Everything in the world is plenty for me
So, first day at the new workplace. I have keys, I found the broom, the little girl who'd barely whisper when I visited last week has taken to yelling for me to come look at things. Life is good. :)
Little kids are very little, though. I changed my first diaper in about five years today, and boy, can you say out of practice? Luckily for me the toddler in question was exceedingly patient.
Another thing I have to get used to again is the way these little kids are constantly trying out new ways of getting their heads bashed in. I AM ON TO YOUR SHENANIGANS. No one will get their head bashed in on my watch. Yes, that means you, little lady in the yellow rubber boots. I see you climbing up and down those stairs. I know I have to let you try this stuff for yourself, but that doesn't mean I can't inch closer so I can catch you when, not if, you fall.
In other news, I spent Sunday doing something lovely with pen and paper. There used to be a time when writing was pretty much all I would do - at breakfast, during lessons in school (my education happened in fits and bursts, the last time not counting uni in my late twenties), after work, all my free time would be taken up by writing. Fanfiction, original stuff, and heaps and heaps of hardly veiled Mary Sue when I was a teenager - you name it, I probably tried my hand at it at some point. Yes, there were poems. I never finished anything I'd ever want to talk about again, but that wasn't what it was about.
Because I had no idea what it was about, I thought I was doing it to publish some day, in whatever form. So I tried and I tried and I failed to make my prose sound professional, to find endings to stories that couldn't ever have any, and in doing so I took everything out of writing that had made it my joy and my saving grace in tough times. I made it into work, and for me, that was never what it was supposed to be. So I pretty much stopped. I'd still carry paper or my laptop with me wherever I went, I'd still add or change a sentence here and there, I'd stare at the screen or the page and pretend to be working on stuff, but my heart wasn't in it at all, and nothing much happened anymore. I'd worried the fun right out of it.
But then, very recently, in a conversation with the lovely
kriski , I realized that what I do and what I want to do and what makes me happy isn't writing at all. It's much, much better described as daydreaming with a pen. I'll watch a little movie scene in my head, and I'll write down what I saw. This is how it happens, and it explains everything. The fact that I really like my dialogue but do a crappy old job on the bits between. The fact that I get so attached to my characters, because in my head, they're almost like real people. The fact that I can never finish anything, because then it would be over and I'd have to let it go.
Now that I've decided that I'm the intended audience, that I write for myself and that if anyone else were ever to read any of it they'd have to accept it on my terms and for what it is (like
kriski does, and did I mention that she's amazing?), writing is so much fun again. I spent all Sunday on my not-a-couch, armed with a pen and paper, and did what came naturally, grinning and laughing to myself frequently along the way. I'm very much in love with this project and the imaginary people involved, so I'll probably have to write an entry about it quite soon, but it's really, really time to go to bed now. And probably do some more daydreaming before I fall asleep, just without the pen this time. :)
This entry was originally posted at http://dirtyzucchini.dreamwidth.org/40462.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Little kids are very little, though. I changed my first diaper in about five years today, and boy, can you say out of practice? Luckily for me the toddler in question was exceedingly patient.
Another thing I have to get used to again is the way these little kids are constantly trying out new ways of getting their heads bashed in. I AM ON TO YOUR SHENANIGANS. No one will get their head bashed in on my watch. Yes, that means you, little lady in the yellow rubber boots. I see you climbing up and down those stairs. I know I have to let you try this stuff for yourself, but that doesn't mean I can't inch closer so I can catch you when, not if, you fall.
In other news, I spent Sunday doing something lovely with pen and paper. There used to be a time when writing was pretty much all I would do - at breakfast, during lessons in school (my education happened in fits and bursts, the last time not counting uni in my late twenties), after work, all my free time would be taken up by writing. Fanfiction, original stuff, and heaps and heaps of hardly veiled Mary Sue when I was a teenager - you name it, I probably tried my hand at it at some point. Yes, there were poems. I never finished anything I'd ever want to talk about again, but that wasn't what it was about.
Because I had no idea what it was about, I thought I was doing it to publish some day, in whatever form. So I tried and I tried and I failed to make my prose sound professional, to find endings to stories that couldn't ever have any, and in doing so I took everything out of writing that had made it my joy and my saving grace in tough times. I made it into work, and for me, that was never what it was supposed to be. So I pretty much stopped. I'd still carry paper or my laptop with me wherever I went, I'd still add or change a sentence here and there, I'd stare at the screen or the page and pretend to be working on stuff, but my heart wasn't in it at all, and nothing much happened anymore. I'd worried the fun right out of it.
But then, very recently, in a conversation with the lovely
kriski , I realized that what I do and what I want to do and what makes me happy isn't writing at all. It's much, much better described as daydreaming with a pen. I'll watch a little movie scene in my head, and I'll write down what I saw. This is how it happens, and it explains everything. The fact that I really like my dialogue but do a crappy old job on the bits between. The fact that I get so attached to my characters, because in my head, they're almost like real people. The fact that I can never finish anything, because then it would be over and I'd have to let it go.
Now that I've decided that I'm the intended audience, that I write for myself and that if anyone else were ever to read any of it they'd have to accept it on my terms and for what it is (like
kriski does, and did I mention that she's amazing?), writing is so much fun again. I spent all Sunday on my not-a-couch, armed with a pen and paper, and did what came naturally, grinning and laughing to myself frequently along the way. I'm very much in love with this project and the imaginary people involved, so I'll probably have to write an entry about it quite soon, but it's really, really time to go to bed now. And probably do some more daydreaming before I fall asleep, just without the pen this time. :)
This entry was originally posted at http://dirtyzucchini.dreamwidth.org/40462.html. Please comment there using OpenID.