…Heaven

So I finally got my creative ass in gear and posted something new over at The Grand Conspiracy today. I think a lot of us have been thrown in the creative doldrums over the holiday season – I was uninspired because everyone else was uninspired, and also my brain was busy with other things. Usually what I write comes to me in a mental image, or a really clear idea. “What if blah blah blah?” my brain asks me, and then I explain to my brain what would happen in that situation, and then I write it down.

Lately I’ve been pondering a lot of things about love and connection. Lost loves most of all. I think because there’s this monumental, eternal quest to find the person who fits you, who loves you, who makes you feel safe – I always wonder what happens if you find that person only to lose them? I read and hear so many stories of loss – every day is filled with so many deaths. How does anyone stand it? How does anyone find their person and then survive the loss of that person? It’s all quite beyond my limited emotional scope I think, to conceive of going on in the face of that. Empty space where once stood someone you love – how is that to be borne?

I’ve also been listening frequently to the Watson Twins cover of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven.”  (It’s on the True Blood soundtrack, which is pretty awesome in its entirety.) When the Cure does the song it’s bouncy and driven. When the Watson Twins do it, it’s mournful and full of loss.

And upon reading them more closely I realized that the lyrics can be rather nonsensical or they can be lonely – and here they’re lonely. And the line “I found myself alone, alone, alone above a raging sea.” lingered with me particularly for the first time in the 20+ years I’ve been loving that song. And then I realized why someone was alone above a raging sea, and how sad it was.

Anyway. I think we’re going to a once per month posting schedule over there, which I hope to be able to maintain. Hope you enjoy the piece.

New GC Post

I am finding life and people and everything else very exhausting right now. I really do feel like everyone is starving and somehow it’s become my job to feed them. Instead I just want to go back to bed. Anyway, new post from me.

Where the Wild Things Are

Finally saw this movie Tuesday night and really enjoyed it. It actually tied into some themes I’ve been musing on myself lately, which made it more interesting. (Or perhaps these themes reached out and slapped themselves into the plotline just because they were tired of being in my brain – not the first time that’s happened.)

Not at all a kids movie from what I could see, I would think young children especially would find it confusing, dull or disturbing. But then again it’s been a long time since I was a young child, so maybe they’d see something different in it than an adult would. The monsters were pretty amazing, all fur and snot and a plodding kind of fierceness. That in itself must be enchanting to children.

The movie dealt with themes of wildness, relationships, loving someone so much you push them away, loving someone but being unable to tolerate them, loving someone and having them mistreat you, conflict resolution and rage and loss. And several of those things have been on my mind quite a bit lately—especially the idea of wildness, and whether we have space in our civilized adult lives to be loud and wild anymore. I know I don’t have much. Between my home with shared walls and my office and other public spaces, the need to be respectful of other people’s right to peace is usually paramount. Only in my car do I experience some level of freedom to sing or scream or just listen to music that gets as loud as I need it to drown out my own thoughts. Which is why I look like a total nutbag, belting out angry songs at the top of my lungs as I listen to my iPod on my way to work. But I don’t care. In terms of things I owe other drivers on the road, the ability not to see me singing  like a freak is not high on my priority list.

As far as love and rage and loss, all those things have been very heavy on my mind. Love is very hard. Families are hard. People are hard. Love can be destructive as easily as it can be nurturing. Obsession walks hand and hand with love sometimes, and obsession and wildness are the themes that came out in my writing for The Grand Conspiracy this week. What do you do when you love someone and they don’t love you, and those feelings can’t be made to go away? Do you ignore them, accept them, or do you rebel? Do you demand what you want from people, take it when they won’t give it? It’s our instinct to take what we want, what we can’t stop thinking of. But of course that isn’t permitted when what we want and can’t have is another person. But the instinct remains all the same. This piece is about someone whose obsessive desire for someone else rips through every polite barrier that society has constructed—and I feel sympathy for her, no matter how much she scares me.

Anyway, that’s what’s on my mind lately. I do not wonder why I can’t sleep.

NaNoEdMo

So I am not doing NaNo this year. I feel really strange and slackery about it, but there it is. I can’t reasonably wrap my head around a new concept when the two books I have written are unedited. So the goal for this month is to finish editing book one by the end of the month. I have plenty of time off to do that, and I want this to be a busy but emotionally calm month. How’s that sound to everyone? Good? To me too. No more fucking asshole people and their chronic weirdness, much more work and focusing on myself and my own business. One of these days I will find the balance between other people and me, but this month I am going to tip the scale in the me direction, for sure.

