On... Doing Things
and personal identity therein derived
and personal identity therein derived
Well, it appears it's time for my yearly blog post. It seems this is just what I've fallen into, updating my blog once a year. In case you were worried, I still don't intend to let this blog die, but I have come to accept the annual blog post as being more or less my established posting schedule. It does make me feel a bit mocked by that line in Rhett and Link's "Internet Overdose" song: "I also had a blog about remote controlled cars: roboblog.blogspot.com. I updated it multiple times... a year" since that's more frequently than the rate at which I am now updating my own blog, but, well, there you go. (Side note: they did indeed make this blog, though I have read it and in actuality it has basically nothing to do with remote controlled cars. I even left a comment on one of the posts, though looking back I see it was even more embarrassingly rambly than most of my blogging endeavors.)
I do apologize that my blog background appears to no longer be working. I'll have to see about getting a new one put up, if I even still remember how to do so. (If you can see my blog background, please let me know in the comments, but I've tried on a few different computers and it just isn't coming up for me anymore.) I should also change my "monthly" sidebar things which at this point might actually be less than annual, as I don't think I updated them last year. Anyways, I don't know if I have any blog readership at this point beyond my dad, but if there is anyone out there interested in hearing more regularly than once a year from the Lande Beyond the Violet Mist, I did recently (in November) make a tumblr. If you would like to see me ramble mostly about fandom things and share fanart and other cool stuff, you can find me at alfhildr-the-word-weaver.tumblr.com (it has a weird layout issue where you have to scroll a bit to make the posts show up, just to warn you. I need to work on both blogs' layouts and backgrounds). I might even cross-promote this post over there where I know I have followers, at least 6 of whom are real people and 5 of whom I don't know personally. Of course, if I do promote this blog to the wider world, then I might have to start finding things to ramble about more frequently than once a year. I might even have to start planning my posts and writing coherently rather than just spewing my thoughts. Nah, that would defeat the purpose of this blog, wouldn't it? Haha. I would like to develop the Lande's lore a bit more at some point, though.
In any case, there were a few different things I started to ramble about in this post--dreams and storytelling and such--but I wanted to write about what I'm thinking about most, which is, to put it broadly, doing things. That is to say, figuring out how to spend my time.
You see, last spring, a dramatic change took place in my life: I graduated college. Some days it still doesn't always sink in--most days really--and it feels like I'm still going back to classes in the fall, despite the fact that it is now winter and, if this were summer, it would be an exceptionally long and increasingly frigid one. But I do notice that I have a lot more free time, at least theoretically. In a way, how I spend my time hasn't changed as drastically as perhaps it should have. I was always a procrastinator, so there's always been a significant amount of internet perusing in my life. Well, you know, I say always, but really I'm only on my 6th year or so of unrestricted internet perusing. Before I had access to my own laptop, I really was only on the internet as necessary, and further back, for a lot of my childhood it seems, we had dial-up which was so slow one dared not dream of playing a youtube video. But it's not that I didn't procrastinate before I gained access to the internet 6 years ago--it's just that then, I procrastinated by reading anything and everything other than what I was supposed to read for homework. (I do still read, of course, but now it is one of those many things vying for my free time.)
But now, without college, without classes or homework or assigned reading, I'm not actually procrastinating. Well, not on schoolwork, anyways. On some level, I suppose, no matter what you’re doing, you’re always procrastinating, because there is always something else useful you could be doing. But it does seem that some things are less... procrastinative than others. I guess what I'm trying to figure out now that I'm suddenly the one in charge of my time is how to actually use it well. That's a surprisingly complicated thing to figure out, though, I'm finding. Should I be writing more? Should I be drawing? What writing should I focus on--my fanfiction, my novel ideas, my blogs? Should I start a youtube channel? Those are barely the tip of the swirling torrent of things spinning around my head and my to-do list, and the questions are only in their broadest forms.
I do apologize that my blog background appears to no longer be working. I'll have to see about getting a new one put up, if I even still remember how to do so. (If you can see my blog background, please let me know in the comments, but I've tried on a few different computers and it just isn't coming up for me anymore.) I should also change my "monthly" sidebar things which at this point might actually be less than annual, as I don't think I updated them last year. Anyways, I don't know if I have any blog readership at this point beyond my dad, but if there is anyone out there interested in hearing more regularly than once a year from the Lande Beyond the Violet Mist, I did recently (in November) make a tumblr. If you would like to see me ramble mostly about fandom things and share fanart and other cool stuff, you can find me at alfhildr-the-word-weaver.tumblr.com (it has a weird layout issue where you have to scroll a bit to make the posts show up, just to warn you. I need to work on both blogs' layouts and backgrounds). I might even cross-promote this post over there where I know I have followers, at least 6 of whom are real people and 5 of whom I don't know personally. Of course, if I do promote this blog to the wider world, then I might have to start finding things to ramble about more frequently than once a year. I might even have to start planning my posts and writing coherently rather than just spewing my thoughts. Nah, that would defeat the purpose of this blog, wouldn't it? Haha. I would like to develop the Lande's lore a bit more at some point, though.
In any case, there were a few different things I started to ramble about in this post--dreams and storytelling and such--but I wanted to write about what I'm thinking about most, which is, to put it broadly, doing things. That is to say, figuring out how to spend my time.
You see, last spring, a dramatic change took place in my life: I graduated college. Some days it still doesn't always sink in--most days really--and it feels like I'm still going back to classes in the fall, despite the fact that it is now winter and, if this were summer, it would be an exceptionally long and increasingly frigid one. But I do notice that I have a lot more free time, at least theoretically. In a way, how I spend my time hasn't changed as drastically as perhaps it should have. I was always a procrastinator, so there's always been a significant amount of internet perusing in my life. Well, you know, I say always, but really I'm only on my 6th year or so of unrestricted internet perusing. Before I had access to my own laptop, I really was only on the internet as necessary, and further back, for a lot of my childhood it seems, we had dial-up which was so slow one dared not dream of playing a youtube video. But it's not that I didn't procrastinate before I gained access to the internet 6 years ago--it's just that then, I procrastinated by reading anything and everything other than what I was supposed to read for homework. (I do still read, of course, but now it is one of those many things vying for my free time.)
