500 Writing Prompts: You're running for President of the United States.

 From 500 Writing Prompts: You're running for President of the United States. What thing(s) from your past could your opposition use against you?

All the things. Why in the hell would I want to run for President of anything? I would NOT.

I suppose this prompt is meant to stir memories and encourage self-examination. But I cannot take this shit seriously. I would never, ever, ever want that much responsibity and attention. Not even to save the world. The world shoulda looked out for itself.

Hm...how about the fact that I never went to college and have no experience in anything that could facilitate being President. People want their President to appear to have achieved a higher education, even if the individual doesn't later employ that education.

That's it, that's where I'm stopping. 

This is not the movie you're looking for (maybe), but it's still pretty awesome.

 Alas. It seems The Friday Five blog is no more. I am sad. Well, I guess I should have done more of them when I could, hmmmmm? 

And now I have to figure out my own Friday blog idea. Noone is gonna think it up for me!

Shall I tell you how I went to the movies?

The Night House
Searchlight Pictures

I went to the movies. I wanted to see The Night House, but it's not showing near me and it's hard enough to make myself do my Artist's Date. It's good for me and I want to write and Julia Cameron's books have helped thousands of creative people for the reals, but even she says you'll be surprised at how hard it is to keep these dates with yourself. And it is, because even a seven dollar movie ticket feels like too much of a splurge on myself.

I really did want to see it, because I love me some mind-bendy slow-burn horror movie goodness, but my anxiety preferred I not drive an hour for a movie. Hopefully it'll show up on Netflix in six months. Or maybe at the AMC in a month or so.

So instead, I went to see a different mind-bendy sort of movie, it's a sort of sci fi story, in that "twenty minutes in to the future" style. With Hugh Jackman.

I saw Reminiscence. And duuuude, I didn't know this until just this minute looking it up, it was written, directed, and produced by Lisa Joy. Yep, Girl Power. You did really good, lady, really good. It was excellent.

You'll have to look up your own picture of the Hugh Jackman eye-candy in a suit that is the movie poster, because now I'm suddenly bored with this and I really do have to make dinner. It's not delivery...it's DIGIORNO.

No energy for snappy titles...

....I seriously almost typed "no energy for snappy titties" and that's just not where I want to go today. Or any day, honestly, but extra not today.

I've been having trouble getting on task for restarting my book and spent a lot of energy being angry with myself for that, when I realized I've only been off social media for a month. And only this week, I've purged my YouTube subscriptions of anything... um, tense? Controversial? Loud? 

Let's go with anxiety provoking... I purged my YouTube subscriptions of almost all the anxiety provoking stuff...which leaves me with a few history subscriptions and a lot of crafting videos.

So off Facebook and Instagram for a month, strictly reduced YouTube, uh, input? this week. And reduced my news reading. And if you have a problem with not staying up on current events, I kindly direct you to go fuck yourself. I can give you a synopsis of current events that is always relevant: People are being horrible to each other all the time, all over the world, the climate sucks and people are dying because of it, and we are all roller coastering into hell every goddamn minute of our lives. The only unknown is when we will actually hit the gates...I like to imagine hell has gates, just like heaven has gates...and I'd rather remain blissfully ignorant while I try to drag myself into happiness. 

I think I need to draw the gates of hell. I'm intrigued now. 

So I've decided I DO NOT need to be working on my outline immediately. I've spent years getting myself into this creative oubliette, I can't claw my way out of it in a month. So I have assigned myself homework in the the form of restarting The Artist's Way and making that my class. I'm not going to college, but I can make my own homeschool, so doing the twelve week course is a good start. I can move on to The Vein of Gold.

I'm going to finish this or die trying.
juliacameronlive.com

domestika.org
I love that they have
instructors from around
the world.

I can also do courses on Domestika! My first one was Creative Bullet Journal: Planning and Creativity. I'm not really sure how well I did, honestly. It's not like
they're graded or anything, and I really like the collage technique she uses to decorate the different pages, but I also find I have little patience for fluff nowadays. I guess the idea of the course was to encourage people to find their own style to decorate their journals, while I already know my own style and how to decorate and combine colors and find collage materials and I just wanted to know how to do the layout of the journal part. 

I think I'll do okay once I finally settle on how to adapt the ideas to my own style. But it's going to be rough trying to find things in the journal for awhile. Yeah, you can have an Index and tabs and such, but it's still confusing at first.

Tune in another day, when I talk about the pens (Zebra BP! Pilot G2 Limited series! And more!!) I bought recently and how I like pens like some women like accessories.

500 Writing Prompts: When life gives you lemons...

 Finsih this sentence in three alternate and original ways: "When life gives you lemons..."

Lemon beside a Christmas cactus. GENIUS!

A) When life gives you lemons...say thank you and take those lemons, because lemons are expensive. Good quality lemons are fifty cents to a dollar each, depending on where you get them and the season. 

Not those bagged lemons, two dollars for a one pound bag. Those are useless. They're too small and they don't have the same flavor.

Wait...is life giving me bagged lemons? Eh...well, you can still use them. I wouldn't cook with them if I could avoid it, but you can still use them for cleaning. Or a still life to practice drawing and painting. Or putting them in random places in nature and taking pictures and making an art series out of them. Actually that's a pretty good idea, I might do that.

