Better Than Dead

I have a Sun in Virgo and Mars in Virgo. I have a Moon in Pisces in almost pinpoint opposition to my Sun. I also have a Pisces Ascendant. The Pisces part of my brain spends a lot of time trying to trick the Virgo part into staying out of its way so it can get on with its creative work. One of the methods it employs is list making.

I am constantly making obsessive lists that keep track of things, from the mundane to the esoteric. Like a catalog of the books I’ve read or the books I started or the books I’ve completed. Or the first lines of books I pick up during the course of a year. Or lists of synchronicities. Or quotes–many, many quotes. Or screenshots from Postcards From the Past on Twitter of places I’ve visited myself. Or… Well, any number of lists that really no one should care about but me (and perhaps even I shouldn’t care about).

But that Virgo part of my brain is rather like the legend of the mythological monster who can be tricked into stillness by throwing a bunch of seeds on the ground so that the obsessive creature is forced to stop and count each seed before moving on. Virgo has many fine qualities but its left brain proclivities tend to get in the way sometimes when I just need to go deep and dream my dreams and put those dreams on the page. With militant Mars in Virgo those tendencies can be rather extreme. Hence, the lists.

My mother, who was borderline OCD, may also have been some influence in this regard. There may be a genetic/nurture as well as an astrological component to my obsessive drive towards list making. Lists are a fairly harmless way of curtailing that dragon. Certainly my housekeeping does not benefit from this Virgoan drive. I could wish that it did a bit more as my current environment is suffering greatly from the Pisces tendency towards sloth and distraction and love of chaos.

The housekeeping also suffers greatly from my lack of mobility, of course. With my bad legs I can have a productive day of cleaning up but the next day will most likely be taken up communing with my heating pad. Maybe more than one day. I would like to say I have resolved myself to this but I have not. I was always strong and energetic and could work my way through a lot of crap in a short period of time (after spending a longer time letting things pile up) but those days are gone. I have to find a new way of doing things and I admit that I’m still flailing around trying to find it.

I am trying to be satisfied with my mantra of “do something then rest” but it’s hard to accept limitations. Still, I don’t have much choice in the matter. Accepting limitations is not accepting defeat and I am trying diligently to teach myself that and to work within my new parameters. It is a work in progress, and like any organic WIP it’s making it up as I go, striving to reach the realization of the dream on the page.

Random quote of the day:

“As an artist, you need the naysayers and the nonbelievers to add fuel to your creative fire.”

―Ice-T, Ice: A Memoir of Gangster Life and Redemption—from South Central to Hollywood

Random quote of the day:

“The creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present. With food, with children, with building blocks, with speech, with thoughts, with pigment, with an umbrella, or a wineglass, or a torch.”

—M. C. Richards, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Desus and Mero, Beyoncé, or the Marine Corps Marching Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“Ignoring the impulse to create is not an acceptable way to spend however much life remains.”

—Amy Goldman Koss, “Art and Arthritis,” The Los Angeles Times, 7/28/19

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Desus and Mero, Beyoncé, or the Marine Corps Marching Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.”

—John Cleese, Video Arts speech, January 23, 1991

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Desus and Mero, Beyoncé, or the Marine Corps Marching Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“The creative process is a process of surrender, not control. Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise.”

—Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Desus and Mero, Beyoncé, or the Marine Corps Marching Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“I tend to approach characters not based on ethnicity but on some unique individual qualities, and I’ve set my whole life that way. I don’t want any sort of limitations imposed on my work. If you truly want to be a creative person, you can’t limit yourself.”

—Billy Dee Williams, The SyFy Wire, January 30, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“There’s this little box that African-American actors have to work in, in the first place, and I was able to rise above that box. I could have done a bunch of movies where I stayed as the Axel Foley or Reggie Hammond persona. But I didn’t want to be doing the same thing all the time. Every now and then, you crash and burn, but that’s part of it.”

—Eddie Murphy, Rolling Stone, November 9, 2011

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“When we wake up in the morning we are inspired to do some certain thing and we do do it. The difficulty lies in the fact that it may turn out well or it may not turn out well. If it turns out well we have a tendency to think that we have successfully followed our inspiration and if it does not turn out well we have a tendency to think that we have lost our inspiration. But that is not true. There is successful work and work that fails but all of it is inspired.”

—Agnes Martin, “On the Perfection Underlying Life,” lecture, Institute of Contemporary Art, February 14, 1973

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

I’ve been doing some clean-up work on my blog, trying to eliminate duplications and other messes that happened long ago when I transferred it from LJ to Dreamwidth. It’s never been a high-priority thing, but something I dip into when I’m in the mood to do something fairly mindless (and kidding myself it’s productive). (Or as a time waster instead of writing, but we won’t talk about that.)

I ran across an old post from June of 2011 which was just at the beginning of my caregiving for my mother when she was on peritoneal dialysis and still able to do most things for herself. That changed in September of that year when she had her stroke—but that’s not the point of this post. Apparently, in June I had just finished my last read through/clean up of my second completed novel, Blood Geek. I think maybe I had the idea of self-publishing. That idea was overtaken by my mother’s illness and never came about. It’s just as well, I suppose. It was a decent effort, but not my best work.

But that’s not the point of this post, either. In the above-referenced post I was talking about the strange parallel of writing a novel (almost twenty years prior at that point) about a woman whose early life had been constrained by caring for her sick mother. She was just about to break free and live life for herself. In 2011 I was rather amazed by the “haunting echo, now that I am helping to care for my own mother, that keeps bouncing through the chambers of my heart. It’s a little disturbing. I knew more than I thought I knew back then.” But in June of 2011 I had no idea, really, of what was to come, how consuming caregiving would be, how it would leave no room for anything but working and caring, how it squeezed out all time for anything like creativity.

But again, that’s not the point of this post. This is, this paragraph I came across:

And now I am in a different phase of my life. I have no vision for what comes next. I can’t see that far beyond the day-to-day. I do know that when I get back to writing something new again, I don’t want it to echo that day-to-day in the slightest. Which is not to say I might not use some of these characters again—in fact, I fully intend to. But they will be engaged in some other enterprise, something that blows the doors open to other worlds with no fences.

What blows the doors off my mind on this day, in 2020, is that I am writing new things again, and the new novel I’m writing does involve some of the same characters—in a whole new enterprise, a whole new process of growth and transformation. (And I am going through that transformation with them.) I haven’t really thought about these characters much in the last nine years, although one of them, Carmina, kept popping up now and then to insist she had a story I really needed to tell. I poked at her story over the years, but beyond the first two chapters, nothing gelled. I didn’t start last year thinking she will be the one. I started last year just trying to write something, anything. And then I wrote a completely different novel in a completely different universe. Also one I’d used before, but nothing to do with these characters.

Yet here I am. Happy and more than a little surprised that this fall Carmina’s story finally took off.

And that’s why I say that no story I have ever committed to paper or electrons (or, hell, even the ones that knock around in my head that I haven’t bothered to do that with) is every truly dead—until I am. Or until my brain blows out. Even my first completed novel, which if I have anything to say about it will never see the light of day, has produced nuggets that I have mined and used in later books. Like the clerk in the dead parrot sketch of Monty Python fame keeps insisting, these stories are not dead. Even if I’m not aware of them on a conscious level, they’re still in there. Resting.