. It played on her home computer and managed to amuse her for hours. No, that's not pathedic, shut up.

Oh, and do you know who was on TV? CP Roth. He was on the Denis Leary Christmas special with his brother, Adam. The Barenaked Ladies were there too -- quite good. There's talk of releasing it on DVD. If you don't know who this is, you suck.

Jeigh had a birthday on November 18th. Yes. She also had some more of those weird dreams that predict the future in a twisted guessing game sort of way.

Jeigh had also seen two very good plays "recently" including Harvey and The Underpants.

It snowed, dang it.

All of Jeigh's classes she wanted for next semester were filled up. And she cut her finger really bad on the laundry basket. It was so deep, she could see her left kidney. It burned in the shower too. No, these were not subtle suggestions that, yes, perhaps Jeigh did clean up once in a while.

She gave a ten minute speech this morning. She's pretty sure she doesn't even remember standing up there because it's a known fact that when multiple people look at you at once, time jumps into another dimension so that by the time you sit back in your seat, you don't remember having stood up there at all. Then the teacher tells you to go sit back down because you've just given your speech, don't you remember?

20 days until Serenity is on DVD. Orange u excited?

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

Eh, lemonade brainfreeze.
Sticky keyboard.
Geh.

Jeigh fought down the urge to stick her tongue out in disguist and ram it up her nose. No more lemonade. Put it away. Jeigh had spent the last...(*looks to clock*)...many hours writing a convincing speech for her Wednesday presentation. The thought of simplicity had been simmering in her brain for about a week -- well actually for a few years, but it'd only been a week since getting the assignment -- and when she began to type, the ideas flowed freely, though she feared a tad too whimsical, what with goofy anecdotes about dinosaurs, the moon, and amish.net, and this was before taking the Nyquil. But if no one found it funny, they were the ones at fault. Perhaps she could try to raise Henry David Thoreau from the dead just for this one night and have him write the speech for her. It was Halloween afterall. At least it would be for the next five hours. Just enough time to find some ancient medallion in the old basement of the...dorm...hall...what happened to all the lemonade?

Anyway, she was considering posting some drawings for her readers, but feared she had none, for most of her...well that was a lie. ALL of her comments lately were ones that had clearly not read the blog, for they spoke of shallow ideas, presumably all from the same user. Nevertheless, drawings did liven the dead space of letters. Dead letters. That sounded like an Eerie Indiana episode. Jeigh decided TV was in order. Perhaps Halloween would provide some good movies on the television set. Afterall, last night, she'd caught the Thirteen Ghosts remake, which she quite liked, and then a cheap Judd Nelson movie about the Bermuda Triangle. Mark Sheppard was in it, so she would have continued to watch to see what would happen next, but she'd taken Nyquil before Thirteen Ghosts was over and was worried she wouldn't have the mentality to brush her teeth if she waited much longer. Anyway, if she couldn't find anything on TV, she did have three seasons of Red Dwarf and a sketchbook to keep her occupied.