Missing Letter Monday – No “O”

“Spinal Tap”

Please leave my spinal fluid where it is.
The tests will all return negative results.
I’m sure that’s what will happen.

Thus it isn’t necessary.
Leave all my fluids inside me,
Where they reside.

Spending days in bed afterwards
Will be unpleasant and lifeless.
Sure, there’s Netflix.
And I’ll have an assignment that’ll need reading.

But I’d rather keep my fluids where they are.
That’s the ideal.

The tests will be negative.

Thus please leave my spinal fluids where they are.

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Missing Letter Monday – No “C”

So, my final paper of the semester is due on Wednesday.

It’s killin’ me.

I wrote the rough draft over the Thanksgiving break, but…there were all these bits where I just wrote things like [find an example and quote it here] or left a footnote saying things like [I know someone was saying this; figure out who it was!]

This may stop me from doing any real re-writing.

In that I first have to figure out the right books to point to for every single one of those.

Not to mention finding and typing in all the right quotes.

And then, if I have any time left, I finally get to do the genuine re-writing.  And let me tell you, it totally needs it.

So, yeah.

That’s why this is an even more lame than usual Missing Letter Monday post.

Sorry.

 

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My bibliography is going to be, like, ten pages long.  At least.  *sigh*

(The paper’s only supposed to be 25 pages, btw.)

 

 

IWSG – Futility

(The usual Words Crush Wednesday post is cancelled this week, because it’s the first Wednesday of the week, so it’s time for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.  I’ll be back to quoting the Iliad next week.  Or maybe I’ll switch it up and move to someone more recent, like Sophocles or Euripides.)

Lately, I’ve been feeling like there’s no point to working on polishing my writing.  Because the point of re-writing and polishing is trying to get it to out to the public, right?  But it’s clear to me that I’ll never get anything I’ve written to a point where anyone would want to read it.  My basic ideas are good, I’m sure of that, but my prose is childish, my characters are shallow, and any time I attempt a love story, it’s entirely unconvincing, because I’ve never been in a romantic relationship.  (That, of course, is why I decided that my heroic trio in my quasi-YA novels would not have any romantic relationships.  Well, except then I later established that the young man in the trio already had several unofficial fiancees (not of his own will) and a girl he’s in love with, but since all those conditions are pre-existing, it’s a very different type of unconvincing.)

On the NaNo forums towards the end of April’s Camp NaNo, or possibly in very early May, I was given a link to a private forum where I could get some feedback on Ilios, since it was already in bite-size chunks, so that I could re-publish it.  (Ilios is my Trojan War novel, telling the whole story of the war, as mythically accurate as possible, with each chapter being narrated in the first person by a different character.  (Which I thought was a unique approach, until recently at a used book store, when I found another novel that had done the same thing, as far as I could tell by glancing through it.  Took a very different approach, of course, and probably didn’t tell the whole war.  I might have picked it up, if the author had used Aias instead of Ajax, but he didn’t, so I didn’t.)  I had e-published it a while ago on LeanPub, but I officially “retired” it because I was so disgusted with how badly I had handled some of the chapters, particularly some of the key emotional chapters tied to the events of the Iliad.)

Anyway, I said I would go to those forums after turning my final paper in, mid-May.  I still have yet to do so.  Because…what’s the point?  The person who offered doesn’t understand how bad my writing is.  People always hear my ideas and say “that sounds great; let me read it and I’ll give you feedback!”  Then they read it and can’t find anything to say, because what needs to be said is “Don’t give up the day job.”  (Which is awkward, considering I don’t have one.)  Of course, there’s more to it than that; I’d be intruding on a forum where everyone else is already close friends, and what would I say when I got there?  I guess it’s partially my social phobia obstructing me even online.

But even though I intend to eventually re-write the abysmal chapters of Ilios, I don’t know if I’ll bother re-publishing it.  Even for free, it only got two downloads.  (Admittedly, that’s partially because LeanPub does not have a flourishing fiction section; it’s more a place for IT texts and other technical books.  But even if it was on Amazon or someplace, I don’t think it would have any more success, even for free.)

