I've got such extensive plans for NaNoWriMo this year.

If you don't know what NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is, click here!

It's so crazy. I'd heard about it for two or three years, and when some of my friends were doing it last year, I decided to try it at the last second. I actually think the oh-what-the-heck decision happened on November first.

The result? It sucked, and that's probably being way too nice. The idea was half-developed and not planned, and all I did was stress myself out, because everyone else's projects were so lovely.

This year I've decided to re-write a very old project—my first serious prose project, in fact, entitled The Red Smog. The original was started when I was ten or eleven and was finished about six months before I turned thirteen. So, of course, it's horrendous. When discussing the old material with my friend, who has long nursed a soft spot for it, I believe I said something along the lines of, “Ugh! Burn it to shreds! What in the name of my life is my life? What was I thinking?”

Don't believe me? Here's proof: the entire thing was written in... *gulp*... Comic Sans font.

Yeah. I was that stupid.

Anyway! I've always loved the basic story of the piece (even if the writing itself is worse than three-year-old gorilla words) and some of the ideas and spin-off chapters I came up with after The Red Smog's completion were actually okay to look at, so when I was consulting that same friend about ideas for NaNoWriMo earlier this summer, she immediately suggested I use The Red Smog, and I agreed.

It's kind of frustrating that November is so far away! I've never made myself wait to start writing something before. It's always been a take-it-as-it-comes sort of deal. So I keep getting these ideas and random flashes of what I want to happen... and I have to keep squirreling them away! I think I sort of like the outcome though. Since it's a Sci-Fi story, I can draw inspiration from everyday life and just run with it—for example, for the past two says my house has been getting phone calls where the caller ID reads MINNEAPOLIS BUS. This inspired me to mess with the transportation system in the story, so that it would call you and tell you when you had to leave to catch your bus or train based on your location!

In short, making myself wait to start writing this story is giving me more time to think and more material to work with.

I can only imagine where it'll end up.

Anyone else planning on participating in NaNo this year?

August 20 Vlog : Lacking Closure

Because none of my blog posts seem to come out right when I start to write them.

Midnight's Concubine

On December 14, 2010, this poem was accepted into the Bemidji State University New Voices anthology for 2011. More information on New Voices can be found here.

She has nebulae embedded on her fingernails
so you feel
as if you've seen the very edges of the Universe
when she gouges out your eyes.
Her lips spread red lace that
leaves its empty spaces
on the dark side of your sternum.
Her tongue licks a line of shining promises
up and
d
o
w
n your spine,
and they sink their needle edges
into the spaces left behind
by the movement of your backbone.
In that moment,
when the impossible is true,
she bids you
fly
and the moment that you jump
she is waiting at the bottom,
laughing as your bones
break
against the pavement.
It was never your body that she wanted,
no.
It was only your soul.

Change, Part 2

Change, Part 1

In the aftermath of my break-up and its related fall-out, I've been plagued with all of my self-depreciating thoughts and ideas. These things aren't new-comers to my head by any means, but they'd taken a leave of absence, and I wasn't entirely equipped to deal with them when they returned. The shapes and forms of these thoughts vary, but what they all melt down to in the end is I am worthless and nothing has changed.

For some reason, the second one has been a lot more prevalent, possibly because a year ago I was so certain that everything would change, and so my worst fear at this moment is that everything from the past year is a waste.

My friends have all been trying to convince me that this is untrue, and while I was thinking today, something my friend Sam said stuck out the most.

You look in the mirror every day and see the same person; never noticing the microscopic changes and growth. When I hang with you once every week to a couple weeks, each time I see something new that you've developed and learned that makes you an even better person than you were before. Nothing you say can convince me otherwise.

This has been a long time coming, but she's right.

For the past two days, I've been applying for jobs. This alone marks a change—a willingness to give up free time and do something that requires more effort—but it's the application process itself that, for me, really measures a change. A year ago, I never would have been able to just walk in to a store or a restaurant and ask, “Are you guys accepting applications?” It sounds like an easy thing to do, but a year ago I would have locked up, panicked, and never actually asked.

Sam, and all the other people who have been trying to convince me for the past few weeks, are right. Change isn't something black an white, Before and After. It's gradual, like looking in the mirror one day and realizing my hair is long again (which it is, but that's beside the point.) Change doesn't happen over night, and sometimes that's good—too much change all at once is likely to short out our mental circuits. But that also makes it harder to see, harder to measure.

And maybe that's the point. Maybe it's not supposed to be something that's easy to measure and quantify. Maybe change is gradual because it forces us to take good, hard looks at our life, both in its current and former states. Perhaps the Universe made change move slowly, simply so we would never forget to look for it.

Because the only thing that never changes is that everything does.

Back-pocket Jawbones

We scrape our nails across our wrists
to bring the scent of blood,
to call the beasts we see in the corners of our eyes.
We chew holes through our pretty lips
hoping to force the truth
through a bigger outlet.
[It never seems to fit through the spaces
in our plastic-metal smiles.]
We've never even seen our own reflections;
it's the images in others' eyes
that show us what we are.

We are
wraiths
of flesh and bone,
laughing in the night,
cigarette smoke weaving through
the empty spaces
in our ribcage.
Our veins are full of alcohol to keep us going.
[What fun is the world without blurry edges, anyway?]
We hide beneath the warpaint and the shirts
of boys who pretend to wish they loved us
and we dance to the music
that we liken to the insides of our skulls.
[But really,
it's only an echo of the expression on our faces.]

We break our spines to tell the story of the scars and
clap our hands together
just to hear the clatter of our bones.
[We are so proud
that you can count them through our skin.]
Our eyes are rimmed in black and
our mouths speak in only red and
we dance,
breaking our hearts as soon as they heal
so our distress signal might
just
reach
your ears as you pass
and your eyes
might light up with lust
for the ghosts of who we think we were.

We slip through the days
hoping that you'll find us,
pity us,
pick us up and
sew us back together.
We conspire in silver whispers,
conversations held behind the gauze.
How do we entrap you?
How can we call you closer
so our legs can wrap around your hips,
blurring the line between animal lust and
fear
of the dark.

We chatter together like teeth in the cold,
avoiding the jutting points of the truth
in our smoke-and-candy voices.

The truth is,
we are never broken enough to be fixed.
We are only dead things shouting out in the cold,
refusing to admit the simplest facts
traced on the roofs of our mouths.

We are broken because we can hide
our ugliness behind the scars—


—and call ourselves perfect.