A soulless tragedy

In my heart and mind I am many things

Which I’m not you see

Because I only act a little part of me

For people don’t like others who are bright and bold and brave

Who think they are better people

So they seek to berate and scathe

Yet look inside my heart and soul and you will surely see

All the people locked inside, the people who are truly me!

I am an empress and I rule with an iron might

My tongue commands great armies and send enemies into flight

But I am also a bird that flies up high and it is truly free

To sing any song she wishes, who dares to silence me?

I am the wind which blows at you, air both hot and cold

And sweeps you off your feet sometimes and lose my self-control

And like an angel I am mild and meek, I will care with tender love

And often I will mediate for peace just like the blessed dove

I am a monster and I am fierce, you don’t want to bother me

And I shall tickle you with bites, just like a little flea

I am flash and I am loud, yet I am dull and quiet too

I am many people you know and don’t, you really have no clue

For I am hidden within myself, I am ashamed you see

To show you who I really am

And what I could be

Though mostly I am a creator

I make worlds with words and paint

I create people and creatures too and I do so without restraint

I create vast worlds for your mind to explore

And all I wish for you is for you to adore

And live within these worlds of mine within your very mind

And love it with all your heart and inspiration find

So you too can create like me, your own little universe

And write good poems, songs and stories and a little verse

So you can feel important too and like you have a place

And ignore all the haters who try to stop you with disgrace

Because one thing that is true and clear

The arts are important my dear

For without it we inhuman be

And soulless we will live in tragedy

And never more shall we love each little gem we find

For our hearts will be black and cold

Because we’ve lost our mind

Top of the wheel

I’m not setting goals anymore in regards to novel writing, they get done when they get done but I haven’t given up; Yes I’ve had a respite since September 2022 and that is a long time, unreasonably long, but I had to have it due to mental health healing.  I had a hard time, there were lots of things happening in my life I had to think about – think a lot.

Lots of things in fact, lots of different problems to solve and many of them just needed me to try and calm myself enough to allow myself to think, then once I had managed to do that, I needed to calm myself again and stop thinking in order to heal from it all.

There was grief, death of a relative, a revelation I wasn’t sure was a trick or not, an announcement, an opportunity, a break up, a diagnosis and so many things all rolled into one major thing for me – that I could not cope.

Ultimately my entire life has been turned upside down and I am still in the situation of not really knowing if it is a good or bad thing just yet, I am still teetering on the edge of trying to determine which – it could be either!

It’s a strange situation to be in.

I feel at the moment I am standing on top of a wheel and if I fall backwards I will land in shark filled waters and if I fall forwards I will fall safe into someone’s arms.

At present I am still on top of the wheel.

It’s like sitting on a bomb really.

My mind has been so preoccupied with all these things that I haven’t been able to keep to my reading goals, my writing or practising of my art.  I haven’t even been able to hold a conversation without my mind wandering off, worrying about things.

It’s only been this past week I have manage to slowly and surely restart my habits.  I have started to write a little again, I have started to read a little again and I have even done some art.

Not as much as I would normally do in a day, in fact, I am doing less than ten paragraphs every couple of days towards anything, my one poem a day has become three or four again; my art practises are happening every couple of days.  It’s more than what has happened between September 2022 to March 2023 in any case and I am proud it’s coming back together again.

The frustrating thing is this – my typing speed has got extremely slow and I can’t seem to speed it up again.  I used to write 90 to 120 words per minute and now I struggle to get above 40.

I am making a lot of spelling mistakes and errors, cognitively I am suffering a lot and I don’t know what to make of it.

My Easter Project and Project AD has hopes to be finished before Midsummer, but I am not going to force myself, it’s still early days for me, I still haven’t fully healed.

In reality, I need a holiday – get out of this environment, get out into nature and remember how to laugh and play again – playfully scream – wash my hair with the rays of the sun – chase faeries – hug trees – and try to learn how to feel happy again.  Because happiness is a distant memory, one I am not sure I can remember how it feels anymore.  Strange as that sounds…

I also need to learn to trust again.

Trust in the process, trust to love again, trust that I have self-worth, that I am someone deserving and someone who can be free to laugh without someone complaining about the noise or worrying I am going to get over excited and hurt myself.

Because a couple of years ago I was bedbound sick and laughing really did hurt me, because it would cause a coughing fit and my spleen was swollen and so it genuinely was rather painful to laugh – but those things are behind me now.  But still, out of habit I have people trying to calm me down, because they’ve forgotten how much I have healed.