But now, without college, without classes or homework or assigned reading, I'm not actually procrastinating. Well, not on schoolwork, anyways. On some level, I suppose, no matter what you’re doing, you’re always procrastinating, because there is always something else useful you could be doing. But it does seem that some things are less... procrastinative than others. I guess what I'm trying to figure out now that I'm suddenly the one in charge of my time is how to actually use it well. That's a surprisingly complicated thing to figure out, though, I'm finding. Should I be writing more? Should I be drawing? What writing should I focus on--my fanfiction, my novel ideas, my blogs? Should I start a youtube channel? Those are barely the tip of the swirling torrent of things spinning around my head and my to-do list, and the questions are only in their broadest forms.
Now that I'm out of college, these questions of how to spend my free time--which were always there but were largely obscured by procrastination and homework, which I rarely got past--have come to take on the weight of identity, cast into sharp relief by the realization that my life now basically consists of work and free time. Where once my free time activities were extra little add-ons, they are now defining factors in who I am. When I'm asking myself whether I should work on my writing or on a drawing, I find that I'm asking myself underneath that, am I a writer or an artist? Of course, I can be a little of both, to an extent. But which do I prioritize? What am I, first and foremost?
Since second grade I've labeled myself a writer, and it's been one of the defining factors of who I am. It mostly started in second grade when I won a creative writing contest--actually I think it was second place, but it still felt impressive--and people told me my writing was very good. People continued to tell me that my writing was quite good as I grew up, and so I decided I was going to be a writer, and that never really changed. Writing is something I've always loved. But as I've gotten older, I've questioned writing's centrality to my identity. Am I really, truly a writer? Clearly I still am, to some extent, since I still care enough to write what typically turns out to be a ten page but thesis-less and outline-less essay for this blog annually, and I also write a good many things in google docs that have yet to see the light of day. But to what extent am I a writer? Is it the foremost aspect of who I am? Writing is such a work of passion, and it seems one must devote oneself to it so fully to truly be a writer, and I question whether or not that's me.
I am certainly still a lover of stories, and obsession with stories consumes much of my time (as discussed in my previous blog post, which I could've repeated in more or less the same way this year but with Gotham, though the time in which I've jumped into the Gotham fandom has admittedly added some nuances I could mention as well). I enjoy being active in fandom and engaging with the stories I enjoy, unpacking them and inspecting their finest details, mulling over the relationships and intricacies of their characters and admiring the artistic contributions of others who also love the stories I do, and chasing down the unexplored corners and paths of the story. I want to use my abilities to contribute to that world and not just consume and redistribute. But I do also feel an obligation to my original characters and worlds, to the stories that only I can create, but they also carry a heavier weight than participating in fandom does because they are more defining of me, and require more of me.
It's an odd thing to grapple with. Even a very simple question--should I work on my fanfiction or on my original writing--is full of that complexity of identity, of attributed importance and weight. On the surface it might seem easy to say that original writing is more important, because it is mine alone and because it can potentially be pursued to the point of profitable publication, but I believe fanfiction matters as well. After all, human storytelling has always been built on other human storytelling, and it's natural to draw our own stories from the gaps in other people's. Once Upon a Time, my first real obsession, is a TV show that was more or less fanfiction of classic folk tales (and, in later seasons, straight up Disney fanfiction). Dr. Jackson Crawford refers to one of the later sagas of Ragnar Lothbrok as "the medieval fanfiction sequel". Stories are built on other people's stories, going back to the bards who learned the ancient tales and put their own spin on them as they passed them down, and likely farther back still. I could ramble about the nature of storytelling for days, but what I'm trying to say is, storytelling within the context of someone else's story is still storytelling. It is not of lesser importance, it bears emotional weight, and it is a creative contribution to the world that will be appreciated by readers. I've started a great many fanfictions and it bothers me that I've never seen one through to completion and published it. And, of course, money is far from the be-all end-all goal, but while fanfiction is sometimes seen as fruitless because it can never be sold (a ridiculous notion, but nonetheless) it has occurred to me that in two of my fandoms now, a good enough fanfiction could potentially be pursued to publication in a fully sanctioned, canonical way. After all, there are many writers of Doctor Who novels, and what are those but canonized, paid fanfiction? A Gotham fanfiction I think would be harder to sell, for multiple reasons, including that Gotham canon exists in a splinter universe from main Batman canon and that most Batman written media is comics (though I believe there are some novels--also I think there are some cases where a writer writes a comic and a separate illustrator draws it), but at any rate, it's a broad-reaching multi-writer franchise and the sort of thing one could potentially get into.
In any case, while writing has been a central facet of my life for the majority of my living memory, there are other artistic pursuits I want to, well, pursue. I first started drawing to support my writing, actually, because when I was younger I decided I wanted to illustrate my own future novels and so I would need to learn how to draw. I didn't take to it as naturally as I did to writing, but it's something I practiced and took many art classes to develop, (not that I haven't also developed my writing through classes and practice. I can hear my teachers now reminding me that this is much too long of a sentence with too much midsentence digression. But back to art.) and I would now say I've become decent at drawing. I found myself picking it back up after a bit of a lull actually in part due to my current job as a video editor. Sometimes the videos will take a while to render, but not long enough to do much else, and so I find myself drawing in my notebook, which got me thinking about drawing more properly again and led to more fleshed out drawings in my sketchbook (left with abundant space from the one art class I took while at college. I often wish I'd taken more art classes, but there are a lot of classes I wish I'd taken and none I wish I hadn't taken, and sadly, my time turner still isn't working). I have an illustration from my Doctor Who fanfic and a sketch from someone else's Gotham fanfic I greatly enjoyed, as well as plenty more ideas of scenes to draw. (Perhaps because my original artistic intention was to illustrate stories, or perhaps because stories are what I focus on, 99% of all my drawing ideas are scenes from stories, both mine and others'. I rarely draw art that is not connected to a story.) But none of these are finished, either. I have so many artistic endeavors started and none of them finished, partly because I'm a procrastinator, but like I've been saying in this post, a fair part of it is because I don't know what to focus on. I don't know what to choose or what matters most to me. Of course, I also feel like I can and should do it all. I could work on each of these things a little bit at a time, and eventually, eventually, something will get done. But in a way, I feel like I am doing that, but things never get done. But, well, if I'm really honest, those things aren't where the greater part of my time is going, I guess--see the next paragraph on tumblr. Consistency of focus is also an issue; I probably start too many different fanfics and stories, though that has to do with being pulled from fandom to fandom and idea to idea. My issue with drawing, on the other hand, isn't really about jumping to new ideas; I really very rarely work on my drawings, and very slowly at that, because especially with the good ones, I tend to question every line I make a bit too much for fear of messing up what's shaping up to be a nice drawing.
