Skip to main content

Irresolute

 


There are no resolutions for 2022. Instead, there's just beginning again, on top of a pile of half-done or barely begun drafts, with the idea that some things should be finished. This is the "new normal" after the pause.  

Normally, I'm ready to take down the decorations the day after New Year's and start that list of projects that I will definitely find a way to finish this year. I'd stack myself a TBR full of books that I've been meaning to read ever since I encountered them but before I actually started to read them. This year...this year I've spent the past several days compiling a list of all the pieces of writing I actually completed in 2021. Blog posts. Instagram poetry. Monthly bulletin boards. Zines. 


What if I'm not a finished kind of person? What if I'm the kind of person who enjoys hole-punching blog posts and treating them like a school project? Why haven't I been doing this for the past couple of years, tracking the shift and sway of stories that I work on through the seasons? I journal among their notes. Is the story or the journal the point?

Will I ever finish the chapbook compiling my 2020 poems or is it good enough that it lives in a similar folder, ready for the editing hand that might never appear? 

I'm not sure what I want to accomplish this year. There is a story that started out in a fantasy cliché (people meeting in a tavern) that might become something. Taverns feel so much more dangerous now. There are bears and not-wizards and caterpillar fairies that cost the main character her job (so far, it's been like rolling a piece of sticky-tape through the odds and ends of old ideas) and there will be a chicken companion and a fairy who might have once been a drop of blood and I don't know what else. Are there going to be giant, world-eating terrors? No. Who wants to walk through giant, world-eating terrors? (Then again, who can avoid it as  we walk past storefronts both empty and full of a consuming narrative that has already eaten itself into your soul, just like the worms that make jumping beans leap?) If 2022 becomes a folder wherein this plot wanders stark through my own days, bumping against what the dogs are doing (Merlin is sleeping, Arthur is sitting in James' office watching for his return from his booster shot) and what the weather and the backyard is creating that day, then that's probably fine. 

Worth, at the very least, a second read. 

-- Chrissa 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Once Upon a Future Past

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse #204 . It's too far in the afternoon, I thought but evening ran behind me dragons, demons, and the sleeping world; afraid to turn, to wake me. Power needs its horror stories, its ghosts. It's too far in the afternoon, I thought but evening followed close; a fantasy of goodness, where the gold is always covering bones. Power needs its fairy tales, its witches. It's too far in the afternoon, I thought but evening treads my hem, like an army from the dragon's teeth and all the lies therein. -- Chrissa
14 comments
Read more

Need

  Sharing with this week's The Sunday Muse #184 . Come celebrate Halloween with verse and The Muse.  I don't think the lantern needed the day; I needed the night: Lit and close and dark and smelling of faraway fires. I needed the smoky flicker that darkened the late-season field I needed the thin linen dress someone else's jacket hides; I needed the nested shadow; not blue, clear sight. It's already a spooky weekend: one window wedged itself just open enough for the breeze to moan beneath, James heard a drone last night (according to him, circling and circling the neighborhood without lights), and our sometimes neighbors have started to set up their backyard for whatever festivities they're planning for Halloween weekend. So...tomorrow (Halloween) will be a good day to read through the books picked up at the local author Spooktacular hosted by a used bookstore not far from here and to say a few final prayers before NaNo begins. Also, celebrating another zine draft r...
13 comments
Read more

On Bad Days

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse #186 . Sorry. Probably best to skip this one. On bad days I argue with the void: it is empty; I call it full of nothing made pathological; therefore it obsesses to possess mass, to be something arguing with the universe but shouting in the mirror black as starlit backdrop, as stars that fall deeper and deeper into time until they  drag everything into the void and are empty, wrung out of needing to have an argument and then we look at each other, deep in the black fallen forever of our gaze.  I wasn't going to post this week. But that probably doesn't matter...because here is a post. This has been a weird week and, in the midst of much more important things, my NaNo project just [temporarily] self-destructed. There will be a return to that project and I'm already sharpening the knives for it. Just need to let a little off-topic anger abate so that everyone doesn't get flamethrowers and a crazy 80's soundtrack. AAAAAAAAEEEEEIIIIIIIIIII!...
12 comments
Read more