I need to lose myself in feelings that are opposite to negative ones – I need to, because I don’t feel very human anymore.

There are times I have sat back and realised all the negativity around me, all the bitterness, envy, jealousy, contempt and discomfort and I wonder what am I becoming exactly?  Am I becoming a demon?  Because the only things I can feel are variations of darkness…

It’s a scary place to be – see, there – fear – another negative emotion… but you see, I try to remember something a motivational speaker called Mel Robbins once said – that fear is the exact same chemical in the brain to excitement and that you have to change your perspective and realise when you fear something that you might actually need to try and tell yourself it’s exciting, rather than something to fear.

Odd… but I am trying this trick.

I am on the cusp of something amazing which is about to happen in my life and all I can think about is how scary it is – I know there are wonderful things coming with it, especially a lot of love and tenderness and protection – but I still can’t help but focus on that one major problem.  I have like 30 pros and only around five cons to this chance, yet it’s the cons that are taking up brain space!

When you see it like that, you realise there is something seriously wrong with how you are wired!

Wired might not be correct actually… trained is perhaps the best way to describe it.   Because I used to be such a Positive Pollyanna and it has only really been in the past decade that the Pollyanna in me has started to die.

I need to do what happened in the book Pollyanna – I need to find my tribe to help resuscitate me, bring me back to the light.

Although saying that, I think I don’t need to, I think – if I am reading things correctly, my tribe has come to find me and all I need to do is wait a little while longer, then reach out my hand fearlessly and say to myself – I am excited to be a part of your life!

Thanks for reading!

My heart My Mind

My heart is like a raven, driven to lunacy

Tearing at its own fibres, because of the wrought words that were thrown at it by cruel tongues

Killing itself as it pulls itself to pieces

Getting ever blacker as its beat slows down to its death

Till its last breath

And then it dies

My mind is like a salted slug contorted with pain, driven insane

Clenching to itself as it aches for loving words

It feels so cursed by its suppressers

Unable to express their desires, fraught with anxiety

Bitten by society and their lies

Then it too dies

Rigid mind

Rigid, those are my thoughts tonight; Rigid and taut through depression and desperation

No matter how hard I try to sit myself down tonight and ignore what’s going on in my heart and mind on a base emotional level, I still can’t help but be dragged down by a numbed mind.

I have written four poems tonight, all destined for the deletion pile, though I am trying to be more merciful with my craft and lock them away in a file on my laptop called “wasted”, as it was wasted time.

Wasted one, wasted two, wasted three, and wasted four, until I felt that tonight I am not in my poetic mojo at all and gave up.

I am certainly in a creative mind-set, but not really focused for Project AD, that’s a children’s comedy horror and I feel more like writing something along the lines of Mr Ted or The Gargoyles Heart.

Oftentimes when I have days or nights like these, I tend not to write anything, not even towards my blog – but I have decided to change.

I have decided to share these times with you all, because these are the times when I can get really down to the heart of the matter – become creative, it’s a strange place to be.

Depressed and apathetic in everything but the written word, depending however what that written word is going to be at the time and whether or not it matches what’s going on inside of you.

A few years ago I used to write snippets, where they were more or less like practise pieces and I would just write the first thing that came into my mind and I would post it.  I got out of the habit of that and it really should be revived again.

This is the start of that.

Thanks for reading…

Romance with death

So many things are taking up space in my mind over the past few days; I am finding it hard to concentrate on anything but emotional presence, which is strange because I usually try to avoid acknowledging my emotions as much as possible, or at least as minimal as possible.

I don’t really know much about meditation other than what I have learned in books and on YouTube.

I have never had a guided meditation – so I don’t really know if the meditation I did a few days ago called “Who am I”? Has anything to do with it, but it’s a strange coincidence if it hasn’t.

When I am not drifting off into trance-like stupors losing twenty minutes a time, I try to sit and focus on writing something for my blog or towards my stories or reading a book, only for me to be absorbed yet again in my emotions.

There is a voice at the back of my head telling me that I need to go through this process as it is healing me in preparation for something big coming into my life.

If I want to cry, do it – but I still try to hold back.

I never did get into the crying yoga I said I was interested in – I kind of know deep down it is something I need… but I still hold back.

I often try not to be emotionally present so it is all new to me.  I try to shut away my emotions into a coffin, put it into a wardrobe and throw the wardrobe into a lake tied up with ropes and rocks so I don’t remember them… until a drought comes at least.

Not that I fly tip or anything, I am being metaphorical – some people can take things too seriously!

