Diss0nance - [always Interconnected] - Tumblr Blog

you actually don't have to go on dating apps to find girlfriends. many beautiful women are waiting for you on rocks out at sea

existing despite all odds

wake up, stumble through life, fall into bed at the end. rinse, repeat. reappear in my dreams under the guise of getting better. ignore the anger boiling in my blood.

pick up a pencil, watch my hands glide across the keyboard, feel my composure crack when i make a mistake, go back and fix it. take a deep breath, count down from five. rinse, repeat, watch them tear each other apart from the safety of my screen. there’s nowhere safe for me anymore.

don’t think about adulthood, stumble through my school day. yeah, school was good, i feel an insatiable hunger to put an end to this miserable existence but i have to go to college and get a degree before i can afford to die. rinse, repeat, try to listen to my therapist.

watch little girls grab at each other’s throats, watch safe spaces become arenas, watch weird kids post their goodbyes on tiktok, keep watching watching watching. rinse, repeat, pretend i don’t feel the anger bubbling under my skin.

pick up a pencil, scribble down my thoughts into a fifteen dollar notebook, don’t think about the factory worker who made it. rinse, repeat, don’t think about how they can’t feed their kids tonight.

wake up, stumble through life, rinse, repeat, repeat. gotta get a degree before i can kill myself, i should have been an artist, that won’t make me money.

wake up, stumble through life, rinse, rinse, repeat, fall back into bed at night and wonder why i need to pay to die. rinse, repeat, remember what i’m fighting for. rinse, repeat, what the hell am i fighting for.

don’t live, just exist, become another number in another pie chart, in another percentage, repeat, rinse, repeat, repeat, i can’t even feel my hands anymore.

pick up my pencil, forget about my school work, watch my future become defined by numbers, make no effort to combat it, they’ll find some way to destroy me regardless. rinse, repeat, push back the burn in my chest, ignore the feeling.

rinse, repeat, wake back up again and rinse, run, repeat. curl up in my bed at night and wonder where god is. stare up at my ceiling and remember he’s above us, above me. close my eyes and realize he won’t save me now.

rinse, repeat, wake back up at dawn and do it all over again.

I know what you're all definitely thinking. What if everyone from Gravity Falls was a chair. Well, I was bored enough at 3am to think about that too

loser lover

some day these memories will fade, and i will forget you and every bad moment that came with you.

i will always remember your laughter. our friendship. the small portion of my life where i thought i loved you. the small portion of my life where i was convinced you loved me too.

i’ve long since forgotten your face. i have the screenshots of our talks, of your confession, of my reluctant acceptance. i remember the grief that followed that mistake. if only i had just said “no.”

would we still have stayed friends? would you keep me as close as you did? would we still talk every night? would you still dream of meeting me?

would we still have fallen out the way we did? what if i didn’t run away?

i am such a loser. you’re a loser too. but you lost your composure, and i just lost you.

along the way, i think i lost a part of me too.

love is a dog from hell

pale and dead like a corpse, still dripping blood on the floor. my nervous system pulls my hand forward, and i can hold the plush, soft skin of your shoulder in my grasp. i see my reflection in the dark, empty void of your eyes. do you see me the same way i do? all blood and bones and veins? pulsing, eternal rhythm. all beating the same chant.

hell hounds scream the same way bullet wounds form and i’m still looking for you.

i like ford because he is strange and off putting

When will humankind learn the lesson of its hubris and begin to heal itself? Also can you recommend any undergraduate or graduate level resources (textbooks etc.) for learning about fiction? I already read Writing Fiction by Burroway. Thanks in advance

January 14, 3182. Make a note of the date and return to this post when it comes.

To your second question, I've never read anything on writing fiction, only writing in general. I've found something valuable in every book on writing, even if there were things in the book I found less valuable. For example, I read Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg, and while there was much of it I didn't care for, there are some passags that have stuck with me 22 years later. When it comes to writing guides, I think the best thing to do is read what interests you while understand that what you are really doing is building your own writing guide inside you. You're absorbing what you find personally meaningful and using it to create your own personal styleguide that, like it or not, you'll be following for the rest of your life. Rather than rejecting that, and trying to decide which text will be the text that tells you how to write, embrace it, realize that you are going to do what you're going to do, and then try to work within that framework. That is, if that's what's happening, how will you approach a styleguide? What will it mean to you to read a very didactic text (i.e. "All serious writers must do x; no serious writer every does y") vs. a loosey-goosey one (e.g. "Dance naked in the garden of your creativity and allow your flowers to bloom!")? What are you looking for in these texts and what will you do with information or strategies that you find valuable?

Returning to Writing Down the Bones, I have to say I found the book to be mostly woo. It was more a kind of self-help/empowerment book than a book on writing, in my opinion. But there is something in there that I'm sure I'd heard before but which finally resonated with me. Specifically, it was the way she articulated that it really, truly doesn't matter what you put on the page when you're drafting. Drafting is not the time to reject. Even some idea comes to you that you find absurd, illogical, thematically inappropriate—whatever. It's not the time to push it away. Indeed, it's wasted effort. Editing and revising is the time to question. If you're writing, you shouldn't let anything stop you—even your own brain.