I suppose a place where I have been productive is tumblr. In a sense, that seems like a place where one goes specifically to be unproductive. In fact, that's part of why I promised myself I wouldn't make a tumblr until I was out of school, and I didn't. I still procrastinated plenty with tumblr when I was in high school and college, but it's different having an account now. It ties you to it more, and it makes it an easier thing to scroll through endlessly. But at the same time, I do feel like I'm being productive there now that I have an account. In addition to reblogging plenty of things (sharing others' posts) and commentating on each of those, I've already made eight original posts of my own since November--compared to this blog, where reading eight of my posts would take you back to Spring of 2014, when I was still in high school. Granted, these blogspot posts are mostly much longer and more involved posts, but still, my tumblr ones are probably more coherent and certainly more concise (though I have no intention of giving up on the long-winded, detailed, full mulling through of a subject that I can achieve on blogspot in an epically lengthy way that wouldn't really fly so well on tumblr. Not that it really flies anywhere very well from here, but it feels less out of place). But I like the tumblr community, and I like that it's a place where I can share things pertaining to certain stories with people who love them as much as I do. For example, take my post about my Gotham trunk-or-treat that I did for Halloween. At the actual trunk-or-treat, maybe five people noticed and commented that I was doing a Batman/Penguin theme, and that's a high estimate. Of those, none of them got the Gotham T.V. show-specific references. But on tumblr, I am in amongst the Gotham fandom, and twenty-nine people have liked or reblogged my post. That's not a huge number, but I still appreciate it. It feels good to have it be noticed by people who are actually interested in this thing with me. Even more thrilling, I have a season 5 theory post with fifty-seven notes. I noticed a significant detail in the trailer, made a prediction, and 57 people (well, less individual people because some people both liked and reblogged, but still) noticed me noticing it and were impressed. That feels good. I didn't put a ton of work into that post, actually, but I did put a ton of work into my trunk-or-treat and it's nice to have a forum for that. I also want to do more posts of the trunk-or treat breaking down my crafting process on a few of the pieces I made for my trunk. That's from October, I know, but I take time to process things, and I've been working on other things, too (as this post is hopefully illustrating)--see, now that I have this free time, there's so much I want to do, and like I've said, it's incredibly difficult picking what to focus on. Everything takes time. I have to pick how to spend it. Plus I'm a bit delayed on things like this by my laptop's current glitch--my screen has gone all twitchy and flickery and it's deeply annoying. It's still functional, more or less, but I'm writing this on my mom's desktop because looking at my laptop for too long right now makes my eyes tired. It's certainly in no state for me to go through the pictures I've taken and pick which ones are clearest and best, so photo posts are on hold for the time being since my pictures are all saved to my laptop and it'd be a hassle to get them all over to Mom's desktop just to go through them.
Those are perhaps my main contemplations, my writing and my drawing and my blogging, but there are still so many more things. I have a lot of footage from my study abroad in England last year I filmed of our train rides across the English countryside and I've been patching it together into a slow TV film, which I thought I might put up on my youtube channel, which has--o gosh I just checked the number and I'm up to 17 now??--subscribers and so far I've only put together music playlists (though see last year's post for the story of one of the reasons I might have so many subscribers for a videoless channel--I got tweeted by a band. A small band, but still. A band.). Actually, I've got another music playlist in progress right now for my favorite Gotham ship, though it's private while I fine tune it and I'm planning on advertising that on my tumblr as well--I mean, it's more a tumblr post I'm planning, but I want to be able to link to the playlist of my fanmix and that will be on youtube. I've also been thinking about getting into fanvideos. The trouble with any sort of video editing, though, is that it involves so much storage space and the hard drive on my laptop is perpetually a breath from full, so I have to keep foisting things onto external hard drives just about every time I download photos from my phone. Video editing is also what I do at work, but all the same I don't mind doing it at home also, since the content of what you're editing makes a fair amount of difference.
Also pertaining to youtube, I've had several vague notions of starting some form of show or making other intentionally filmed projects, from a talk show with my cats as cohosts to choreographed and costumed dance videos. I even have a Doctor Who fanfilm script I started writing in early 2016 with myself as the Doctor (back before there was a female Doctor, though there were whispers that there might someday be). Admittedly I do feel slightly less motivation to finish this now that there is a canonical female Doctor because a lot of the script was me interpreting what it would be like for the Doctor to regenerate female--actually, I made it into a running gag where the Doctor doesn't notice she's a girl at first and she's commenting on all these other differences, like she's upset that she somehow regenerated with an American accent--partly because my British accent is terrible so I wasn't even going to try. Also I read a theory where the accent of the last companion/person the Doctor sees before regenerating influences the Doctor's next accent, i.e., Amy Pond made 12 Scottish, and I was going to play off of that, with my Doctor blaming my companion, played by my friend, for turning her American-sounding. Then the companion, slightly befuddled, was going to keep trying to point out to the Doctor that she was a woman now, but the companion keeps getting interrupted before she can tell the Doctor. Okay, I actually still really like the idea and kind of want to get around to making it, but I do slightly dislike now that it will inevitably be compared to the actual 13th Doctor's regeneration and people will assume it's a response to it somehow even though I haven't actually seen much of any of 13 yet and I started writing the script long before she was cast. Time does affect long-running projects.