For at least fifteen years, every word of fiction I wrote was purely for myself.  In fact, most of it was fanfic.  Though it might seem like a waste of time and effort to write stories/novels/whatevers that I had no intention of ever showing to anyone else, it was comforting to know that it didn’t matter if it sucked, because no one else was going to see it.  It didn’t matter if someone was out of character for a while, because no one would know.  It was okay that the relationships were flat and unconvincing, because I was the only one who could read it.

But since telling myself that my fanfic days are over, I feel like I’m supposed to be writing towards the goal of publication, admittedly only the self-published kind.  But there’s no way anything I write can ever be suitable for the public.  As I said last month, I’m incapable of writing descriptions, because I don’t think visually:  I have no idea what my characters look like apart from a very few physical details that I do impart in the books (primarily concerned with height and hair color) and even if I did know what they looked like, I wouldn’t be able to describe them, because I don’t “get” descriptions of faces.  My ability to describe locations isn’t much better; my brain can’t grasp the geometry of the place, no matter how many descriptions I read of the region, or how many photos I see.  (Even if I went to Greece and Turkey to see the places for myself, I doubt I’d have any better luck trying to describe them.)

I think I’m about to sink into a re-run of last month’s post, so I should perhaps stop while I’m ahead.

Random Thoughts from the Past Week

Since I’m no longer posting my random stuff whenever I feel like it, due to April’s A-to-Z challenge, this week I’ve stored up a bunch of little things.  At the time I’m writing this section (mid-afternoon Wednesday) they are all, so far, positive.  Uh, except for the ants in the kitchen.  But that led to something positive, so it’s not so bad.

So, on Tuesday, when I went to the post office to mail in my taxes (yes, I know, I know, I shouldn’t have waited so long!) I was surprised by how few people were there.  In front of me in line were a couple of women, and there was another woman off to the side, using her phone to take a photograph of one of the other women, so I assumed the one off to the side was there with her.  The woman being photographed looked to be in her early thirties, and had two small children with her.  After she was done at the counter, as she was on her way out the door, I heard the other woman approaching her, at which time she said something along the lines of “I don’t want to seem like a stalker, but I’m a big fan of your online blog, and I just wanted to tell you that,” and then went on a little longer about how great the blog was, and how her daughter was also a fan, and so on.  I was just standing there going “what, seriously?”  This woman with her two small kids posts pictures of herself (and/or her kids) enough that this total stranger was able to recognize her.  Now, in this case, that was a totally fine thing:  the woman who recognized her was very nice, and a fan of her work, whatever her work is.  But what if she hadn’t been?  That’s the second major reason I would never post my photo online:  I’m too paranoid and misanthropic to trust people that far.  (The first reason, of course, is that then I would have to see my photo, and I don’t want that.  Ever.)  Overall, a very surreal experience, though it must have been even more surreal for the woman with the two little kids!

A crossroads?

Or a decision point?  Or just a “wander around aimlessly, as per usual” point?

‘Cause, see, I’m starting to feel like I need to abandon Helen of Space, my 2014 NaNoWriMo project.

It was supposed to be this glorious, funny, anime-inspired, sci-fi re-working of the Trojan War, wherein every major character had been reincarnated into a giant robot-style universe, only the war wasn’t going to go as planned, due to the alien invasion killing Paris before he even met Helen.  Only as I was planning it, I realized that it was going to be even cooler if it still started, and went on for a while, only to ultimately be cancelled when the aliens resurfaced and kidnapped Helen themselves.  And generally happy (or not) endings all around, as the characters’ actions and personal stories dictated.  (As opposed to the myth, wherein huge numbers of them die horribly.)

Now, don’t get me wrong when I say I need to abandon it.  I did succeed in NaNo itself; I wrote 100k words (my lowest ever, but it was the first time I was also a student during NaNo, so I think that makes a good excuse) and finished the novel.  Problem is, by that point, the single novel had become a trilogy (of which I had only completed book one), because the story kept becoming more and more complex.

