There was something in me.
Did it hold itself with malformed limbs,
croon a sad song for itself
or was it just a single cell,
a secret waiting to be wiped away
or buried so that I could hide the stain?
And did it plant this madness in my brain
so I would know this pit of dread
of hungry serpents snapping at my feet,
of old mistakes come back to fill my head
and monsters come to laugh at my defeat?

Now even as I hold you
to my malformed heart,
when you make my dreams come true
my secret wants me to depart.
When I put my arms around you
and try to kiss away your fears
my secret is beside you too
breathing malice in your ear.

It tells you,
"There was something in me,
something masquerading as a soul.
Did it smile with crooked teeth?
Did it doodle on its arms
and sing softly in its sleep?"
There was something in me,
or maybe not; I don't recall.
Whatever it was, wherever it went,
it's all gone now.

I have a vivid memory of you from Alpha 2009 when, after ruthlessly critiquing my story the day before, you raved about a poem I decided to send off to Strange Horizons on a complete whim, and convinced me to present it at the poetry reading at Confluence. I was intimidated to be reading after published authors, but your enthusiasm about having an Alpha student on stage was what kept me going. There are many fun and interesting people who I met at Alpha who I admire, respect, and to some extent seek to emulate, and you were a force of nature among them, Alpha's own legend in literary SF&F fandom. I don't think I ever got to tell you how much I appreciated your presence at my first Alpha, and your briefer but no less impressive appearances at Alpha 2010. Thanks to your advice and encouragement, I will keep writing. And if/when I have produced something substantial and beautiful, I hope that wherever you are, you can look down at me and say "she did alright."

...tonight seems like a great night to blast Nine Inch Nails and the Misfits and write about android punk rock stars on the run from corporate bounty hunters until my eyes bleed from looking at the screen.

Also: I wish I had discovered dirty, ugly, distorted, raging hardcore punk before my 18th birthday. Oh well, I guess there's a time for everything.

Tonight I took a walk to focus myself before finishing my homework. Conditions: dark, chill, on the verge of rain, the sound of wind rustling through trees tuned to the perfect tone for introversion, the scent of winter, faraway no longer, on the air. Descending a hill shaded by a massive stone wall on one side and trees on the other, I entered a state which has been missing in my life for the past month since arriving at Swat, a state I often lose track of when entering a new place. I felt myself severed from the artificial world, the connections layered on top of each other and around me in an overly-intricate web of ego. At first it was frightening to feel myself slip away from myself, but I realized that the urge to push back against the pull of solitude was simply a symptom of my reliance on the artificial world. In the world of solitude, I am able to inhabit the volumes of nothingness with an individual self which is lost in the exterior world. In the exterior world, I exert a persona who pretends to be an individual, but what is that urge for individualism but a product of exterior, and therefore empty, influences? In the interior world, I am truly in touch with my core and able to tap that source of power and focus. The stimuli of the exterior world exerts a pressure on me which limits the possibilities of my psychic strength. In this way, I am fundamentally an introvert. I need to enter that space of solitude to regain myself and allow my mind to flow without the constraints of the exterior world, no matter how fun it may be to play with them.

College on Tuesday!

I'm having an interesting time unknotting a POV problem in my current story. It's pretty much 3rd person limited, and the person I thought was my POV character--a sort of prodigal son returning home after falling in with a bad crowd--withholds some important information from the other characters (his mother and childhood friend) as a part of the plot. I want this information to be withheld from the audience too, because it feels more interesting and suspenseful that way... How do I do this while still developing his character? Maybe it has to be from another point of view, or from 3rd person omniscient.

Doing research on mudang, Korean shamans, for a story I'm writing.

"Often a woman will become a shaman very reluctantly--after experiencing a severe physical or mental illness that indicates possession by a spirit."

"In the nineteenth century, new creeds made their presence felt in Korea, such as Tonghak (Eastern Learning - Confucianism, etc.) and Sohak (Western Learning, such as Catholicism), but the mass of Koreans preferred their native shamanistic beliefs as compiled in a late nineteenth-century book, Chonggam-nok. When there were emergencies, people would call upon the local mudang to look into the Chonggam-nok to discover hidden truths or to prophecy. While this certainly lent itself to groundless rumors, it could also inspire popular revolts against ruling-class oppression."

"Hereditary mudang, especially in former times, formed a separate religious group of low social standing and seldom married into families on a higher social level."

In the story I'm working on, spells are cast by offering a sacrifice of blood to dead spirits, hungry for a taste of life. The main character's mother is a "blood shaman" who protects a small rural village in war-torn medieval !Korea. The research I've done so far is quite compelling and inspiring--I'm glad I landed on this story idea. Actually, big thank you to Tina for mentioning blood magic during that one lecture, because I'm running with it. My thought process at first was "I'm going to write the blood magic story! Hey, let's stick it in Ancient Korea for the hell of it!" But some good ideas came out of trying to make the cultural aspect more authentic, genuine and thematically relevant.

Now fast-forward to the bit where I've finished and revised the damn thing... XD

Rather fun times in New York City today with cachinna and davekirtley. I was really glad that Rachel made it out to the city, particularly since I had no idea she was in New York!

I  got a free book from Laura Anne Gilman because I knew what dyscalcula was. (It was a pop quiz book giveaway deal.) Apparently the book is about wine magic. The idea started as a joke between Laura and her editor. Hah.

I HATE (but love) Blake Charlton right now because the excerpt he read from Spellbound, his forthcoming novel, was vibrant, suspenseful, funny, thoroughly enjoyable... and ended on a cliffhanger.

I am really entertained that someone asked Saladin Ahmed to write a novel based on "Mr. Hadj's Sunset Ride" because I thought the same thing when I read the story. Muslim bounty hunter with superpowers and half-Arab Christian sidekick killing evil sorcerers and zombies in the Wild West. WHO WOULD NOT READ THAT NOVEL?

I also got my copy of The Living Dead signed by... some guy... and I learned that Picasso REALLY liked zombies.

Oh yeah and I almost killed some people with a frisbee. Pretty typical day, overall.

Found this on Blake Charlton's blog...

"Tolkien was the holder of several highly personal if not heretical views about language. He thought that people, and perhaps as a result of their confused linguistic history especially English people, could detect historical strata in language without knowing how they did it. … [He also thought] that philology could take you back even beyond the ancient texts it studied. He believed that it was possible sometimes to feel one’s way back from the words as they survived in later periods to concepts which had long since vanished, but which had surely existed, or else the word would not exist…However fanciful Tolkien’s creation of Middle-earth was, he did not think that he was entirely making it up. He was ‘reconstructing’, he was harmonizing contradictions in his sources-texts…he was also reaching back to an imaginative world which he believed had once really existed, at least in the collective imagination.” (Shippey xiv-xv)

I think the warm, fuzzy feeling growing in my soul right now is called "inspiration."