Additionally, as far as things that are less about producing concrete products, I recently picked back up with Khan Academy. I started Khan Academy back in high school in an attempt to teach myself AP calculus. Well, you see, in high school, sophomore year, I moved from this big (about 900-1,000 students) high school with a bunch of advanced classes and multiple degree paths to a much smaller (less than 400 students) high school with no AP classes but a few dual-enrollment things with a local community college. Anyways, I've been in advanced math classes since elementary school basically--not that I ever particularly liked math, but I was told I was good at it--and so I finished the highest level high school math class my Iowa school had in eleventh grade. This was also the case with this one other guy at the school, and the math teacher mentioned to us that it was possible to take the AP calculus exam without having had a class since the school didn't offer AP calc. If we passed the exam, it would be as if we had passed the class. So, that guy and I sat out to teach ourselves AP calculus. I heard about Khan Academy and took Mr. Khan as my AP calculus teacher. (In hindsight, the other guy and I probably should've teamed up in teaching ourselves AP calculus, two being better than one and whatall, but for whatever reason, we didn't and went our separate ways to learn advanced math by ourselves.) In the end, I wasn't self-motivated enough and didn't focus well enough to finish the Khan Academy AP calculus course, and neither I nor the other guy ended up feeling confident enough to even bother paying the test fee and taking the AP calc test on our own. But, I did learn that Khan Academy was quite useful. (I don't mean this to turn into an advertisement for Khan Academy but in my experience it is a very helpful site, and I do think it's noble what they do, the whole free educational resource thing. Speaking of free educational resource, the Dr. Jackson Crawford I quoted above is actually a professor of Scandinavian history with a youtube channel that's highly informative if you're interested in that.) So anyways, I used Khan Academy to help me out again when I was getting behind in college physics.
Now that I've graduated, I'm finding myself missing those sorts of classes. I'm very much a Ravenclaw. I never want to stop learning. Of course, I also believe that one can learn all sorts of things in all sorts of places beyond school. Writing this blog post is a learning experience. Tumblr is a place of learning. Learning happens anywhere and everywhere. But I do want to keep up my mathematical and scientific skills, even if they don't come up for me in my current job, and even if they never come up for me professionally again, simply because I like to have that knowledge for its own sake. So, I've gone back and started a few more Khan Academy classes, and I'd like to take time for that. I also mean to read through my many only partially read college textbooks. Also, I recently saw a thing on tumblr that very effectively used an Epictetus quote on an edit of Oswald and his son Martin from Gotham (yes, he's his son, we the fandom have declared it). So, I looked up the source text of Epictetus, a philosopher I'd never previously heard of, and started reading that. Basically, I don't want to stop engaging with the sort of things I engaged with in college just because I'm not currently in college. But the trouble is, these things, too, take time, and all of this, everything, and even more is vying for this newborn free time of mine.
I also recently got cast in a musical with a local theatre company, my first post-college production. It's thrilling, really. I auditioned for play after play in college, and I didn't get cast in anything until senior year, when I got cast in one thing in fall and another in spring. Then I went to my first audition out of college, for a musical no less. I've long considered myself, mostly based on the opinions of others but also based on my general lack of musical knowledge, not to be a singer, but I didn't want to miss out on auditions by not going out for musicals so I did and somehow I got in. My last three auditions I've been three for three getting into things! If I'm not careful I'm going to get used to getting cast in things. (Well, technically, I also had an unsuccessful audition last spring, but the other one was successful so it's almost like a straight run.) Theatre is different in the way it calls on my time because it has set dates and schedules, and it takes a lot less figuring out of when and what I'm going to do. It is a fixed demand on my free time. Of course, my personal practicing time is a bit more fluid, but it has a deadline attached and so necessarily gets done. All the same, I appreciate not having a deadline on other things, but, well, you see the conundrum it creates in my priorities. A deadline gives a project an inherent priority ranking. And I do work to deadlines; it's why my yearly blog post comes out on New Year's eve and not in midsummer. But still, it's also good to work on things that don't have deadlines. And I am. Just slowly. The trick is making sure that I am slowly making progress rather than slowly jumping from thing to thing and getting next to nothing done. In any case, frankly, slowly is how I do most everything. That is, except when I'm binging a book or a show, like how I watched seasons 1-3 of Gotham in eight days this summer or how I read Unwind in a single evening last year when I was supposed to be writing a paper. I also did not write the paper slowly, as that happened between probably the hours of 1 and 4 in the morning, knowing myself. I guess the two reasons I do a thing quickly are deadlines and obsession, which is probably not something unique to me. There are pros and cons to both work style, really, the pell-mell race to a deadline and the slow, deadlineless gradual build. Actually, these blog posts are a fair compromise of that, since I do budget a few days for them to make sure I can get all my thoughts out.
In any case, forgive me if this essentially turns into a narrative version of my to-do list as I continue. Those were most of the most major points. I also want to do physical things, like dancing and yoga and going on walks, a bit more. Not in an exercise sort of way--I've never really believed in exercise; I tend to believe you should find fun things to do (because there are so, so many in this world) and do them. I did dance quite a bit today, which felt quite nice (mostly to "That's Not How the Story Goes" from the Netflix version of A Series of Unfortunate Events, if you were wondering. If Gotham season 5 weren't coming this Thursday (AAAAaaaaaaA!!!), A Series of Unfortunate Events would almost certainly be my new primary obsession; as it is, the two will have to vie for the title.)
I've also been interested in LARP for quite a while but not been quite ready to start it. There is an Amtgard LARP about an hour from where I live, which is the closest LARP to me I've seen online. But I feel like that would be a big commitment, and it would also be quite a bit of extra driving if I were to go to something like that weekly. But my gosh does LARP look fun. For a while, I think I'll just keep watching the LARP youtubers, but one of these days I'll get around to actually doing it.
I also want to keep in better contact with my friends. It's tough, having just graduated college. I have the advantage of living only half an hour away from my college, and one of my friends has invited me back for a couple of game nights in her dorm, and that's been great. My older friends and friends from my year are flung to the four winds, though. I really just need to message them on facebook or text them more, and remember to do things with those who are within a reasonable distance, but it's just a lot to keep track of, keep up with, and do. It was actually my 2018 New Years' resolution, to stay in touch with friends more. To a certain extent I've done it, but it's hard, particularly being the introvert I am. It takes effort and I need to keep working on it. (Speaking of resolutions, what's my resolution this year, you ask? Well... everything in this blog post, in a sense. Maybe just "figuring out how to better spend my free time" to put it briefly, but this blog post is an excellent way of putting it the opposite of briefly.)