So as of tomorrow – we edit! If you see me not-working you have permission to scold me, but please do not kick my ass, I am a wee bit fragile at the moment.

I’d like to think at least things can’t get any worse.

Florence + The Machine “Hurricane Drunk”

The Grand Conspiracy | The Lonely Dance of the Pearl-Grey Shark

The Grand Conspiracy | The Lonely Dance of the Pearl-Grey Shark.

Last week while we were out at the Deacon, we were taking turns doing dramatic readings of “Silk & Steel“, possibly the worst book ever written. It contains descriptive prose of this sort:

Her face had the fragrance of a gibbous moon. The scent of fresh snow. Her eyes were dark birds in fresh snow. They were the birds’ shadows, they were mirrors; they were the legends on old charts. They were antique armor and the tears of dragons. Her brows were a raptor’s sharp, anxious wings. They were a pair of scythes. Her ears were a puzzle carved in ivory. Her teeth were her only bracelet; she carried them within the red velvet purse of her lips. Her tongue was amber. Her tongue was a ferret, an anemone, a fox caught in the teeth of a tiger.

As we were reading, and laughing, and drinking, I perceived of a GC challenge based on the following passage. (I for one think we need more challenges and themed writing events over at GC, since people are Losing Steam and Letting Life Get in the Way and stuff. Asses.) Anyway, read this if you can:

Her shoulders were the clay in a potter’s kiln. Her shoulders were fieldstones; they were the white, square stones of which walls are made. They were windows covered with steam. They were porcelain. They were opal and moonstone. Her neck was the foam that curls from the prow of a ship, it was a sheaf of alfalfa or barley, it was the lonely dance of the pearl-grey shark.

And the sad thing is “the lonely dance of the pearl-grey shark” while it doesn’t really describe a neck to any extent, is a pretty evocative phrase. I thought we should all write a story, a poem or do some artwork with this concept and title. So anyway, at the link is mine. If any of you non-GCers want to submit your Pearl-Grey piece in the comments here or there, please feel free.

Much <3’s,

Your Gibbous-Moon scented superBadGirl

Language is a Virus – Poetry Generator

This is the third October in a row that I’ve found this randomly generated LiaV poem compelling enough to post.

Always for different reasons, reading meaning into what is nothingness. These are like horoscopes, you take away what you want to.

Enjoy.

Poetry Generator

All angry over the spirits

All angry under the bullshit
I cavort with dazzling spells among the clouds
Be aware! The sin was good
So sensuous within the fire
We sense luminous vapors before the fire
Awaken, awaken! The passion must continue

All angry over the spirits
You expel yellow flames among the ground
Heavy! The birth has died
translucent thirsty
across the water
empty hands
How many times
the foreigner
come singing
before help could come

The Grand Conspiracy | Even You

New post from me at TGC this week. Give it a read, love to know your thoughts, as always :-)

The street sees everything. It saw you arriving earlier, hope in your heart and money in your pocket. It sees you stumbling out at closing time, somewhat less hopeful and with a few crumpled wads of soggy cash left to your name. It feels your toes wavering tentatively between your car in the parking lot and the after-hours bar down the way. It lays beneath you all broken glass and crinkled cellophane, with no judgment for whatever you decide. When your shoes invariably carry you in the direction of more alcohol it throws no obstacles in your way, aside from the odd displaced brick—which is really more the sidewalk’s fault.

via The Grand Conspiracy | Even You.

New Post at Grand Conspiracy

So I have a new post at Grand Conspiracy – posted it yesterday. It’s a shortish piece of microfiction, a vignette on one person’s self-destructive reaction to love and loss and obsession. And it’s kind of violent and it’s kind of awful, and even though most of us wouldn’t take the extreme actions of the main character, I suspect that the wish to be able to physically cut all traces of a lost love from one’s life might be universal.

I hope that you enjoy it.

No Longer Required

Protected: Dark Night of the Soul

Clean, Clear, Cloudy

New post of mine up at The Grand Conspiracy. Pretty happy with this one, love to know what you guys think!

It wasn’t like she wasn’t going to drink it. She was looking at the bottle and pondering whether she was going to drink it, but really the decision was made and it was going to be drunk. It was already drunk, in the finality of reality, just not yet in the present tense.

The bottle was clear and cold and so was the liquid inside. What it did to her was hot and decidedly murky rather than anything crystalline. But that was afterward. The crisp burn of that initial drink always presented the razor-sharp illusion that clarity would be forthcoming— although that had never before been the case. Maybe this time.

Read more here

New Conspiracy Today!