This was in the lemon image search, tagged "Green Lemons".
Um, Life? I'm not stupid. I know what lemons look like.
Those are not lemons.

Q)When life gives you lemons...check your fingers for hangnails and paper cuts, but life is an asshole like that sometimes. It thinks it's being all sneaky, giving you your favorite citrus fruit so you think you can just make lemon bars and tasty broiled swordfish steaks and candied lemon peel and all manner of sunny things, but life KNOWS you have a hangnail and it's just waiting to laugh at you. Life is a dick.

My house is not this nice. Not even close.
Still...#lifegoals.

7) When life gives you lemons...they're also giving you potential lemon trees. Thanks, Life! I've always wanted a lemon tree. Now if only I can keep the cats out of the pot until it's big enough to...scare the cats? Mess with their heads? Use harsh language at them? Because I'll have to put it in the living room in the winter and they'll probably mess with it. Cats are dicks too. 

___________________________

There. I thought those were pretty original. Good job, Self!

500 Writing Prompts: I you were to start a new business right this minute, what would it be? Describe it.

 500 Writing Prompts: I you were to start a new business right this minute, what would it be? Describe it.

See, what the hell? How does this help me write? Besides stoking my rage at how ridiculous these questions are and then I rant for twenty minutes and leave really annoyed but hey, I got my blog entry done right? Plowing through, because that's how good writing eventually gets done. Eventually, plowing through the boring, enraging, muck to get to the other side, where an agent awaits to see my genius and get me a contract. Right? RIGHT?! 

Because that's just stupid, start a business right this minute? Do you have any concept of how much planning needs to go into a business before it starts? Really starts, not just "I have a great idea" starts? And you can't just want to start a business, that's not how it works. Just because you have things you want to sell doesn't mean those things will sell. There has to be a market. And how much are you spending on materials? How much do you need to charge for each item to be able to pay your bills and buy new materials and be compensated for your labor? Will the market bear that price? If you want to make beautiful bookmarks, how many do you have to make and sell before you break even? If you make three gorgeous handcrafted bookmarks a day, with premium materials, what do you charge each? Fifteen dollars? Whose going to buy a fifteen dollar bookmark? Unless you're already famous and they're buying them because then it's a steal. But if you're already famous you could probably charge twenty-five dollars and they would sell.

Some bull shit.
Sis, you aint never gonna get that rock up that hill to stay,
the variables do not add up to success.
1847_Mythe_de_Sisyphe_Emile_Gregoire_

I think one of the problems of our society, in America at least, is the erroneous idea of "where there's a will, there's a way." is staunchly believed. If you just work hard enough you'll succeed and if you don't succeed well obviously you're just not working hard enough. Tell that to the thousands of  small business that got crushed by Walmart over the...what, fifty years I think...that it stomped it's way across the landscape of America. All those Mom and Pop places, are you telling me those family owned business didn't work hard enough? Those people put their own heart and soul and sweat and tears into those business for generations. They worked, many times they worked themselves into an early grave. So that grotesque prosperity gospel vein horseshit is just disgusting. I Instead of "give enough money and faith to god and he'll reward you," it's "give enough money and faith to an ideal and you'll be rewarded." It doesn't actually work like that.

And a business isn't fun and excitement and creativity 24/7, there's a ton of boring shit in there too, like sales and marketing and doing the books and figuring out how you're going to feed your kids when you don't sell enough hand made greeting cards. Oh, you have a regular job to cover the bills? So you're working two full time jobs, when do you sleep, cook, grocery shop, live? 

So my answer is, I wouldn't. I wouldn't start a business of any kind right this minute. I would never start a business on a whim. Ever. Because that's just stupid.

-------------------------------------------------

How does an exception prove a rule? For anyone who thinks to chime in, "Oh yeah, well so-and-so started their widget business with a dream and two dollars, look where they are now! They did it through hard work." No, they didn't. They may have worked hard, but they didn't succeed just through hard work. A whole lot of other variables had to be in their favor. Hard work is the last on the list, not the first.

And this is not an "eat the rich," rant, this is a "stop lying to people to make them feel like shit when they need help and to excuse your robber baron activities," rant. 

The efforts of Sisyphus were not noble,
they were a punishment for being an asshole.
He didn't get a reward for all his pushing. 
The odds were not in his favor. 

And no, Albert, the struggle is NOT enough to fill one's heart. We do not have to imagine Sisyphus happy. What a load of crap. This is why people don't want to hang out with you, Albert.

Some days...you just feel old.

 This is my year 50, as I think I wrote a few days, a week, whatever ago, and some days I just feel old. In my heart as well as my body. Most of the time it's my body looking bleh and I get shocked by it, because I feel pretty young in my head, like around...33 maybe. But today I feel old.

Here is a picture of a tiny snail shell I found
 in my newly purchased juniper bonsai tree. 
Isn't it cute? I don't think there's a live snail in there.