What else? I need to take time for reading. I mean, I do already, but that's just one of these things circling the area here. I ought to read my Bible more. At one point I set a goal for myself to have finished reading the Bible by the time I graduated college, but that didn't happen. The Bible is a thing it's best to go through slowly and carefully, though. I should spend more time on that as well. I'm up to Joshua chapter 18 currently. But it does feel good that I've gotten through all of Numbers and some of those slightly denser early books. It's good to read it to listen to God, because I know I pray more than I read, so one might say I talk more than I listen. Also, I do want to know exactly what is and what isn't in the Bible; people are always saying so many things about it and I need to know for myself what's true. It's my responsibility as a Christian as well as being useful for hearing from God. I really ought to take better notes, but I at least have some. Beyond that aspect of my faith journey, I also want to read pleasure books, naturally. For example, I'm just starting the Doctor Who novel I got for Christmas, and it's very fun so far. And, of course, there are many, many other books I have that I haven't read yet and I ought to get to. Taking in stories is something that's good for me as a writer as well as something I love, and one of the essential aspects of me as a person.
There are so many smaller things I want to do as well. I want to paint my nails more often. I've done some really fun nail art in the past; actually I have my October Oswald nails on my tumblr, a post which I'm rather sad hasn't gotten more attention--then again, it was my very first tumblr post, so maybe I should reblog it now that I have a few followers. And I should share it on the discord. I also want to put more of my other nail art out there, like that pop art nail polish I did last summer or those flowers I did last spring. But just in general, I must say, I have been doing better at basic physical maintenance since graduating. It's odd the things one puts off for the sake of homework when one is a rampant procrastinator as well as a slow reader. I used to go a week or two between brushing my hair in school because I was always just so busy with my homework, and that was priority number one, but I've been keeping up with my hair a lot better now that I'm working. I even do fun styles sometimes in the morning before work. And, now that we're getting to the really basic things, I need to work on keeping my room and the house cleaner. That's an ever-developing process.
For these last few paragraphs, I've literally had my personal to-do list google doc open in another tab, and that was the end of it, the house cleaning stuff. So, I suppose I must've covered most of it. And, copying and pasting this into a google doc to check the length, I now see it's just over eight pages single spaced, so it's about a standard length for this blog. I suppose my main takeaway is that I want to do a great many different things, so I just need to make sure I am actually doing those things, working on things, and making progress, and being productive. I certainly don't feel I need to pick a single thing to focus on and revolve around, and I think it's good to have variety in one's pursuits. But I do need to pursue things consistently enough that things get done, and while that is still fairly vague, it's good enough for a New Year's resolution. I need to just keep doing things. I imagine my artistic identity will develop a bit more clearly somewhere along the way, which might even affect my work life and goals (which is an entirely additional area I could've rambled about... perhaps next year's post. Who knows where I'll be then?) In any case, I'm sure I could still think of more things I'd like to do and discuss my personal and creative identity in greater depth, but for now, perhaps, I will simply wish you all a new year full of wonders, adventures, and creative, artistic, and personal productivity.
Here in this Lande that lies shrouded beyond the violet mist, now floating all the more obscurely in this deeply mist-filled post-school void, we seek to weave words into tales, pencil lead into imagery, and thoughts into projects to be shared with the world. But each task takes its own time, and we find must now seek some form of balance and order amidst our thick violet mists of creative chaos.
Since second grade I've labeled myself a writer, and it's been one of the defining factors of who I am. It mostly started in second grade when I won a creative writing contest--actually I think it was second place, but it still felt impressive--and people told me my writing was very good. People continued to tell me that my writing was quite good as I grew up, and so I decided I was going to be a writer, and that never really changed. Writing is something I've always loved. But as I've gotten older, I've questioned writing's centrality to my identity. Am I really, truly a writer? Clearly I still am, to some extent, since I still care enough to write what typically turns out to be a ten page but thesis-less and outline-less essay for this blog annually, and I also write a good many things in google docs that have yet to see the light of day. But to what extent am I a writer? Is it the foremost aspect of who I am? Writing is such a work of passion, and it seems one must devote oneself to it so fully to truly be a writer, and I question whether or not that's me.
I am certainly still a lover of stories, and obsession with stories consumes much of my time (as discussed in my previous blog post, which I could've repeated in more or less the same way this year but with Gotham, though the time in which I've jumped into the Gotham fandom has admittedly added some nuances I could mention as well). I enjoy being active in fandom and engaging with the stories I enjoy, unpacking them and inspecting their finest details, mulling over the relationships and intricacies of their characters and admiring the artistic contributions of others who also love the stories I do, and chasing down the unexplored corners and paths of the story. I want to use my abilities to contribute to that world and not just consume and redistribute. But I do also feel an obligation to my original characters and worlds, to the stories that only I can create, but they also carry a heavier weight than participating in fandom does because they are more defining of me, and require more of me.