As always, I would love to know your thoughts! :-)

The Grand Conspiracy | A Conversation

It started out as a conversation about curtains, and ended up as a conversation about everything he’d ever done wrong.She didn’t know what business he had opining about curtains, anyway. She’d only asked as a sort of rhetorical silence-filler, more to hear herself thinking out loud than really elicit his judgment. Who knew he’d have anything to say about anything?For his part, he just didn’t like the god-damned curtains, considering them not only ugly, but somehow oppressive and stifling. If part of the money going to purchase them were his, he’d go ahead and say if he didn’t like the fucking things.“It’s not as if you ever gave a damn about this place until five minutes ago.” she bit out spitefully, wrapping fistfuls of fabric into great messy wads and shoving them back into the plastic packaging.“Excuse me for not wanting to live in some kind of crazy funeral parlor-slash-funhouse, all right?” He stood with his arms folded, a bit concerned with where this conversation was suddenly heading, but semi-determined to see it through now that he’d started it.

continued at…  The Grand Conspiracy | A Conversation.

An “Aha!” Moment, and the SOTD

Can’t write this week. Thought it was because I had no time, but I realized it’s more about something else.

I’m happy.

So this week every idea I’ve had to write about is a non-starter because my writing is normally always about misery or pain or confusion, and I don’t feel any of those things right now. I am sure I will again soon, but this week I am glad to be blocked, just a little.

Unicorn – Apoptygma Berserk

You hold the candle I once lit
You shine your light
When you forgive I cry
You run your fingers through my hair
And tell me it’s worthwhile, it’s all worthwhile

Even when I hate myself
Even when I feel your pain
when you cry
Even when my heart is cold
You assure me it’s worthwhile, it’s all worthwhile

You see what can’t be seen
You repair the damage done to me…

The Grand Conspiracy | Countdown

I have a new post up at The Grand Conspiracy today. It would please me greatly if you’d go and read it!

It was seven hours and forty-two minutes until the party started, and so far Cassandra’s day had felt like a series of stops on a low-budget bus tour of a grotesquely humidified Hades.

via The Grand Conspiracy | Countdown.

The Grand Conspiracy | The Vial

Hey kids, it’s Thursday, which means I have a new post up at The Grand Conspiracy. I’d love to have your thoughts, critique, words of wisdom etc. Teaser below, check it out in its entirety here.

Sometimes he wished it was just a bit more difficult.

Looking in the mirror he contemplated both the night ahead of him and the head in front of him. It had been a good decision to shave everything off, he thought. The clean-shaven head and goatee made him look meaner, and he’d realized a while back that most girls thought the meaner a man looked, the more protection he offered. Girls’ errors in judgment were not his problem though. In fact, you could say that girls’ errors in judgment were his stock in trade.

He grabbed his toothbrush and set the timer for three minutes. While scrubbing viciously on his teeth he planned his movements. He knew which bars he was hitting first, and he knew where he’d probably end his evening. Any good thing that happened in between was just gravy. Last week had been very special and he was still riding that high.

continued at… The Grand Conspiracy | The Vial.

The Grand Conspiracy

A few months ago, some of the local St. Louisans I’ve met via Twitter told me about a project of theirs, known as The Grand Conspiracy*. Since they’re almost all artists and writers—and many are both—they wanted a collective place/way to share their work.

The Conspiracy was apparently originally conceived as a one-sheet of short fiction and artwork to be distributed in local bars and shops.  Since then the project has morphed into an electronic one, centered around a collectively updated blog, with a print version to eventually be taken from the best of its posts. The other Conspirators kindly invited me to play along, and I was really happy to accept. It’s much easier to write when you have an intended outlet in mind, and it’s easier to keep to a deadline if you know someone else is depending on you to do so.

Of course, people and their schedules being what they are, the blog has taken quite some time to get off the ground, but I am excited to announce that we’ve got our collective asses in gear, and will begin (hopefully daily) posting at The Grand Conspiracy today!

As luck would have it, Thursdays are my posting day, so there’s a new piece of mine “Make Your Selection” up now. I’d love for you to have a look and let me know what you think of the blog overall, and of course any critiques of my work are always welcome.

(I mean, I am not saying I won’t punch you in the face for daring to dislike my writing, but I certainly welcome the opportunity to punch you in the face.)

Anyway, have a look, add it to your feed reader, check it every day. If I know these people at all, there will be some stellar work there for your edification and delight.

*For those of you who are not St. Louis natives, this name refers to the the street, South Grand, where all our favorite bars are located. Not that this is a group which centers itself on drinking at all. *ahem*