I think there are some readers out there that takes me too seriously too – sometimes when my depression kicks in and I make all these creative works of poetry, I sometimes sit back and laugh at how tragic I was for those moments and I feel stupid and slightly embarrassed by yet another emotional outburst. 

I think it is good for you to know that sometimes when I have got it all out creatively, I do laugh at myself – because of how pathetic I come across.  Some days though, I am quite serious and often think about death very seriously after writing such things… but a good third to near half of the time I find humour in my tragedy, like some kind of sad clown story.

I do see myself as a pitiful sad clown a lot of the time.  The kind of clown that will sit in the grey in dirty dusty clown clothes, with a black cone hat and grey pom poms on it, sitting miserably alone in their own grey tragedy – then suddenly opens the door of their house to jump off the cliff that’s waiting just beyond the threshold only he is saved by a rainbow bridge and whilst he is standing on that rainbow bridge he magically transforms into a colourful rainbow clown and laughs at his own sorrow and skips off down the curve of the rainbow to play with the faeries!

Well that’s how I visualise myself anyway.

Dark sense of humour at times!

But you have to admit though, the depths I go, the sarcasm at times, the irony etc. – I see myself as ironic, my humour is definitely ironic and I know because I have been told multiple times that my humour is lame – but you’ve got to admit, sometimes it’s funny?

Was never meant to be, but boy I can get too deep at times cant I? Its almost like a romance with death and despair!

Well, if I didn’t laugh I’d cry and which one is better eh?

I’m trying so hard not to be a Sylvia Plath, not going down her route.

However, my depression is very real.  Have no doubt about that.

Thank you for reading… 

Life isn’t always bad

What is the point in following her that has a heart so grey?

To love her works and writings, for her to throw her life away?

What is the point in caring, when she is doomed to die?

When she still insists in sitting down to cry…

The point is that you love it

The point is my words should flow

Like the water that’s in my spirit

I should let my words go…

Who knows it could heal me?

Who knows I could change my mind…

Who knows what is what

And what my life should find…

The point is I am healing

The point is I am not

The point is I am trying

I am trying not to stop

One day I am happy

One day I am sad

One day I want to kill myself ever so bad

But some days I plodder on

And write these things for you

Whilst soak in tears and sadness, sitting in the blue

Wondering when my life will change

Wondering when I’ll find love

Wondering when things are different

Or when is the next shove?

I am curious when I’ll do it

When I will cut the cords

That ties me to this life full of discord

I wonder when I will cut too deep

Too deep that I will forever sleep

I wonder when my life will change

So I can look back and think it strange

That I was ever in that place

That I was ever sad

Because I try to lie to myself, that life isn’t always bad

Like a spider to a fly, they will know your lie

Silence is no longer for me

I will talk and I will say the truth

I will tell people all about you

Whether you like it or not, about my youth

You can’t always hide from facts

You can’t always lie

One day it will catch you up

Like a spider to a fly

One day you will get slower in mind

One day you will slip up

One day people will hear the truth

Because one day you will fuck up

And I won’t be there when this happens to you

I abandoned you long ago

So be careful of the seeds you sow because you will never know

Which path they will take you, fast or slow

For the truth to be revealed

Writers block and brain food

A debate today on twitter has been whether or not “Writers Block” exists or not?  My two cents on the matter is that writers block does not exist, I used to believe it did but then as I grew as a writer I learned that it was purely laziness on my part and the simple fact that I rarely thought outside of The Box.  I was also very nervous about how much of what I wanted to write has been done before and how little my stories represented “Original” ideas. 

The latter is laughable to me nowadays, because every idea in the present and the future has already been done somewhere, nothing is unique, but you need to understand that every human being is unique and therefore will have a unique take on a story already written.  For example, if a hundred writers had to write a story based on Alice in Wonderland every one of them would have a different stance to it.  Some would suggest that Alice was a drug addict hallucinating everything that had happened to her, another writer would believe that she had multiple personality disorder and that every other character who was not Alice was in fact her alter egos.  Another, would write the story as close to the original as possible, but even then there will be differences, some will make it dark humour, some will make it serious, some will throw in too much drama and one might make Alice a man from a rock band who got kidnapped and taken to an alien world and so on and so on. 

Now that has me thinking, wouldn’t that last idea be great?  Aliens kidnapping Alice Cooper, taking him to Wonderland another planet, but you see I can’t do that because of so many copyright laws, but it is a fun idea to play with in my mind or as a fan fic.

