trice's blog

I have not been updating much recently. This seems odd to me, as I used to post as often as half a dozen times a day.

It might be tempting to blame this on Pokemon, which I have recently started playing again and the playing of which has been interfering with my ability to hold conversations with people. But that would only apply to the past couple of days at most and I am talking about something of months.

(I started with Yellow, by the way, and so far have a little team in Vista counting of course a pikachu [Chikapu], rattata [Ratsy], pidgey [Perchy] and two nidorans, male and female [Nirodan and Nita, respectively].)

For the past several weeks I have been undertaking an industry placement for TAFE two days a week, which means working in a somewhat looking Catholic high school library. It has been interesting and fun. I got to do actual cataloging for a catalogue. Well, copy-cataloguing. Also designed and put up a display on this year's Olympics, shelving, cleaning shelves, some circulation (mostly the checking out of laptops to students, who seldom borrow books when I am looking) and end-processing. Also recently making sure signage is in the right place and designing new signs for the shelves.

This necessitated much colour-matching yesterday, to get the new signs with their number breakdown to match the colours of the existing signs pointing to the first hundred divisions. The other people there seemed to think this was a sort of brilliant idea so yay. Currently that is in an intermediate state of being cut to size before getting laminated, after I spent much of yesterday calculating the right font size to use to get the desired spacing, and other such sign-related activities.

The point of saying all this is that I have been doing work-type things for nearly the first time in my life and although for a while it was leaving me tired unto sleep once I got home (now less so to the point of being able to be productive ish in my own time again) and it has been interesting and varied and even in some cases fun. So far I have managed not to succumb to the occasional bouts of anxiety which have me wanting to whimper in a corner until it goes away and I have managed to do socialising a bit.

So. Library work. I can do this. I have also been finding that, if this is what library work is, it is not interesting enough for me to want to do indefinitely. Fortunately it is something I can do and not hate and even enjoy in parts, so I am not looking to abandon it even for the next several years barring some unexpected opportunity, and may well continue with it for a very long time. However, I will definitely be considering what else I might do that could provide me with more intellectual satisfaction.

Astronomy is something I have been wanting more and more to get back to. Doing so would mean really working on my mathematical skills, which I keep not doing. Still not sure how to do so, though I am sure it involves cutting down on the amount I feel obligated to do online and especially the things I do to shut off my brain and thought. Even if I do, I am doubtful I would want to pursue a career in research. It seems laden with a lot of distasteful scrabbling for funds and tenure and a whole lot of pressures not really related to learning about the universe.

Writing is something else. Despite my occasional mutterings about the end of my writing, I do not intend to give it up. I am less focused these days on the idea of publication, and even if I am published it is unlikely I would be so successful and prolific that I would be able to write full-time. It might however provide a diversion from work which would satisfy me. I might find, too, this 'satisfaction' thing in other aspects of my life which I do not expect.

Satisfy, that is a curious sort of word to use. I do not imagine myself ever being satisfied in life, experiencing contentment without ambition. But I might apply that word to the pursuit of things, to engagement with what I am doing, to the journey itself even if no destination can quite compare.

While writing this I have been thinking about my recent decline in posting. There have been ideas.

One is that I am currently in three romantic relationships and quite possibly this has the effect of socially saturating me. There are people (not limited to those I am in relationships with, though nearly so) who are willing to talk to me on a near-daily basis in interesting ways. I do not have much desire to seek out social contact outside what I already have - the main reason at present is the inconvenience of the hours, which leave me often awake with no one about.

Another is that posting is a habit and a mindset, and one I have fallen out of. More than once over the past few weeks I have begun writing a post only to lose heart soon after. I was a bit depressed in the first half of the year and this may have had an effect.

The last one in this little list is that I have been doing such things as going to classes and this industry placement, and I find such activities exhausting beyond their content. Often the first day after these (Tuonday and Sriday currently) I spend decompressing, not doing much at all beyond recovery. So this is going to cut into what I actually do in my free time, although it seems to be improving.

And that seems to be all for now.

For one of my classes I am tasked with the creation of a bibliography, an extensive document serving as a directory of books, serials and web resources pertaining to a particular subject. More complicated than something for which a simple catalogue search would suffice.

The library whose resources I have chosen to create the bibliography for (it has to be for and using the resources of a particular library) is the Seattle Public Library. The subject I have nominated to cite is resources for building writing and artistic skills.

My actual intention behind this is to create a resource index for aDE, material we can use to study and learn from. Currently the area of material I am investigating is very broad and not especially well defined. It would be helpful if people would nominate particular areas of interest for skill development, or resources they have found useful in the past.

People who are not members of aDE are welcome to participate too. They are certainly welcome to make use of the bibliography once it is done.

It turns out, when I am writing fiction longhand it is allowed for me to make edits. It is allowed to rewrite scenes and sections, to make notes and to change direction if the previous one is unworkable or judged inferior to the new.

Handwritten stories are allowed to be messy and do not have to be perfect, continuous narratives. Not even when they are first drafts.

Light is of course a fluid. Drennets learn this at a very early age and frequently run outside as children to catch in cups the daily rain of sunlight, which they keep glowing by their bedside at night, or drink to feel its warmth flow through and fill their bodies right to the very tips of their fingers and hair, sometimes overindulging to the point of themselves beginning to glow and leak, or sometimes dip brush or finger in and use as paint, that special paint which is seen at night until it dries and fades or leaves radiant stains in many a youngster's reach.

As they grow older, the more inquisitive might experiment with pouring sunlight through prisms and learning the tastes of the colours. Hot, sharp violet, the tang of green, sweet soothing red. Mixing and remixing, sometimes sifting fine and collecting as many gradations as they can for experiments artistic, culinary, scientific, or some combination of the three. Or perhaps the simple joy of collecting.

Sunlight is plentiful and easy to collect, its fall regular, predictable, and abundant. Starlight is different. Each faint glittering point in the night produces such fine mist it might take a night, a week, a month to fill even a thimble. Each star's light is different. Tinted, flavoured, altered by its source and path. Dust-sweetened, tang of re-radiation, merest whisper of brushing other worlds.

Each unique, each precious. In fields beyond the cities myriad dishes open at night, each arranged just so to collect its target's light, stored for later collection in specially mirrored containers to prevent evaporation. These are used much the way sunlight often is: art, flavour, science. Starlight distilled, starlight blended, starlight flowing glowing in many-threaded tubes, the light of a thousand suns mingling in intricate sculpture in a dark room. Expensive seasoning, fierce nova light, never to be tasted again in a lifetime.

Night falls and silver flowers open to the light.

Another month, another story posted and a new book created to hold it. Previous stories were posted under Fictions, intended for keeping minor one-off stories from cluttering the page. The new book is Numbered Tales.

As indicated on the page itself, these are a set of stories I devised back in 2002. Each story is assigned its own number and told mostly as a series of short tales. Only the first four listed for now, though; 05 is more of a hypertextual work and I am uncertain how to present it.

I have not written as much of these in the years since. Only the first story for each, although there are some spinoffs. The story posted, Maricia, actually serves as a prequel for its series. Scanning it again for posting and formatting, I am not sure I like it now. It was written when I was seventeen, for a competition for a women's magazine. Never heard back from them, but for $3,000 I think it was worth a shot (this remains the only work I have submitted for publication, in fact).

I am not sure if I like this story now, or the other numbered tales. There are elements I am fond of and others which bother me, so possibly there will be a reworking of this and the others in the future. They are not meant to be especially serious works, but I want to feel I have written them well. I want to have pride and enjoyment for what I have done.