So I started book two in the final days of November, right?  And I still have only, I dunno, 20 pages or so.  Maybe 30?  It’s probably not much over 15k.  I’ve barely even opened the file in the last few weeks, and I can’t even remember the last time I managed to write anything in it.  (Admittedly, last week’s assignment for my class was very time-intensive, but…)

The real problem is that this has turned into a project that shouldn’t even be a book.  It has a massive cast, and they need to have a lot of time to develop interpersonal relationships at every stage of the story, but in order to get the story from point A to point B, I had to rush through absolutely everything.  That 100k, that was the pre-alien invasion set-up, the invasion itself, the tension between the (reincarnated Greek) refugees from the space stations and the (reincarnated Trojan) colonists living on the surface of Ganymede, and the suspicions between the two groups as the alien attacks diminished that this had all been a trick of the other side, so that the first book ended with the outbreak of hostilities between the two groups.  By this point, the relationship between (I’m just gonna use the original names here for simplicity’s sake) Achilles and Briseis and Aias and Tecmessa were supposed to be strong enough that the two women abandon their own side for their new lovers.  Neither had had more than two or three scenes with the other, because there just wasn’t enough time.  Because, as I said, everything was turning out horribly rushed because I had so many characters and so much story.

Really, what it needs to be is a TV show or something.  I suppose if I knew a good artist I could collaborate with, it could be a series of graphic novels, or online comics or something, but…I dunno, that’s sort of going in a radically different direction than what I was thinking of.  (Unless the artist had a manga-like style.)

I think the reason I’ve been so stuck is multifold.  One, I don’t really know how to structure the next bit, the actual “war” between the two sides, because neither side has enough people to spare to have much bloodshed in their “war,” so how, exactly, are they fighting?  Two, I’m already feeling forgetful about what happened in the first book, which I already felt like needed huge re-structuring to begin with, which just leaves me all the more unsure of how to proceed.  Three, because of the huge cast, I have a tendency to lose track of what the minor characters are up to most of the time, and only remember the ones who either have a direct impact on the plot and the ones whose relationships need to have a significant arc in the story.  (And, unfortunately, characters like Helen and Menelaos are among those who do not have a direct impact on the plot for most of book two.  I don’t think Helen’s even shown up yet, in fact.)  Four, one of the big things going on in book two is that Cassandra has accidentally ended up captured by the (reincarnated) Greeks, and they know she’s crazy, so they’re not treating her as a prisoner of war, but the lesser Aias was trying to rape her (again) when Odysseus interfered, so she has to be kept guarded at all times lest the creep get his hands on her, so there’s a huge, slow relationship arc between Cassandra and Odysseus throughout the book, and I have no idea quite where it’s going to go:  the larger part of me wants to have them end up together, and the rest of me is like “Are you stupid?  She’d never allow that!”

Anyway, yeah, so it’s a mess, and I don’t know what to do with it.

I should probably just set it aside and go back to re-writing Ilios, but…I’m just afraid that if I set it down I’ll never pick it up again.  I can’t count how many projects I’ve just abandoned over the years.

I should probably write that “undead werewolves on a cruise liner” thing instead.  I’ve got no idea what the story is (apart from it apparently involving a super-villain who bred them as man-eaters?) but at least it’s actually original.  As much as I tell myself that my Greek myth stuff is a “better” endeavor than the fanfic I used to write, in a way it’s still just fanfic:  I’m still just working with someone else’s characters.  The only difference is that if I want to write a novel about the love quandrangle of Briseis/Achilles/Patroclos/Iphis, I can actually publish that, because they’re not copyrighted, whereas if I write about a love quadrangle of…uh….no, I can’t think of anything that would allow one of those…all right, a love triangle of characters from Final Fantasy or Doctor Who or whatever, I can’t publish those, because the characters are copyrighted.

Okay, I’ve lost the train of thought now, but…yeah, I’m sort of in a funk at the moment.  I’d say it always happens this time of year, but last year I was madly writing away on my quasi-young adult novels.  I really do want to get back to those, try and polish them up, but I want to get Ilios in working order first.  (I feel like I have to, because I used it as the master version of the Trojan War that was the reality for the quasi-YA novels.  Uh, I should point out that the leads of said novels are the offspring of Achilles, Odysseus and the greater Aias, and the books take place 17-20 years after the war.  So what version of the war it was is actually pretty important.)  Of course, even after I get Ilios up and running, the quasi-YA books are another matter entirely.  I have no idea what passes for “young adult” these days in fiction.  Is it okay to talk about things like rape in what’s otherwise a pretty light-hearted book?  ‘Cause the two heroines (the illegitimate daughters of Achilles and Odysseus) spend the first 16 years of their lives as slaves, so it’s actually kind of a miracle that they’re still untouched, and have only once had to fight off a rape.  (Though the fact that the heroine was always calling herself the daughter of Achilles, and threw a guy up onto the roof when she was nine years old probably had a lot to do with it…)

Hmm, I seem to be rambling now.  So I guess I should shut up.