It's an odd thing to grapple with. Even a very simple question--should I work on my fanfiction or on my original writing--is full of that complexity of identity, of attributed importance and weight. On the surface it might seem easy to say that original writing is more important, because it is mine alone and because it can potentially be pursued to the point of profitable publication, but I believe fanfiction matters as well. After all, human storytelling has always been built on other human storytelling, and it's natural to draw our own stories from the gaps in other people's. Once Upon a Time, my first real obsession, is a TV show that was more or less fanfiction of classic folk tales (and, in later seasons, straight up Disney fanfiction). Dr. Jackson Crawford refers to one of the later sagas of Ragnar Lothbrok as "the medieval fanfiction sequel". Stories are built on other people's stories, going back to the bards who learned the ancient tales and put their own spin on them as they passed them down, and likely farther back still. I could ramble about the nature of storytelling for days, but what I'm trying to say is, storytelling within the context of someone else's story is still storytelling. It is not of lesser importance, it bears emotional weight, and it is a creative contribution to the world that will be appreciated by readers. I've started a great many fanfictions and it bothers me that I've never seen one through to completion and published it. And, of course, money is far from the be-all end-all goal, but while fanfiction is sometimes seen as fruitless because it can never be sold (a ridiculous notion, but nonetheless) it has occurred to me that in two of my fandoms now, a good enough fanfiction could potentially be pursued to publication in a fully sanctioned, canonical way. After all, there are many writers of Doctor Who novels, and what are those but canonized, paid fanfiction? A Gotham fanfiction I think would be harder to sell, for multiple reasons, including that Gotham canon exists in a splinter universe from main Batman canon and that most Batman written media is comics (though I believe there are some novels--also I think there are some cases where a writer writes a comic and a separate illustrator draws it), but at any rate, it's a broad-reaching multi-writer franchise and the sort of thing one could potentially get into.
In any case, while writing has been a central facet of my life for the majority of my living memory, there are other artistic pursuits I want to, well, pursue. I first started drawing to support my writing, actually, because when I was younger I decided I wanted to illustrate my own future novels and so I would need to learn how to draw. I didn't take to it as naturally as I did to writing, but it's something I practiced and took many art classes to develop, (not that I haven't also developed my writing through classes and practice. I can hear my teachers now reminding me that this is much too long of a sentence with too much midsentence digression. But back to art.) and I would now say I've become decent at drawing. I found myself picking it back up after a bit of a lull actually in part due to my current job as a video editor. Sometimes the videos will take a while to render, but not long enough to do much else, and so I find myself drawing in my notebook, which got me thinking about drawing more properly again and led to more fleshed out drawings in my sketchbook (left with abundant space from the one art class I took while at college. I often wish I'd taken more art classes, but there are a lot of classes I wish I'd taken and none I wish I hadn't taken, and sadly, my time turner still isn't working). I have an illustration from my Doctor Who fanfic and a sketch from someone else's Gotham fanfic I greatly enjoyed, as well as plenty more ideas of scenes to draw. (Perhaps because my original artistic intention was to illustrate stories, or perhaps because stories are what I focus on, 99% of all my drawing ideas are scenes from stories, both mine and others'. I rarely draw art that is not connected to a story.) But none of these are finished, either. I have so many artistic endeavors started and none of them finished, partly because I'm a procrastinator, but like I've been saying in this post, a fair part of it is because I don't know what to focus on. I don't know what to choose or what matters most to me. Of course, I also feel like I can and should do it all. I could work on each of these things a little bit at a time, and eventually, eventually, something will get done. But in a way, I feel like I am doing that, but things never get done. But, well, if I'm really honest, those things aren't where the greater part of my time is going, I guess--see the next paragraph on tumblr. Consistency of focus is also an issue; I probably start too many different fanfics and stories, though that has to do with being pulled from fandom to fandom and idea to idea. My issue with drawing, on the other hand, isn't really about jumping to new ideas; I really very rarely work on my drawings, and very slowly at that, because especially with the good ones, I tend to question every line I make a bit too much for fear of messing up what's shaping up to be a nice drawing.
I suppose a place where I have been productive is tumblr. In a sense, that seems like a place where one goes specifically to be unproductive. In fact, that's part of why I promised myself I wouldn't make a tumblr until I was out of school, and I didn't. I still procrastinated plenty with tumblr when I was in high school and college, but it's different having an account now. It ties you to it more, and it makes it an easier thing to scroll through endlessly. But at the same time, I do feel like I'm being productive there now that I have an account. In addition to reblogging plenty of things (sharing others' posts) and commentating on each of those, I've already made eight original posts of my own since November--compared to this blog, where reading eight of my posts would take you back to Spring of 2014, when I was still in high school. Granted, these blogspot posts are mostly much longer and more involved posts, but still, my tumblr ones are probably more coherent and certainly more concise (though I have no intention of giving up on the long-winded, detailed, full mulling through of a subject that I can achieve on blogspot in an epically lengthy way that wouldn't really fly so well on tumblr. Not that it really flies anywhere very well from here, but it feels less out of place). But I like the tumblr community, and I like that it's a place where I can share things pertaining to certain stories with people who love them as much as I do. For example, take my post about my Gotham trunk-or-treat that I did for Halloween. At the actual trunk-or-treat, maybe five people noticed and commented that I was doing a Batman/Penguin theme, and that's a high estimate. Of those, none of them got the Gotham T.V. show-specific references. But on tumblr, I am in amongst the Gotham fandom, and twenty-nine people have liked or reblogged my post. That's not a huge number, but I still appreciate it. It feels good to have it be noticed by people who are actually interested in this thing with me. Even more thrilling, I have a season 5 theory post with fifty-seven notes. I noticed a significant detail in the trailer, made a prediction, and 57 people (well, less individual people because some people both liked and reblogged, but still) noticed me noticing it and were impressed. That feels good. I didn't put a ton of work into that post, actually, but I did put a ton of work into my trunk-or-treat and it's nice to have a forum for that. I also want to do more posts of the trunk-or treat breaking down my crafting process on a few of the pieces I made for my trunk. That's from October, I know, but I take time to process things, and I've been working on other things, too (as this post is hopefully illustrating)--see, now that I have this free time, there's so much I want to do, and like I've said, it's incredibly difficult picking what to focus on. Everything takes time. I have to pick how to spend it. Plus I'm a bit delayed on things like this by my laptop's current glitch--my screen has gone all twitchy and flickery and it's deeply annoying. It's still functional, more or less, but I'm writing this on my mom's desktop because looking at my laptop for too long right now makes my eyes tired. It's certainly in no state for me to go through the pictures I've taken and pick which ones are clearest and best, so photo posts are on hold for the time being since my pictures are all saved to my laptop and it'd be a hassle to get them all over to Mom's desktop just to go through them.
