saturday.

I've lit candles around the living room, because the dusk is beginning, faintly, to crawl in on us and due to the hill outside our window, the apartment is pretty dark as it is. Lights are nice. I need to go get a refill on tea.

...

Today has been -- stressful. I don't exactly know why. It's also been good! I've gotten a lot of chores done, a lot of writing and tagged a bit on my gf's and my Star Wars PSL. All good things. I've gone for a walk as well. All good things.

Yet, I feel really stressed out.

Some of it is just creative energy, filling my body, because writing my story is going so well, much better than expected. I finished chapter two around noon today and have hit the 8k mark on the full document, so it really is going over all expectations. I read it through just a moment ago and while I still don't know where this story is even going or if it's going anywhere at all, I really love the style of it and my writing soothes me -- so I guess, I'm just hoping that at the end of the day, it might soothe someone else as well.

That would make me happy.

...

Though, first and foremost, LOL, I hope to finish the full story. Haha. That's my first wish.

I have chamomile tea now. Bless.

I have chamomile tea and family drama. Great.

Expect a continuation of this post later or tomorrow or something...

saturday.

Progress report. bethefirst Omina fanfic.

Words written (with notes, headlines, etc.): 8535/50.000
Chapters finished: 2/12
Prose poems done: 59/365

Title changed 2 times, still working with this one, The Year of the Wolf.

Plot? Short answer, none. These are atmospheric, philosophical, thinky kind of poems. Long answer, it reads more like a quest kind of story, watching the road, studying nature, off-screen killing people, meeting other people, learning from all these observations.

Excerpt:

JANUARY 10th

From the nearby oaks, she harvests long strips of bark, as well as sap that tastes sweet and looks like amber where it stains her fingertips and her dagger.

After hours of work, scraping off and draining and cutting into sizeable pieces, the Amazon cooks all of it over open fire, in a small clay pot, cooks it until it’s dark and grainy, looking more wooden than it ever did in its original state. The concoction is thick like syrup, like drying mud and the grief of widows, forever caught in throats, never making it out alive.

Tears, at least, understand how to run through.

She dips her finger in it. She licks it off her skin. It tastes bitter, that is how she knows it’s right.

Thoughts...

So far, this has been one of the most gratifying experiences I've had writing yet. The deadline of April 22nd keeps me going, but at the same time it's not a single month's intense writing, which probably helps me a lot in terms of managing the stress of it. I feel a creative spark, writing this, but not a spark that's gonna start a fire that burns me to a crisp. At the same time, the format I've chosen suits me so well, it's poetry but it's prose?? That's perfect for me and very in tune with how I like to express myself. As such, I can also limit each little "scene" to about 100 words, give or take, and not linger too long in the same scenes which is one of the main things about writing longer stories that demotivate me so much and which I struggle with greatly. It's also a lot of fun trying to make my very purple prosey style of writing replicate or, at least, refer to the concise, brief style of Aidt's and Moestrup's original writing. A lot of fun!

March in the universe of this fic will build up to spring equinox and some table-turning events in the Amazon's life, so I'm very excited for that.

Next week better be as satisfactory as this week has been, for all its ups and downs.