Thinking about a title change.

The title was appropriate for the blog I originally set out to write, the chronicle of my last desperate attempt to enter into a romantic relationship before I turn 40.  But of course that hasn’t been happening.  I’ve barely even made any sort of attempt; the one new foray I made into online dating was an even bigger disaster than usual, and left me feeling even more cynical and hopeless than ever.  Consequently, instead I’ve been doing a daily blog chronicling my ordinary life, my studies, my writing and Greek mythology, which are, of course, all interconnected.  (Though sadly the mythology is only connected in the sense that I’m writing about it and studying it, and tend to think about it a lot.)

Over the last few weeks, I’ve come to the bitter but inescapable realization that there’s no point pretending that I’m going to be able to change my loveless existence so easily, or at all.

We live in a society where a woman’s worth as a romantic partner is judged solely by her looks, and I’m quite probably the most physically repulsive person on the planet.  I’ve seen women even heavier than I am, it’s true, but they’ve had more attractive faces to make up for it, plus their weight was better distributed.  I can’t even hope to make good friends with some compatible guy and then turn that into romance, because most men are too disgusted by my appearance to be willing to speak to me, and even if they were able to speak to me, I’m too socially inept to be able to make friends easily.

So I’m going to change the title of my blog, as soon as I come up with one that seems appropriate.  After all, I set out to write a daily blog for a full year–minus November, of course–and I plan to achieve that goal at least.

Bad time at the movies

Not that the movie was bad, mind you.  I quite enjoyed it.  It was just the experience of going to see it that was bad.

It started out bad in the embarrassing way, in that a woman of my years should not be attending the cinema in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday accompanied by her parents and brother.  It’s just pathetic.  But I’m used to that, unfortunately.

So setting that aside, there are my special health considerations in going to a movie.  They’re not the usual kind a person might have.  The easier to deal with (and to explain) is that I have problem knees.  They don’t like being motionless for any length of time, and they dislike even more the idea of being bent for long periods of time.  This makes sitting in a movie theater for a whole movie potentially disastrous, especially for a movie as long as that one.  Fortunately, the theaters around here all have the special areas for wheelchairs, which have nice bars behind them, so I can sit behind the wheelchair area and put my feet up.  Probably impolite, possibly even against some kind of regulation and/or etiquette, but at least I’ve never done that when someone actually had their wheelchair in front of those bars.  (In fact, I’ve rarely seen anyone in a wheelchair at the movies around here.  Possibly because I rarely go at peak hours, preferring weekday afternoons, when there aren’t many people.)

Okay, so that’s the easy one.  The hard one has to do with my left arm.  It has a strange condition, leading it to feel hot almost all the time.  If there’s a name for that condition, I don’t know what it is.  (I’ve spoken to a couple of doctors about it, and neither has had any clue what it is or what’s causing it, and one of them quite clearly thought I was making it up “for the attention.”  (He was one of those “old-school” doctors, in the sense that he probably should have retired twenty years ago.))  I’ve had this condition for years now, so apart from the fact that it makes it very hard to sleep, and driving can be unspeakable (given that the sun beating through the window on my arm can cause extreme anguish in the summer, and even through my heavy winter coat it still causes discomfort), I’ve mostly learned to live with it.  But one of the most annoying things about it is that the proximity of another human body to my left arm can exacerbate the condition badly.

Meaning that at movies, I have to sit with either an empty seat by my left arm, or with my left arm on the aisle.  My family knows about this condition, and so we always sit with me on the end, so my left arm isn’t discomfited further.