Those are perhaps my main contemplations, my writing and my drawing and my blogging, but there are still so many more things. I have a lot of footage from my study abroad in England last year I filmed of our train rides across the English countryside and I've been patching it together into a slow TV film, which I thought I might put up on my youtube channel, which has--o gosh I just checked the number and I'm up to 17 now??--subscribers and so far I've only put together music playlists (though see last year's post for the story of one of the reasons I might have so many subscribers for a videoless channel--I got tweeted by a band. A small band, but still. A band.). Actually, I've got another music playlist in progress right now for my favorite Gotham ship, though it's private while I fine tune it and I'm planning on advertising that on my tumblr as well--I mean, it's more a tumblr post I'm planning, but I want to be able to link to the playlist of my fanmix and that will be on youtube. I've also been thinking about getting into fanvideos. The trouble with any sort of video editing, though, is that it involves so much storage space and the hard drive on my laptop is perpetually a breath from full, so I have to keep foisting things onto external hard drives just about every time I download photos from my phone. Video editing is also what I do at work, but all the same I don't mind doing it at home also, since the content of what you're editing makes a fair amount of difference.
Also pertaining to youtube, I've had several vague notions of starting some form of show or making other intentionally filmed projects, from a talk show with my cats as cohosts to choreographed and costumed dance videos. I even have a Doctor Who fanfilm script I started writing in early 2016 with myself as the Doctor (back before there was a female Doctor, though there were whispers that there might someday be). Admittedly I do feel slightly less motivation to finish this now that there is a canonical female Doctor because a lot of the script was me interpreting what it would be like for the Doctor to regenerate female--actually, I made it into a running gag where the Doctor doesn't notice she's a girl at first and she's commenting on all these other differences, like she's upset that she somehow regenerated with an American accent--partly because my British accent is terrible so I wasn't even going to try. Also I read a theory where the accent of the last companion/person the Doctor sees before regenerating influences the Doctor's next accent, i.e., Amy Pond made 12 Scottish, and I was going to play off of that, with my Doctor blaming my companion, played by my friend, for turning her American-sounding. Then the companion, slightly befuddled, was going to keep trying to point out to the Doctor that she was a woman now, but the companion keeps getting interrupted before she can tell the Doctor. Okay, I actually still really like the idea and kind of want to get around to making it, but I do slightly dislike now that it will inevitably be compared to the actual 13th Doctor's regeneration and people will assume it's a response to it somehow even though I haven't actually seen much of any of 13 yet and I started writing the script long before she was cast. Time does affect long-running projects.
Additionally, as far as things that are less about producing concrete products, I recently picked back up with Khan Academy. I started Khan Academy back in high school in an attempt to teach myself AP calculus. Well, you see, in high school, sophomore year, I moved from this big (about 900-1,000 students) high school with a bunch of advanced classes and multiple degree paths to a much smaller (less than 400 students) high school with no AP classes but a few dual-enrollment things with a local community college. Anyways, I've been in advanced math classes since elementary school basically--not that I ever particularly liked math, but I was told I was good at it--and so I finished the highest level high school math class my Iowa school had in eleventh grade. This was also the case with this one other guy at the school, and the math teacher mentioned to us that it was possible to take the AP calculus exam without having had a class since the school didn't offer AP calc. If we passed the exam, it would be as if we had passed the class. So, that guy and I sat out to teach ourselves AP calculus. I heard about Khan Academy and took Mr. Khan as my AP calculus teacher. (In hindsight, the other guy and I probably should've teamed up in teaching ourselves AP calculus, two being better than one and whatall, but for whatever reason, we didn't and went our separate ways to learn advanced math by ourselves.) In the end, I wasn't self-motivated enough and didn't focus well enough to finish the Khan Academy AP calculus course, and neither I nor the other guy ended up feeling confident enough to even bother paying the test fee and taking the AP calc test on our own. But, I did learn that Khan Academy was quite useful. (I don't mean this to turn into an advertisement for Khan Academy but in my experience it is a very helpful site, and I do think it's noble what they do, the whole free educational resource thing. Speaking of free educational resource, the Dr. Jackson Crawford I quoted above is actually a professor of Scandinavian history with a youtube channel that's highly informative if you're interested in that.) So anyways, I used Khan Academy to help me out again when I was getting behind in college physics.
Now that I've graduated, I'm finding myself missing those sorts of classes. I'm very much a Ravenclaw. I never want to stop learning. Of course, I also believe that one can learn all sorts of things in all sorts of places beyond school. Writing this blog post is a learning experience. Tumblr is a place of learning. Learning happens anywhere and everywhere. But I do want to keep up my mathematical and scientific skills, even if they don't come up for me in my current job, and even if they never come up for me professionally again, simply because I like to have that knowledge for its own sake. So, I've gone back and started a few more Khan Academy classes, and I'd like to take time for that. I also mean to read through my many only partially read college textbooks. Also, I recently saw a thing on tumblr that very effectively used an Epictetus quote on an edit of Oswald and his son Martin from Gotham (yes, he's his son, we the fandom have declared it). So, I looked up the source text of Epictetus, a philosopher I'd never previously heard of, and started reading that. Basically, I don't want to stop engaging with the sort of things I engaged with in college just because I'm not currently in college. But the trouble is, these things, too, take time, and all of this, everything, and even more is vying for this newborn free time of mine.
I also recently got cast in a musical with a local theatre company, my first post-college production. It's thrilling, really. I auditioned for play after play in college, and I didn't get cast in anything until senior year, when I got cast in one thing in fall and another in spring. Then I went to my first audition out of college, for a musical no less. I've long considered myself, mostly based on the opinions of others but also based on my general lack of musical knowledge, not to be a singer, but I didn't want to miss out on auditions by not going out for musicals so I did and somehow I got in. My last three auditions I've been three for three getting into things! If I'm not careful I'm going to get used to getting cast in things. (Well, technically, I also had an unsuccessful audition last spring, but the other one was successful so it's almost like a straight run.) Theatre is different in the way it calls on my time because it has set dates and schedules, and it takes a lot less figuring out of when and what I'm going to do. It is a fixed demand on my free time. Of course, my personal practicing time is a bit more fluid, but it has a deadline attached and so necessarily gets done. All the same, I appreciate not having a deadline on other things, but, well, you see the conundrum it creates in my priorities. A deadline gives a project an inherent priority ranking. And I do work to deadlines; it's why my yearly blog post comes out on New Year's eve and not in midsummer. But still, it's also good to work on things that don't have deadlines. And I am. Just slowly. The trick is making sure that I am slowly making progress rather than slowly jumping from thing to thing and getting next to nothing done. In any case, frankly, slowly is how I do most everything. That is, except when I'm binging a book or a show, like how I watched seasons 1-3 of Gotham in eight days this summer or how I read Unwind in a single evening last year when I was supposed to be writing a paper. I also did not write the paper slowly, as that happened between probably the hours of 1 and 4 in the morning, knowing myself. I guess the two reasons I do a thing quickly are deadlines and obsession, which is probably not something unique to me. There are pros and cons to both work style, really, the pell-mell race to a deadline and the slow, deadlineless gradual build. Actually, these blog posts are a fair compromise of that, since I do budget a few days for them to make sure I can get all my thoughts out.