I can play with ideas like this all day long in any situation.  The problem for me is that I have too many ideas and I can struggle to decide which one to play with at the time.  I have got to the stage where I have selected five current novels I am working on and having to use random.org to help me choose which one to work on today?  I literally list and number my ideas like a maniac.  I even have a random scene list which is also numbered to help me fill in boring bits of my story or to prevent boring bits from occurring.  If I don’t know what I should do in the next scene, I use random.org and my lists to help me.  Each list is categorised.  It doesn’t sound very artistic, usually artists and writers are disorganised and free thinking, but I do organise my stuff like this a lot.  Granted I lose lists a lot, but I am getting better at keeping them in their place lately.

The idea of writers block is unfathomable to me in recent years.  I have learned if you constantly read and learn and if you make yourself look for art of what you are looking for, poetry etc, you will become inspired and if you do this daily as part of your routine, your mind will eventually throw things out at you.  Don’t ignore “brain farts” as I call them either – things such as…

I was reading a book about ancient Sumerian beliefs and I came across the title chapter called “The creation of man” I misread it as “The Cremation of man”.  This can spark interesting ideas if you don’t ignore it.

You’ve got to constantly stuff things into your brain daily, furiously, eventually your mind can switch into creator mode with little or no effort.  Try it.

Do this… 

Think of silver dragons and go to deviant art, flick through the pictures you first see in their search bar that says “Silver Dragons”, do this for 5 minutes, then go to pinterest and do that there again for around 5 minutes, just flick through pictures quickly, you don’t have to look at anything individually, just literally look them over, notice each different scene and do it at quick speed, you are not there for research, you are not there to steal, you are there to feed your mind and it is a hungry monster than doesn’t stop!  No idea is stupid, no idea is pathetic, if you get an idea whilst flowing like this, write it down because you’d be amazed how quickly these things pass through, it can be like being on a high speed train and you are trying to keep focused on a particular field you’ve just gone past!  Then search silver dragon poetry in google, or silver dragon songs, or silver dragon art in your search engines or snap chat or tumblr or anywhere that is likely to have a search option!

Do this with scenes or creatures or events you want to write about.  Writers block is just an excuse for lazy writers.  Don’t be a lazy writer.  If you don’t love playing with your mind and feeding it like this and you find writing hard work, then you can’t be a writer.  Because writers don’t work, they play and they do this every single day.  Some scenes are hard but the writing is never stressful or hard work because you love it and if you love something, it can’t ever be hard work!  Don’t keep chasing the money either by looking for things that are trending, because trends change exceedingly fast, as soon as you write about what is trending now you are already out of date by 30k words.  Play and write for you and read a lot of books; not just fiction books on the genres you like, read broadly, especially non-fiction because that can help you world build.

 

 

 

Will you follow my imagination?

Will you come on a journey with me? 

Will you sit and wait for me to find inspiration again?

Will you want to see my victories of mind?

How I will loosen up my imagination again and make whole worlds mine?

If you do, I will show you things that will fill you with awe and it will be sublime.

I will show you worlds filled with zombies who can travel in time

Giants aplenty sitting by fires singing rhymes and werewolves growing orchards of limes

And pixies who entertaining kings with mimes whilst mermaids eat shark meat all the time

And faeries all tip toe

If you follow me I promise you, there are no bounds where my imagination can go

So will you join me?  I don’t know

But perhaps you will time…

Writer losing her mojo

We all have heard the saying that “writers write as simple as that” and it is really is as simple as that, but most don’t actually do it as regularly as they should or at least believe they should.  For me, I do not write as much as I believe I should because in the last few years I have lost my mojo, I forgot what it meant for me to write and I have done a lot of soul searching in the past year to find out where the passion has gone.

I did something rare for me – I re-read a book, usually I don’t re-read books unless I put them into a reference category but this particular book I re-read and saw it with fresh eyes and read things I didn’t remember were in the book in the first place.  The name of the book was “Big Magic” written by Elizabeth Gilbert.  When I read this book I asked myself a question; “Why do I think I have lost my love for writing”?  It was a simple answer really upon reflection and I would never have gotten this answer if it wasn’t for this book.  My writing became too focused on financial panic, the urge to write as much as I can so I can earn a living because I needed to break out of debts, but instead, this kind of pressure halted everything about my creative mind and I found I couldn’t do anything other than dramatic self-pitying poetry on mass, the stories and the playtime died, literally.

