changeling | I've been contemplating suicide/But it really doesn't suit my style (Reply)

You are Samuel Taylor Coleridge! The infamous "archangel a little damaged!" You took drugs and talked for hours, it's true, but you also made a conscious choice to cultivate the image of the deranged poet in a frenzy of genius. You claimed you wrote "Kubla Khan" in an afternoon after a laudanum, when you pretty manifestly did no such thing. You and your flashing eyes and floating hair. And your brilliant scholarship and obvious genius.
Which Major Romantic Poet Would You Be (if You Were a Major Romantic Poet)?
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I've spent far too much time recently thinking about the Romantic poets (or, as my mind reconfigures them, the Romantic Junkie Poets). I suspect this partly to do with my current fascination with Byronic heroes (have one in the two novels I'm working on...), but it prolly doesn't help that I've been listening to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and its plot point with Coleridge. And let's not mention that slash I mentioned in passing

I want to try laudanum...no, really. *has no idea how laudanum ravages the body*

*cough* Yes.

I read recently that the phrase "Mad, bad and dangerous to know" was invented by a female friend of Byron, to describe him. Hmm...suspect it was in Encyclopedia of Fantasy, that worthwhile tome.

Yep, here it is, on page 154 (paperback, 1999 edition). The lady's name was Lady Caroline Lamb, and she fictionalised Byron in her 1816 novel Glenarvon. and... good Lord, A. S. Byatt is a woman! I'm sure you all already knew that, but I actually haven't read any of her stuff.

So, in this whole friends-list frenzy I've been going on recently, I've been adding a bunch of random people I don't know who write interesting stuff. One person I added is

pegkerr who (pardon the ignorance) is apparently a writer. I think someone who actually knows who she is linked to her journal, but I don't remember who. *shrugs* Maybe the NaNo group?

Anyway, she says a lot of interesting things about writing. Her latest post was a discussion she was having with a friend of hers about her new novel, and the magic within is specifically. Her friend told her that there were a series of questions she had to consider:

What's the magic for?

What's the cost of using it?

How does it affect people?

And if you are hypothesising magic in our everyday world, why is it not visible to a lot of people?

Why aren't people using it all the time?

...which I thought was immensely good advice. I printed them out and stuck them on my wall.

So. Speaking of friends lists...

I'm far more likely to add someone I don't know. This comes from the whole "It's easier to be honest to strangers" idea which was the centre of the 7-11 conversation with Daniel in the early hours of the morning after Liam's 18th (pardon the run-on sentence). I've always had a bit of trouble letting people within my defences, something I thought I'd gotten over, but it seems I haven't.

With random people, you don't have to mentally (or maybe literally) vet all of what you've written in the past, to see if you've written something nasty you've regretted later, or bitched about because you were at the end of your tether. There's something reassuring about knowing that there's no way these people are really going to care enough to hurt your feelings. You're unlikely to have a bit argument which involves one or the other of you doing something to hurt the other.

I suppose this train of thought has been partly inspired by the fact that I wrote a private entry last night. It was public originally, but then I decided I didn't want every mad Jacobin off the street to be reading it, so I planned to set it to friends only. In the end, due to a mistake in the drop-down menu, it was set to private, an option I only ever use when drafting an essay and keeping a backup on LJ. Why? It was poetry, something I'm not confident with at the best of times, and it was dealing with something I'm not dealing with very well on my own, without well-meaning (or not-so-well-meaning) people leaving me concerned notes. I'm not sure it's something I want to share right now.

Maybe if this journal was only read by strangers I would, but I doubt I would have even then. There's only one person I'd be brave enough to share it with, and that's because he's a continent away, and I know has been through a similar thing.

I'm not sure I'm even comfortable with people reading that last section, now. Just promise me you won't nag me into telling you what I made private, and this entry stays. *smiles*

I just found a piece of jewellery I made in year 12. I miss doing that. Whatever else has changed, I always need to be creating something, with my mind or my hands. It doesn't really matter if I'm brilliant or not, it's the creation that counts.

I really, really want to learn cello. Desperately. I wonder how I can arrange that?