Fairy Revel

He who digs a pit will fall into it,
And whoever breaks through a wall will be bitten by a serpent.
He who quarries stones may be hurt by them,
And he who splits wood may be endangered by it.
If the axe is dull,
And one does not sharpen the edge,
Then he must use more strength;
But wisdom brings success.
~ Ecclesiastes 10:8-10

In otherwords, anyone can fail or experience difficulties in their chosen field of work, but starting out with understanding and skill increases one’s odds of success.

For years now, I’ve been alternately trying to hone my writing skills and chopping away at my works in progress with a dull axe. In fact, there are a lot of areas in my life where I’ve been working and learning at the same time. It’s frustrating, and I’m not sure how well it works to learn so many different things at once. As a married person, I never worried about making money; we didn’t have a lot but we had enough to get by with just my then-husband’s income. I squandered that time playing around, and now I feel like I’m fighting a battle every day to learn new things, and to learn discipline in my chosen path.

Another way of looking at it is that if I need money now, I should try to use skills I already have to earn it (research, article writing), while sharpening my skills in areas that need work (writing fiction). Instead of panicking because I haven’t finished a novel and my dream of being a published writer seems far away, I should write fiction for enjoyment and to learn, and try to make ends meet with non-fiction.

Sometimes, honing my skills means fighting the urge to get ahead of myself, chopping with that dull axe hoping to finally fall a tree with it and instead just getting a big fat splinter in my eye.

I keep forgetting what I’m supposed to be doing.

I keep trying to write a novel. I made a deal with myself that I would pull back from that goal for the time being, and yet I continue trying to choose one of the projects I’m tinkering with and force it into shape. Last night I tried to split Amaranth up into its original two novels, and it didn’t go well. Basically, there’s not enough left of the storyline I took out to make a whole novel, and I’d have to work out a plot from the ground up. I think the lifelong-love element I was missing from the current incarnation of Amaranth is going to have to wait for a different novel, because it just doesn’t have enough oomph to encourage me to start yet another unfinished novel from scratch again. My Muse is recalcitrant; it doesn’t believe I’ll ever finish anything, so why give me more ideas to just stick in a drawer?

I also promised myself that I would read. Here’s a sad state of affairs: Whenever anyone asks me, “Have you ever read so-and-so?” the answer is almost always no. I’ve usually heard of so-and-so, I’ve meant to get to so-and-so for ages, but have I read them? Nope. This is true both in and out of my genre.

When I was in high school I read tons of Romance novels. But that was quite awhile ago, so now I’m not even familiar with Romance. It’s a problem in two ways: Not only does my subconscious tend to produce Romance plotlines, even though I’ve moved away from Romance and don’t find writing it personally rewarding, but I’m almost completely unfamiliar with my own genre, Fantasy. The authors I have read extensively are Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, and McKillip, along with a smattering of individual novels by other authors. I never have any idea what’s going on in my genre, except that vampire books are popular and I don’t care for them. I don’t think this is good.

I have to keep reminding myself that my purpose right now is to write for enjoyment, and to read to make up for lost time. I’ve learned that I’m a faster reader than I thought, but that I rarely take time to read. I feel guilty, I feel like I have to justify it, and it doesn’t directly make money, which is, you know, necessary to live. Especially now that I’ve opted only to recommend and not to review, it’s unlikely reading will earn me any coin. But still, I have a goal to catch up on Fantasy. I don’t know exactly what that means, except that I want to look around when I’m standing in Barnes & Noble and know what’s actually inside most of those books. I think that’s kind of ambitious, but I’d like to try.

It’s weird how I’m more resistant to doing pleasant things for my art than suffering for it. Intellectually, the suffering seems more likely to result in finished novels, but it hasn’t worked for me so far. Maybe it’s that whole carrot person vs stick person theory of rewards and punishment. It would be hard to say I’m “goal-driven” but I think you could say I’m “end result oriented”? Which may be saying the same thing, but in a less Type-A Personality sort of way.

Drinking a cup of Taylors of Harrogate’s Tea Room Blend while I fuss with customizing the new theme for Badgerish.Net. It’s being frustrating at the moment so I’m kind of playing around in Scrivener at the same time.

You can tell I’ve been building websites for too long, because I change my layouts live with no “under construction” page or any concern about who sees. I probably shouldn’t do that when I have more readers . . . It looks kinda sloppy, lol.

Right now I’m just sort of bouncing between projects, but I’m happy with that state of affairs. It feels good to just write whatever strikes my fancy at any given moment. I don’t know how effective it’ll be in the long term, but right now I feel like I’m in a transitional stage and the most important thing is to have fun without losing sight of my goals. There’s a feeling of freedom in it. I don’t know if that freedom will give way naturally to a primary work-in-progress, but I’m willing to take the risk.

Anyway, gotta keep this short as I need to finish working on the site and then it’s bellydance practice. Catch ya later!

For the past two days I’ve been messing with WordPress themes here at Badgerish.Net. I’m sort of swapping topics between this and my Livejournal, because I’ve decided to start posting more seriously about writing and reading again, now that I’ve had some realizations about how I work best, and I think Badgerish.Net is the place to do that. I hope to have a focus on mythmaking and worldbuilding, because that’s really my favorite part of writing (oh, a confession!)

My Livejournal will be used to post more personal stuff, because it just makes more sense that way, Livejournal being the way it is (more personal).

Yes, I’m repeating myself and not making a lot of sense right now, but I’m wiped out from lack of sleep, from searching for a theme that I like (still haven’t chosen one yet, so watch this space for erratic layout changes), and I’m really just making this post to put something in the text area while I’m trying out themes.