News from the Great Beyond

A Little Redecorating

Thought I'd give the blog a facelift for the new year - with what my resolution to write more (and my commitment to post weekly on the CCC-SI "Word" blog, then at least share a link here), we wouldn't want it to start looking dusty around the place.

The banner graphic is newly created, but loosely based on the New Year's theme I used here on the site back in 2005.  What? 2005?  Really?  Yes, time has flown.  Here's a snapshot of what it looked like back then. 

And since I was being all graphic-designishly creative, I was poking around in my archived files and found a folder full of forum signatures I'd created for myself and my friends on my World of Warcraft guild forums.  I've created a new photo album and uploaded the majority of them here just for grins.  For those of you who played in the past (or still play), enjoy this walk down memory lane.

Tomorrow, be on the lookout for the first of my weekly group blog posts.  I'll likely just link to it here with a short excerpt, to direct more traffic to the main blog.

Musings... on Writing Discipline

Oh hi, it's me again... remember, the one who promised back in August that I'd be posting more often?  Yeah, we can see how well that worked.  Promises, promises, eh?

I will say that despite not posting about it, I did work on transcribing more of my poetry to the blog site - I finished all the more recent poetry collection (although I still have to work on getting the songs typed up, and finish the original, older collection while I'm at it).  And then... life happened.

I had a wedding to attend in early September, with bridesmaid duties... and right before I left, I was presented with a can't-miss opportunity at work to assist with our next new hire training class and coordinate their on-the-job training.  This caused my work schedule to shift for 7 weeks, starting the day after I returned from my week long bridesmaid-vacation, and suddenly I no longer had my 3-day weekends to designate a spare day for creativity.  And once I'm out of the habit, it's deadly hard to get me back into it, so going back to my usual work schedule in November, nothing got written.  Discipline has never been my strong suit, apparently.

I have, however, been reading a lot about writing - especially Twitter updates and blog posts from one of my favorite authors, James Scott Bell.  And reading about writing makes me want to write more, I just need something to force me to get started, and keep going.

Enter my mom's church, and their 2012 theme, "Do the Word".  As part of their "Bible-in-a-year" reading plan, there will be daily devotionals on their new church blog, and yours truly has been designated as one of the 7 regular blog contributors.   In fact, I will be writing every Sunday.  Hey wait a minute, New Year's Day is a Sunday this year... You mean I'll be the first one up?  No pressure there, folks!

As a side note, my mom will be one of the featured bloggers as well.  She would never describe herself as such, but my mother is a scholar - I expect some fantastic insights from her, especially regarding the Old Testament readings.

In any event, I'll link to the weekly "Do the Word" posts here as well as on Facebook.  Having a regular audience depending on me for the church blog will keep me accountable to write at least that on a weekly basis, and I refuse to promise too much for additional writing (especially coinsidering how busy work is likely to get after the new year), but once I'm in the groove, you may see more.

Looking at the past...

As promised last week, I've spent some time toiling away, transcribing more of my past collections of poetry, songs, and miscellaneous bits of creativity.  There's much more to go, but I've made a few observations.

First, some of what I wrote when I was in high school and college was rather profound.  Some of it was utter drivel.  I have been making a huge effort not to censor myself as I retype, preferring to keep things as they were in all their naivete and melodrama, but man.  It's an effort indeed.

If I could go back in time to my teens-and-twenties self and give myself a few pieces of advice, first and foremost would be that guy is not worth the drama you're putting yourself through.  Although in retrospect, my tendency toward melancholy, melodrama and unrequited love did prompt me to write prolifically at times, so perhaps that's not the foremost piece of advice I'd give after all.

OK, truthfully, the most important piece of advice would be don't stop writing.  Happy, sad, or apathetic; head-over-heels infatuated, infuriated, or awed... Every little thing that used to make me write at some point stopped being so important to put into words.  That, I regret.  I got out of the habit of writing, and of sharing that writing with others, and it's a tough thing to get the words flowing again.

So I'm still working at it.  Nothing "new" to share at this point, but I've plugged away this week at adding more to my Open the Window, Let in the Rain collection, mostly working from the later end of the table of contents back toward my older, stupider self.  I've also put up an index page for what was going to be my second collection of poetry, songs, and creative bits - I started gathering them around 1998 or so, intending to pull them into a cohesive collection and make copies for distribution to friends and family (much as I did with the first one), but I got sidetracked in the process and never finished.  How appropriate, for a collection entitled "Unfinished Business." 

From that index page you can link to the dedications - I've actually edited that a bit from the printed version I had lying around, and will probably edit some more... as well as the songs index and the poetry index.  The poetry index includes links to the more recent poems I've published on the blog, within the original blog posts, so you'll see some explanations, dedications and comments already there from years past.  Older poems will be published on individual pages like I've done with the older collection and linked to the titles you see there. 