Today’s big mistake was letting my parents go in first to get seats while my brother and I dealt with the concession stand.  Because I get into the theater, and they’re sitting there, with an empty seat to my father’s left…and a man sitting in the seat beyond that.

Because that other man was sitting directly in the center of the row, he had to have been there before my parents got there.  So they purposefully picked seats where I absolutely could not sit in the seat they had left open for me.

After spending about thirty seconds trying to hold my arm across my body and thus keep it away from outside body heat, I had to get up and move to the other side of the theater, sitting alone next to the aisle.  They did not follow me over.

And my father acted like I was being unreasonable.

Trying to sit in any of the seats available where they were was literally causing me physical pain.  And I was the one being unreasonable?

Keep in mind, this was not a crowded theater.  Apart from that one man sitting in the middle of the freakin’ row, there were two, maybe three other people in the whole room.  There was no reason for my family to be clumped up right next to that guy.

To top all that off, the theater was so cold that I had to use my coat as a blanket to keep warm (though I carefully didn’t drape it over that arm, which helped a bit), the staff forgot to close the door that led back out to the lobby, so I had to go out and do it myself, because the excessively loud dialog from the neighboring film was drowning out the movie we were seeing, and I had had a very light lunch in expectation of popcorn, meaning I was excessively hungry by the time the movie let out, since the popcorn had stayed with my parents.

My arm is now acting up so badly that when I put my coat back on again after the film, I had to take it right back off again, because it felt so hot that it was like sticking my arm into a fire.  It settled down briefly during my bath, but now it’s screaming at me again.  I don’t think I’ll be getting much sleep tonight.

Making decisions

It’s never easy for me to make a decision.  Of any kind.  I’ll waffle about what to have for lunch.  (Though I never have waffles for lunch.  I don’t like to have breakfast for any meal other than breakfast.)  So when I’m faced with really momentous decisions, that’s just all the harder to deal with.

Right now, my “momentous” decision is about my writing.  Or rather, about what I should be prioritizing in my writing.  Should I focus on getting reading done that will add to my academic writing, even though I won’t be working on my thesis again until the fall semester at the earliest?  Should I knuckle down and find a way to get back into gear on part two of this past NaNo’s trilogy?  (Somehow, book two is just excessively slow in its writing pace.  It’s been days since I did more than stare at the last few lines and then give up and close the file without adding to it.)  Should I get back to work on fixing up my Trojan War novel, Ilios?  Should I get to work figuring out the re-structuring details on my quasi-young adult novels?  Should I take a break and work on some short story ideas that have been jostling about in my under-crowded head lately?  Or should I start cruising the NaNo forums to see if I can find a collaborator who will work with me as a co-author, fixing up my impossibly sparse prose with those mysterious things called “adjectives”?  (Okay, technically, it’s not really that I lack adjectives; it’s that I lack sentences/paragraphs of descriptive text.  I can’t help it.  I’m just not a visual person.  My mother once asked me, in recoiling in horror at the lack of description in whatever book of mine she was savaging, “you see them all in your head, don’t you?” to which my only answer was “no, I don’t!”  I think in words, not images; my thoughts are conversations, not landscapes or action scenes.  It’s not something I can change.)

And how have I been dealing with my current uncertainty on how to proceed, you might ask.

I’ve been playing more video games.  Seriously.  I’ve just been procrastinating.  It’s a decision that has no authority figure saying “do this!” or anything like that, and yet I’ve still just been putting it off, not thinking about it.

That’s so typical of me that it kind of makes me want to cry.

The more I think about it, the worse it seems.

No matter how I look at it, it feels like my writing is doubly sure never to get off the ground.  Even for free, I can’t get people to read it.  I don’t think it’s just because my writing style sucks–though I think that’s part of it, too–I think it’s also that what I write is just something that no one wants to read.

Even in my academic writing, I feel like that’s the case.  All I could think regarding my presentation in class about my thesis-to-be is that no one thought it was worth writing, like I was wasting their time in making them listen to it, and wasting my time in writing it, and everything.  I mean, I guess it’s not really world-shattering, studying the way myths are re-shaped by the times that they pass through, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to study it, surely.  Some of the others had some pretty vague and/or unimportant topics, too.