In any case, forgive me if this essentially turns into a narrative version of my to-do list as I continue. Those were most of the most major points. I also want to do physical things, like dancing and yoga and going on walks, a bit more. Not in an exercise sort of way--I've never really believed in exercise; I tend to believe you should find fun things to do (because there are so, so many in this world) and do them. I did dance quite a bit today, which felt quite nice (mostly to "That's Not How the Story Goes" from the Netflix version of A Series of Unfortunate Events, if you were wondering. If Gotham season 5 weren't coming this Thursday (AAAAaaaaaaA!!!), A Series of Unfortunate Events would almost certainly be my new primary obsession; as it is, the two will have to vie for the title.)
I've also been interested in LARP for quite a while but not been quite ready to start it. There is an Amtgard LARP about an hour from where I live, which is the closest LARP to me I've seen online. But I feel like that would be a big commitment, and it would also be quite a bit of extra driving if I were to go to something like that weekly. But my gosh does LARP look fun. For a while, I think I'll just keep watching the LARP youtubers, but one of these days I'll get around to actually doing it.
I also want to keep in better contact with my friends. It's tough, having just graduated college. I have the advantage of living only half an hour away from my college, and one of my friends has invited me back for a couple of game nights in her dorm, and that's been great. My older friends and friends from my year are flung to the four winds, though. I really just need to message them on facebook or text them more, and remember to do things with those who are within a reasonable distance, but it's just a lot to keep track of, keep up with, and do. It was actually my 2018 New Years' resolution, to stay in touch with friends more. To a certain extent I've done it, but it's hard, particularly being the introvert I am. It takes effort and I need to keep working on it. (Speaking of resolutions, what's my resolution this year, you ask? Well... everything in this blog post, in a sense. Maybe just "figuring out how to better spend my free time" to put it briefly, but this blog post is an excellent way of putting it the opposite of briefly.)
What else? I need to take time for reading. I mean, I do already, but that's just one of these things circling the area here. I ought to read my Bible more. At one point I set a goal for myself to have finished reading the Bible by the time I graduated college, but that didn't happen. The Bible is a thing it's best to go through slowly and carefully, though. I should spend more time on that as well. I'm up to Joshua chapter 18 currently. But it does feel good that I've gotten through all of Numbers and some of those slightly denser early books. It's good to read it to listen to God, because I know I pray more than I read, so one might say I talk more than I listen. Also, I do want to know exactly what is and what isn't in the Bible; people are always saying so many things about it and I need to know for myself what's true. It's my responsibility as a Christian as well as being useful for hearing from God. I really ought to take better notes, but I at least have some. Beyond that aspect of my faith journey, I also want to read pleasure books, naturally. For example, I'm just starting the Doctor Who novel I got for Christmas, and it's very fun so far. And, of course, there are many, many other books I have that I haven't read yet and I ought to get to. Taking in stories is something that's good for me as a writer as well as something I love, and one of the essential aspects of me as a person.
There are so many smaller things I want to do as well. I want to paint my nails more often. I've done some really fun nail art in the past; actually I have my October Oswald nails on my tumblr, a post which I'm rather sad hasn't gotten more attention--then again, it was my very first tumblr post, so maybe I should reblog it now that I have a few followers. And I should share it on the discord. I also want to put more of my other nail art out there, like that pop art nail polish I did last summer or those flowers I did last spring. But just in general, I must say, I have been doing better at basic physical maintenance since graduating. It's odd the things one puts off for the sake of homework when one is a rampant procrastinator as well as a slow reader. I used to go a week or two between brushing my hair in school because I was always just so busy with my homework, and that was priority number one, but I've been keeping up with my hair a lot better now that I'm working. I even do fun styles sometimes in the morning before work. And, now that we're getting to the really basic things, I need to work on keeping my room and the house cleaner. That's an ever-developing process.
For these last few paragraphs, I've literally had my personal to-do list google doc open in another tab, and that was the end of it, the house cleaning stuff. So, I suppose I must've covered most of it. And, copying and pasting this into a google doc to check the length, I now see it's just over eight pages single spaced, so it's about a standard length for this blog. I suppose my main takeaway is that I want to do a great many different things, so I just need to make sure I am actually doing those things, working on things, and making progress, and being productive. I certainly don't feel I need to pick a single thing to focus on and revolve around, and I think it's good to have variety in one's pursuits. But I do need to pursue things consistently enough that things get done, and while that is still fairly vague, it's good enough for a New Year's resolution. I need to just keep doing things. I imagine my artistic identity will develop a bit more clearly somewhere along the way, which might even affect my work life and goals (which is an entirely additional area I could've rambled about... perhaps next year's post. Who knows where I'll be then?) In any case, I'm sure I could still think of more things I'd like to do and discuss my personal and creative identity in greater depth, but for now, perhaps, I will simply wish you all a new year full of wonders, adventures, and creative, artistic, and personal productivity.
Here in this Lande that lies shrouded beyond the violet mist, now floating all the more obscurely in this deeply mist-filled post-school void, we seek to weave words into tales, pencil lead into imagery, and thoughts into projects to be shared with the world. But each task takes its own time, and we find must now seek some form of balance and order amidst our thick violet mists of creative chaos.
