(no subject)

My parents walked in on my watching Monkey's Mask tonight. I just had it on for background noise while I worked on a page from my last year's NaNo & Extended Fic assignment.

Of course, my mother has to walk in on the first sex scene in the movie. If I wasn't already out, I suspect I would have been outed tonight.

(no subject)

Just fuck off, okay? You don't need to go out of your way to prove me wrong when I'm making a fucking joke.

Pencilled a new background, but I lack the energy to ink, scan and colour it. Hn. Maybe I'll do that later. Within this week, maybe.

I've been contemplating suicide/But it really doesn't suit my style

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)?
brought to you by Quizilla

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.

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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*

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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?

That's SOOOO Punk Rawk!

Don't get me started on pseudo-punks... I don't consider myself having the musical knowledge or fashion style to be punk, but I'll defend them to the death.

Hn...

Nys: (On the topic of my totally punk rawk...erm, I mean fuckin' brill CD we're washing the dishes to) You don't like that punk crap, do you?
Dani: It's not crap!
...
Dani: Um, I guess that's a yes?


Nys and I spent five minutes bagging Avril, her clothes, and her use of language ("sk8er boi"?? What drugs is she on??). Hn...fun times.

Really, though, she is so incredibly prissy. And wearing a tie? Please. That was me in 2000. I went to the MHS formal in a tie. You're two years behind the trends, Avril honey!



(Although, according to Quizilla [because we know that's a totally reliable source], I'm a regular, average, good-times punk kid. There ya go.)

Now it's time for some healthy...COMPETITION!

Okay, who wants to help me name the first chapter/issue in last year's NaNo?

Breakdown:
Alice, a Private Eye and our Byronic hero, happily turned her back on the magical community 10 years ago. Today, however, a face from her past turned up to ask her to track down a missing person. She's being blackmailed into taking the job, essentially, as the girl's promising to give her the other half of a photograph of her and her ex-girlfriend Miranda (a bisexual, confident gypsy-like woman with a torture fetish). Al suspects that Miranda's behind it, but can't prove anything.

The novel:
Al gets slowly drawn back into the magical community after her PI partner Mark commits suicide, and the missing boy seems to be behind a drain of magic from the world, and turns out to be trapped in dreams, due to the tutorage he's received from Miranda. Stuff happens. (The middle's still rather shady). It's funny in places (I hope), but is essentially a tragedy...Al loses everything that was important to her by the end.

I need this thing named tonight. Anyone offer any suggestions?