It doesn’t help that as I read these various books for my research that I can see the people who wrote them are infinitely more intelligent than I am.  I’ll never be able to write anything so deep and insightful.  I’ll never be able to write fiction that anyone wants to read.  So where does that leave me?

I’m unemployable, so I can’t just get a job and work for a living.  No one would ever hire someone who’s never had a job.  But if I can’t write fiction and I can’t enter academia, and I can’t get a job, then what do I do with myself?  What justification do I have to exist?

If I were younger, pretty and thin, I could say “screw being useful, I’ll just get married and churn out babies and at least keep the species alive” but there’s not a human being on this planet who’d ever want to marry me, and I don’t have the financial, emotional or mental stability to raise a child on my own.

If my writing style was more acceptable–if I was even capable of writing descriptions–I would try to churn out some fiction that people would want to read, even if it was crap.  After all, there are certain genres that are popular, right?  If I could write in a style that people would be willing to read, I could try to grind out some of that “tween-girl porn” that’s popular right now, but…well, actually, first I’d have to be able to put up with reading some of it to know it’s like.

And watching “Pyramids of Mars” while I’m already in a funk isn’t really helping.  It’s not exactly the most cheerful story out there.  (But Barnes and Noble was having a half-off sale on BBC DVDs!)

It also doesn’t help that I still have 34 pages left in the book I told myself I was going to finish reading today.  Then tomorrow I’m going to tackle the last of the new library books, and if it turns out to useful to–wait, wasn’t Set the uncle of Horus, not his brother?  And Sutek is Set, so…but actually, I think I’ve seen something lately that called Set the brother of Horus, rather than the brother of Osiris, so maybe it’s one of those multiple versions things.

Well, digression aside, like I was saying, after the one I’ve spent today reading, I have one more library book left (plus a book about Amazons that I bought a while back, which should prove useful) and then I have to go back to the library and get some new books to replace a few that didn’t pan out.  I know which two I want, though, and I think they’ll be useful, and once I have them, I shouldn’t need any more.  I hope.

I think my new version of the topic–on gender roles instead of sexuality–is probably a lot better than the old one, but…

…I still wonder if there’s any point to any of this.

I am officially stupid.

There’s just no two ways about it.  I must be the most moronic person ever to be accepted into any graduate department in any subject ever.  I don’t understand why they let me in at all, in fact.  Maybe they felt sorry for me.

I don’t get any of the same things out of the reading that anyone else does.  My opinions–as stated in class and as stated in the papers–are shallow, unsophisticated, and inarticulate.  My papers may have started out like something written by an undergrad student, but by this point they’re more like a low level middle school student.  At this rate, they’ll turn into “A Book Report on Peter Rabbit” before we even hit the end of the semester.

I don’t know if it’s that my brain is just incapable of processing information in a properly analytical way, or if I just don’t even have a brain, or if it’s something that everyone else was taught at some point that somehow I was never taught, but there is some basic, inherent problem that is keeping me from being able to do the the classwork in anything like a competent manner.

I’m supposed to sign up for next semester’s classes on the 5th, but I wonder if there’s any point in doing so.  Technically, I can’t flunk out before the end of the semester (in fact, it’s possible that I would need more than one F to flunk out, in which case I couldn’t flunk out before the end of next semester) but if I simply am incapable of doing graduate level work, is there any point in wasting my money and the professors’ time by continuing to take classes?

The thing is, what happens now?

What do I do if I have no alternative but to drop out of graduate school?  I’m still utterly unqualified to work.  My novel is still an unmitigated disasterpiece.  So what am I supposed to do if I can’t get a Master’s Degree?

I know there are all kinds of scams about getting money just by surfing the Web, but I’m not that stupid.  I know you can’t get paid to do nothing.  But unfortunately the only things I’m even competent at are doing nothing, converting oxygen into carbon dioxide (and I have asthma, so I’m not even all that good at it), and complaining.  Unfortunately, there is no way that I know of to turn complaining into a profitable skill.  Not at my level, anyway.  (Technically, most critics get paid to complain, but they do so in a manner that is either erudite or funny, and I fail at both erudition and humor as well as everything else.)  Likewise, I’m pretty sure I can’t get paid just to breathe, either.