The songs index currently has only two items available to view, and both of those are special requests from my mom:  Breathe, and Given.  I think I may be missing one or two from that list, which I'll have to go back and add as I find them.   While I'm busily paving the road to Hell, I might add that someday I hope to get some help from a good musician or two, record these babies, and add the recorded version for posterity.  Perhaps I'll YouTube 'em. 

But these are pipe dreams for a different day, and I have promises to keep (I won't forget to work on the new stuff, Dave!), and laundry to do before I sleep.  Literally - the bedding is in the washing machine even as we speak!

Return of the Muse (or some such)...

Well hello there, friends, family, and random strangers who leave tangentially related spam comments on random old blog posts!   'Tis me again, your humble procrastinator.

So... those of you who are Facebook friends have a decent idea of how life's going for me lately.  Working 4 ten hour days, spending at least two days of my three day weekends trying to recuperate from the daily hell that is customer service...  Reading voraciously as usual, and having little mental energy to write anything myself.  This is why I'm such a delinquent blogger - my job may actually provide me with fascinating stories to tell, but it normally sucks the energy out of me to tell them.

In any event, this is not a "oh hey, how about this jerk I talked to the other day" post.  This is an announcement that will hopefully help to keep me accountable to a plan I recently made, thanks to the encouragement of a new friend, acquired across the world through the random connections one makes through social media.  Yes Dr. Dave, this means you!

As posted oh... about ten months ago (how does time fly this fast?  seriously!)... I've got the germ of an interesting story brewing in my head, and actually made a decent start on writing it.   And now I have a commitment to working on it, at least enough to make some progress by the end of August (August?  Wasn't it just March like, yesterday?).  Watch this space for public humiliation, or updates of various writerly sorts... I'm trying to force myself to write something, anything, regularly, and will post when I can just to keep the words flowing.

And to prime the creative pump a bit, I have started retyping some of my old poetry collection, that was previously posted on my Geocities website.  (Yes.  Geocities.  Old school.... or just old.  Whatever.)  You can find the title page here, and links from there to what I've gotten done.  I've chosen a few of my favorites to start with, some random examples from different time frames, and one special request from my mom.  More to come in the future from that collection (check back every so often, I probalby won't post new links every time I add to it)... I'll also be putting up a second collection of my newer ramblings and whatnot, including lyrics to several songs that I'm actually rather proud of (but still need to make decent recordings of), and quite a few poems that already appear on the blog in my Creative Offerings category archive.

My plan is to spend a chunk of either Monday or Tuesday every week on creative writing activities, and posting updates that are fit for public consumption.  Of course, we all know about the best laid plans of mice and men, and the paving material for the proverbial road to Hell...  but as long as it lasts, I hope you enjoy the ride along with me.

Musings.... On Writing

A couple of weeks ago I woke up sometime before my alarm went off, in the dark with very little sense of what time it was but a sense of urgency clinging to what remained of a dream.  As I tried to drift back to sleep, a single line popped into my head, as if my subconscious was writing a story in my sleep, and it stuck with me.  I posted it on my Facebook wall when I got home that evening, so I wouldn't allow myself to forget it for future use.

"At the end, I was left with just this: Elizabeth dead, and myself out of time to mourn her."

That was all I had, but posting it on Facebook cemented my intention to turn it into something more, especially with comments from friends and family.  Mom asked me about it a few days ago, and I told her I was still mulling it over in my head.  I was slightly afraid that "mulling it over" would be as far as I would ever get, to be honest.

Yesterday I was even thinking about writing this post with a different focus - talking about the difficulty for someone as indecisive as I can be to take just a nugget of a thought and flesh it out into a full story.  

Take my sentence there, for example.  It contained the germ of a story, to be sure, but so many decisions to be made about what it meant.  Obviously it is being told in the first person viewpoint, so one has to determine who "I" am:  male or female?  I have doubts about my ability to write a convincing story from a male viewpoint... but for a while there the story seemed it may demand a male point of view.  Older than the author, or younger? 

And who is Elizabeth to the storyteller?  Wife?  Lover?  Sister?  Mother?  Daughter?  Best friend?  Colleague?  

How did she die?  Car accident? Cancer? Shot by an outlaw of some sort? Peacefully in her sleep at the age of eighty-something?

Even with all those decisions made, arbitrarily, I was going to have to come up with a reason why the storyteller would be out of time to mourn her, and those options seemed to lead me into the realm of a plot that would challenge my ability to write believably.

The results of all these decisions would have a huge impact on what kind of story it would wind up being... I mean, consider the difference between these:  An elderly man on his deathbed recalling his memories and regrets while mourning the passing of his wife of 60 years....  And a secret agent who had (perhaps unwisely) become very close to his or her informant before she was murdered by government assassins and is now running for his or her life.  Both of those stories could contain the line I came up with in my sleep, to very different effect indeed.

And then, while I was coming up with potential examples of the different stories these decisions could lead to, the perfect solution hit me.