And today I'm supposed to be continuing my new vigor for moving forward and starting fresh and I just....my brain just...I was overwhelmed by the thought that I had to rewrite everything from almost scratch...I have a large portion of my original NANO work printed and the rewrites of sections printed, but I didn't have any outlines or character sheets and I was exhausted at the fact that I had to rewrite all that and HEY, lo and behold, I found out one of the thumb drives I have in my desk drawer actually has a ton of stuff on it and I don't have to rewrite it...

Yeah, now I have to print all of that and sift through it. Organize it. Because there's a lot of stuff there, which I sort of dumped all together on the drive when my laptop had to get worked on and I ended up losing the motherboard. 

And suddenly I'm so mentally exhausted. And here's a completely unrelated fact that's also contributing to my feeling old. The sun is coming in the window just right that I can see my own reflection in the computer screen and while you'd think that such an indistinct reflection wouldn't show many details it's fucking sunlight and is making me look like I feel (OLD) and I don't fucking want to look at that for hours.

I think...I think I will make an executive decision for today. I did my Morning Pages, I'm doing my blog entry. And then instead of plowing into this, right now this morning, I'm going to make a brain switch and work on some embroidery. I have several projects planned, I call them the Humanity Series. I'll explain that later. I have the thread and the fabric to start the first one. So I'm going to do that.

Some garden stuff. Deal with it.

Here's my summer savory. It's very difficult to get a decent picture of. It's a beautiful airy little plant that sends up long, long stems with small leaves and tiny beautiful purple flower but manages to stay up right and just looks so fairy like and lovely in real life but trying to get a picture to do it justice was impossible. for me anyway. 

Bzzzz.

We didn't plant our own sunflowers this year, but some came up nonetheless. We planted some the past two years and got some volunteers this year. This one is by the back porch, not much higher than the railing. It was a dwarf variety. The honeybees like it very much.

Another volunteer in back of the house, where we planted traditional sunflowers two years ago, and it' is a MONSTER. The stalk is nearly as big as my wrist at the base and look how tall it is, hovering well over the gutters of the garage behind it. I don't know if any pollinators are visiting it because it's too damn tall. It's doing quite well. The cucumbers next to it...not so much. A bummer, they did much better last year.

On the top (or left): That's the delicate little flowers of the dill plant, this particular plant is not very...."leafy? When you see fresh dill bunches at the market they have lots of feathery, er, leaves. I don't know what else to call them. I have yet to grow any dill that looks like the feathery bunches in the market and I want to know why. It's probably variety, but I've tried several varieties now and haven't found one yet. I will though!

And on the bottom (or right) is Sweet Thai basil gone to flower, which it did stunningly quickly.

And we'll finish up with this beauty, this is an ornamental pepper call black pearl. Isn't it just a stunner? I love it, I want to save some of the seeds to see if I can grow my own next year, for borders. I think it would make an interesting contrast with my creeping jenny up front, or even in a container with dwarf Alaska nasturtiums.

When you do a bunch of thinking and it all leads nowhere. I don't even feel like looking for pictures.

 From 500 Writing Prompts: Create a new character for the Lord of the Rings series. Write up a brief description of them and how they would change a major event in the story.

Eh....for the movies or for the books? There is a dearth of female presence in the books. Yes, there's Galadriel and Eowyn, but that's two. Just two who get any kind of a proper speaking part. And they take no real part in the actual journey, except Eowyn at the end and she had to sneak in. Now I can understand why that is, because of the time Tolkien was writing in and how the journey and the battles and such were an allegory for World War I, which he'd fought in as a young man and was much changed by. Women were the pretty things you thought about in the misery you found yourself in, the thing you fought to get home to.

Still, as a female reader in the late 20th century as I was when I first read the books, one does get sick of constantly hearing men's stories. Galadriel was a Elven queen and Eowyn was a noble woman, a shieldmaiden of Rohan. A story about a tough regular woman would have been nice. Oh, there was Goldberry in there too, Tom Bombadil's wife, all fluttery and beautiful, and there were glimpses of Arwen but she didn't really do much in the book but she's also a Elven princess.

When you've had years and years and years and YEARS of men's stories, men's bonding, men's talking, you get sick of them and would like to see a character you can relate too. A regular woman who does a few extraordinary things herself. Even if she just relays some wisdom that makes a difference. Or saves an important (plot related) person from straight up dying. Or leads them part of the way because they're lost, because yeah, Aragorn was a ranger, but your telling me he knew every inch of that land and never got lost ever? 

So...I guess that's my character. An old woman, maybe she lives out in the middle of nowhere because most of the story takes place in the middle of nowhere. Should she be an old wise woman? How about she's the widow of a huntsman. She's the widow of a huntsman, so she would know the terrain and such, and she comes upon them one day, while they're walking the oldest hunting trails and she tells them that the way they're going is...maybe the bridge is washed out...or there's goblins around, or an orc raiding party, she had to kill some of them, she has a bow and arrow and an axe, like a regular splitting axe, just a small one. And a knife. In her boot.

But how would this change a major event in the story? I don't really want to change any of the major events of the story, you change major events it impacts other major events and I just don't like where this is going.

I decided I don't really care to change a major event. But that would mean her part could be cut too easily. I'm tired of this now.