Pre-Raphaelite painting by unknown artist, transfixed me with its beauty, $9000.

Amazing white and beige straw purse, possibly 1970's, floral accents, $20.

Labels: tea

I created this cover for my profile today and added NaNoWriMo info to the side bar of Winter Light. Tomorrow I'm going to complete my writing schedule and work on my plot outline. I also have to find time this week to read the whole story structure book. This is already working out to be a very busy NaNoWriMo, and it hasn't even started.

Labels: NaNoWriMo 2008, story notes

To wear: Silk blouses in white, hair spray

To listen: Belinda Carlisle

The Philosophy of Tea - enforces cleanliness, comfort in simplicity, defines our sense of proportion to the universe.

Belief that each meeting should be treasured, for it can never be reproduced.

Broken tea bowls are painstakingly repaired using lacquer, powdered gold. Used mainly in November, when tea practitioners begin using the ro, or hearth, again, as an expression and celebration of the concept of wabi, or humble simplicity.

Study is through observation and hands-on practice. Students do not take notes, and some schools discourage note-taking.

Taken from Wikipedia, Japanese tea ceremony.

I have long been unable to perfect the art of denying my own gratification in writing. I do not know how it is possible to feel so deeply what Delphinia feels and deny her her desires.

I come home with a great headache, and this is not what I should do. If I had had my camera, I would have gone to the garden to take photos. I long to express, but my mind is too tight and rigid for me to be writing.

I know the only way to make my story as I want it to be is to make the desire of Delphinia's heart my own, and thus consumed in them, write my way through every possible denial of them, torturing her in every conceivable moment. That is the story I want, but after a scene that tormented her effectively my imagination conjures an even better torment, with no interim of relief for her emotions, and yet I am too weak to continue.

I can see that the romance stories I like to write now are more akin to torture. I am bored with anything less.

Then I wrote a little on A Fine and Private Place. It is cheating to write of Ophelia, I suppose, but there is my own ungratified desire with which to contend. I have felt for a while like my soul is sweating out a fever. I have never known this kind of denial. I feel powerless against this, the must-have, and the must-not-have. When I consider all that has passed in the several years conjoining my world to Ophelia's, and others, I do not think that I can return to a common reality. I really do not think I can.

I am coming to the burnt-orange season when I can sit on the porch and write just like this.

I have settled on the heart of my anxiety. I have not written for weeks. I have been bottling it all up, hoping the force of my stashed passions will get me through 6,000 words each day next month.

I did not participate in NaNoWriMo last year, and I think that was a good decision, though I regretted it afterward. I remember how deeply I struggled to learn to do my job, and for how many weeks. It would have been idiotic to try to write a novel then.

I have felt myself change. I do not want to hide from the truth. That is not the point of writing in a blog. I realize that all throughout my life I have been holding myself back from my present situation. I have been aloof. Always my eyes were fixed on the horizon, and my attitude was that one day I would be in a position that suited me. I can see that last year I did that, reserving myself for my writing session at Starbucks.

However, I have come to the dilemma that writing is in life, not apart from it. I cannot write while I am living, but I cannot write without living. Thus, there must be a reorganization of myself, and I can no longer hold myself aloof. My writing has been but a vague shadow of myself, while a fantasy parallel to the novels I have spent my reading life reading, gothic novels and romance. That does not satisfy me anymore, and so I have not been writing, and I have been very, very anxious. This anxiety is enough to make me act out tremendously. It makes me feel what I have doubted for so long, and that is that I have not grown out of my writing. It follows me like a shadow and troubles my dreams. Unfortunately this is going to be a long month.

I was not writing in my journal a year ago today. I was overwhelmed with learning my new job and abandoned all thoughts of Cambriel, Snow White, and my other WIP's for a very stressful several weeks. So this is the closest entry I have to that time.

My life… is totally different than when last I wrote. Wow. I was waiting on the job news. Now I’m one month into the job. I feel kind of insecure right now. I’m afraid I’m a lousy scientist—and my fear is not so much in losing my identity because I’m an ineffectual scientist—it’s more like being found for a sham and thrown out. I think it’s kind of funny I do for a career something that interests me not at all while my passions lie elsewhere. But my passions are only passions. They don’t last me very long every day. I am too capricious to devote myself to writing...

However, I screwed up a lot today... Some of the things I have to do—like pretending to review those folders again and again to learn them—are so mentally excruciating... I squashed one of the baskets today. I screwed up my dissolution so royally. I didn’t measure my amounts well at all. I spilled some. I injected one sample on top of another, in the wrong vial. I erased my timer twice. I did all the things wrong I possibly could have. Then I stayed pretty late just to clean up my dissolution... I fear I will have to re-do everything... You know, I was really getting a plan together when I got... this job. I was going to be a web designer. Study each day for hours on my own, then take a class.

However, I have my writing. It’s coming to me now, in full and shining glory, overcoming me, hooking into its dream. I have these afternoons, these glorious afternoons after a day of hard work, where I am at Starbucks writing and planning. My goal is throughout my life to complete and perfect every possible story in this folder. That is a goal to work for. I also have goals to be a web designer, to build sites pertaining to my writing and photography interests, and develop sites for their own sake—mobile sites, especially. CMS’s. I have dreams and plans. No matter how hard my day was, I have this.

And I can buy whatever I want again. I don’t hold back. When Nathan and I go to expensive restaurants, I savor every bite. The world is in living color for me now. The sacrifice is 5 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.