For the word, nothing has been published except for the things that are published on this blog simply because I didn’t want to approach a publisher with such depressing poetical themes, because I still hold to the idea that I am primarily a fantasy and horror story writer, not a poet!  I am also an essayist I suppose, because I like writing and hoarding information I have learned about my favourite subjects, but I am not sure how to become a paid essay writer and I am not really going to approach that as a career until I learn more about it. 

Anyway – getting back to the main subject of this post.  I forgot how to play – yes, even in real life, I have forgotten how to play and to laugh because of my severe depression, breakdown and financial worries.  I became so down in the dumps about my life that I had two years of being carefully guarded by Paul my fiancé because I couldn’t be left alone for fear I’d commit suicide, seriously.  One point it got so bad, Paul had to go out somewhere without me and he needed to ask a neighbour to sit in with me.  To say I am over that now, would be wrong, the slightest thing brings it back, but I am not as bad as I used to be, the self-harming has stopped a little bit and I am more predictable these days; but ultimately, the depression is still there and I am trying hard to find out how to play again, how to feel happy again and how to enjoy life.  I don’t enjoy anything anymore and it is getting increasingly difficult since the doctor is now looking into what they believe to be a very serious neurological problem, either MS or motor neurone disease, but like always there is a long waiting list here in the UK and I won’t really know what’s going on with me for several months apparently.

So, how does one go about trying to find out how to be happy again and learn to play again?  It turns out according to the book “Big Magic” and a couple of other books I have read recently that it is something most adults get out of practise of, that once you start trying to become playful and do things which are generally playful (even if you don’t feel happy doing it or feel that it is playful) you will eventually trick your mind to becoming playful and you will build up a type of momentum.  Once the momentum is built up, you will start to feel a change – well I hope so.

I thought hard about how I write stories now in comparison to how I wrote them ten years ago, was there any notable differences in how I produced work back then than now?

Yes there was a huge fundamental difference in fact. 

A decade ago I wasn’t afraid to be thought of as eccentric or insane, I would play with my imagination and I would share my thoughts and ideas no matter how obscure and strange they were with people around me and then I would write about those ideas.  I used to have a lot more creative friends too, but many of them have creative careers which have made them too busy to socialise even online, some have died, some have decided that they too have lost their playful side and have become super conservative people.

I have also found that my social circle is smaller these days which is amazing because I used to think my social circle couldn’t get any smaller ten years ago, the people who I do talk to these days are very serious people who have a worried look on their faces whenever anybody talks about anything out of the ordinary, even if you were to explain that you are an artist and a writer so it’s not a mental health problem, it’s just my mind playing with ideas and therefore there is a story in this.  You’d be surprise how people like that can dry up your will to be imaginative or to share your ideas.

Some people who have very little imagination tell me that they wished they had more of an imagination and they start to tinker with my story ideas themselves (which I don’t mind) but then they start demanding that they must change my concept on my fantasy worlds because things are just not plausible and that readers are real people who live in the real world and they want something believable, so they start pulling at the threads of my fantasy infrastructure and start literally pulling my fantasy communities apart by the seams.  It turns out that even my perfect all powerful fantasy God is not infallible, that he has other beings that will cause problems he can’t deal with and that even this God ponders who created him and so forth.  I told the person, you are going too deep here buddy, I don’t want to go that way in my story, but they insist that I must.

I became a fantasy writer because I find the real world too boring and predictable for me to want to think about and write, the idea of making a fantasy based novel plausible, to me, is laughable, because fantasy is supposed to be anything BUT normal. 

To cut myself off from such people will almost completely isolate me again, which I don’t want.  But can I really sit through another conversation where my worlds are being shattered write before my eyes?  I often feel like screaming at the top of my voice “Of course this fantasy God has a creator you dumbass, it is me, I am their goddess, I made them, but I am not egotistical enough to put myself in the book as the all-power”, does any other writer go through this?  Or is this situation totally unique to me?

So I am currently on a journey to find “My tribe” as Elizabeth Gilbert puts it and to find my playful imaginative self again and to have the confidence and focus of not listening to those who are dismantling my worlds and to continue with what I had always planned instead.  Which is a shame because these people used to feed me ideas, used to support me, but these days it is just soul destroying.  I have to ignore the world destroyers.

I wanted to join a writers group, but not sure what is involved with those and I am scared to find more people who are like that, once they’ve heard my stories.  I am trying to forget the people who are making me focus on writing purely for financial reasons and try to focus once again on writing for me, for fun, for release and for pleasure; the way it should be for all writers.