The Veil

The veil is there, dark and forbidding
The light cannot penetrate
An unknown God, you do his bidding
Stand there in the dark, and wait.

Outside the temple, nearing noon
The sun is at its highest peak
A dusty road, a rugged cross
The son of God is growing weak.

The priest moves in beyond the veil
Although you cannot see
Your God, who they say cannot fail,
You know that He must be.

A hammer pounds, a piercing wail,
A man lays down to die
God is there within the veil
His precious Son raised high.

All is dark, within, without
The veil is in the skies
A cry of pain and one last shout
With that, Messiah dies.

The veil has ripped down to the floor
The priest just turned and ran
Within the temple, that unseen God
Makes himself known to man.

den 14 jan 88
all i have i count for loss/
there in the clouds, one single cross

Inside

You never know
how much faith you have
until all you are holding on to
is ripped from your grasp.

You never know
how brave you can be
until you are faced
with the end of your world.

You never know
how strong you really are
until everything collapses on you at once
and you must hold up
under the weight.

You never know
how much pain you can bear
until your heart is torn in two
and you must choose
to go on breathing or die.

You never know
what is truly inside of you
until you are crushed
and it pours out for all to see.

den 15 feb 2010

a moment outside of time

open yourself
listen to creation
crying out
music of untold beauty
glimpses of glory
beyond what can be seen
or heard or
touched
the heart cannot contain
it swells and overflows
through tears that slowly
trickle down the face
and mix with
the dew
a spark of flame
a sunrise
a breeze
a whisper
a drop of rain
a smile
a brush of a butterfly's wings
a symphony
a baby's cry
a perfect rose
a wave crashing on the beach
one word

love

~dac
11.21.09

Musings... on the Unfound Door

Some of you, especially those who are not writers or poets, may be surprised when I say that at times, I don't fully see the meaning in the poems I write. 

At times I barely feel like I've written them - the words seem to spring from a deep, subconscious well, with very little conscious shaping.  The process of writing, for me at least, is somehow almost mystical.

I took a poetry writing class in college, which later I regretted.  The teacher wrote poetry, but at least from what I could tell of the way he taught, he did not have the soul of a poet.  He approached poetry from a very methodical perspective, teaching rules of construction (for if you do not know the rules, it's less meaningful when you break them) and the process of editing and re-editing to perfect the finished product.

For me, editing is internal as the poem is written.  My goal in writing is not so much for others to enjoy, but for myself, to take an image, an idea, an abstraction that is pressing me from deep within, and as perfectly as possible translate it to the written word.  As I write, phrases spring to mind, and I weigh them each as I go - does it feel "right"?  Does it belong here, or elsewhere within the poem?  Sometimes I don't know until I reach the right phrase how it will end, or what it will be called. 

Sometimes a word or phrase will come to me, and I hold it in my mind until the poem is finished, and read back through it to see where I might have missed its proper place.  When I am satisfied that the fullness of the poem has been put into words, I will look over it again to see if there is anything that does not ring true.  At times a specific word stands out as overused, or understated... I'll see a line break that is more of an interruption than an emphasis, or a thought that is not as clear as I had intended and could use another word or two for clarification.

But often, even when I am sure that all is exactly as I would have it, I do not fully understand the meaning of what I have written.  I do not sit and plan out my imagery and symbolism, but they find their way into my words nonetheless.  In my poetry class, I submitted several samples of my writing and was amused and amazed at the meanings others divined from own words.

The poem I wrote this week is no exception.  The phrase "the unfound door" sprang to mind about halfway through the writing, and I knew it belonged in the title, and when it worked its way into the body of the poem I knew it had found its ending point as well.  I didn't think deeply about the meaning, but this morning it revealed itself to me.

Alone at the Unfound Door

It's so dark in here sometimes
Lonely and more than a little cold
I shiver with anticipation
of nothing
Either now or again

What hope is there for one
who has known this kind of love
and had it taken from her
to find anything further but a poor, pale substitute

And even then, it would be unfair
to hold another up to your memory
To the sweet, tender truth of you
Without time to tarnish your brightness
how could another hope to be anything to me
but the shadow of a love that yet may never die

Our flame burned bright and true
The warmth real and enduring
I never felt anything but cherished,
cared for and utterly accepted
I never felt that I needed to be anything
or anyone other that what I was

You were the one constant reminder in my life
that God was good to me
and all would be well as long as you were beside me
And now the hours stretch into endless dark nights
and unrelenting days and weeks
as time passes without you
and yet I remain, bewildered and bruised

While I cannot be so reckless as to be angry
with the God who gives and who takes away
Surely I am crushed beneath His hand
What was taken cannot be restored
And if this is mercy
I cannot hope to survive the judgment

Tried and found wanting
Wanting and found alone
Searching in vain for that unfound door

den 21 dec 08
for my one true love
who lingers in the shadows of the past