Why it took till then for this idea to take root, I don't know. It could be how she worded it. It could be that it came at the right time. Perhaps I was more open to new ideas when I was reading this book. It may also have something to do with a transition that had taken place for me in writing. After all, when I started high school, I was not regularly using a computer (we'd only just gotten a computer that stayed at home). When I started writing, I wrote by hand—on paper. It's a much, much different thing to edit and revise when you're writing on paper than it is on when you're working on a computer! I mean, digital real estate is cheap. When you're writing by hand, it can literally hurt to write seven or eight pages—and then to discard them in editing! Right now I'm working on a novel draft where I've decided an entire section needs to come out. If I'd written that by hand?! I can't even imagine.

I guess the tl;dr of it is I don't have a specific text to recommend. Rather, I encourage you to look around and grab anything that interests you. In doing so, though, I encourage you to approach it differently, focusing on what in it you find valuable, without either wholly rejecting it or feeling you have to follow it to the letter like an Ikea manual. I even found something valuable in C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, which I honestly can't believe I read.

If you'd like some fiction advice that may be generally useful no matter what you're writing, this is what I can offer:

A valuable skill to hone is being able to read your work as if you have no other knowledge of it. In other words, you need to be able to read your work like a reader. One of the most difficult things to do with fiction is to cut. You usually have a lot more characterization, a lot more plot points, a lot more detail, etc. than end up on the page. The important question is if you cut something, will the reader notice? Will it actually feel like something's miss it, or will a reader never notice? Mind, I'm not saying that as a writer you can't tell if something is superfluous, or that anything you cut will be superfluous. I'm saying sometimes even if you cut something important a reader will still get the impression that what they are reading is whole and unedited. That isn't a good thing or a bad thing: it's a neutral thing. The question you'll have to answer is what is this whole that the reader is getting, and is that whole something you're satisfied with?

Get multiple rounds of feedback from many different readers. I say this not because it's vital, because beta readers are important, because you have to have multiple perspectives on your work, etc. None of that. Getting feedback from many different readers is a form of self-care on the part of the writer. I was deathly afraid of feedback as a young writer. I welcomed praise, sure, but anything else felt too painful to bear. This changed when I took a short fiction class at Berkeley. Suddenly a short story of mine wasn't getting one round of feedback: it was getting fourteen. And not just from the professor, but from fellow students. This was a minor revolution for me in terms of accepting feedback. If I were to take, say, one round of feedback, certainly there would be some praise, but there would also be notes like "awkward phrasing", "why did x character do y?", "this is unclear", "too much description", etc. These things would burn me. I would seethe reading them, and it would hurt so deeply. But! Imagine that one of them circles a paragraph and writes "too much description" and then the other thirteen readers say absolutely nothing at all about that paragraph—maybe one even puts a smiley face next to it. THAT puts the criticism in its proper context. Maybe your writing isn't too bad! Maybe there isn't too much description. Maybe that particular reader just wasn't vibing with it, and maybe that's okay. And then let's look at it from the other perspective. Say thirteen out of fourteen papers have a sentence marked and all of them say things like "huh?", "what's this mean?", "confusing", etc. Guess what? The sentence is probably confusing. And for some reason if everyone's saying the same thing it hurts a lot less. It means, yeah, you probably made a little mistake, and that's okay. It's not one person singling you out, and it's not the case that they don't know what they're talking about. I can't emphasize enough how freeing it is to look at reviews of your work if you have a handful or more to draw from rather than just a single good friend.

It's okay to write the fun part first. You may have a plot device you're really excited about, but to get there, you have to introduce your characters, have them get together, have them go to a place, meet someone else, etc. And it may take time and energy to write all that. You may feel pressured to get through that before you get to the part you really want to write. You certainly can, but you do not have to. I don't know if younger writers can appreciate exactly what it means to have a computer. You can write a little bit now and literally copy and paste it into some other document later. Try doing that with a typewriter! You can write something like "Insert paragraphs later of characters traveling to x location". You can even drop a variable in there so it's easy to find with the search function later (e.g. "ZZZZZ insert scene description here"—now you just need to search for "ZZZZZ"). You can put it in a different color on the screen so it's easy to find when scrolling. You can paste a freaking photo into your document! It's extraordinary what you can do with a computer that you couldn't do in years past. You've got a ton of options. But most importanly, when your work is done, no one will know what order you wrote it in.

In fiction, nothing has to happen. Villains don't have to be punished; heroes don't have to win; characters don't have to have a specific arc that comes to some conclusion. Honestly, one of the tropes (if you can even call it a trope) that I find most frustrating in sequels for movie franchises is after the characters are introduced, they take a few character and assign to them the major story conflict, and then for the rest, they give them a mini arc. It's like, "Mondo 2: Exploding the Mondoverse sees our hero Larjo Biggins take on new villain the Krunge as the very core of the Mondoverse is threatened with destruction! Also, Siddles Nuli learns its okay to be left out sometimes and she shouldn't get her feelings hurt, and Old Mucko learns that even though technology is advancing, sometimes good old fashioned common sense is just what the doctor ordered!" If you get to the end of your story, and you feel it's done, you don't have to panic if you suddenly realize we don't know whether Hupsi ever made it to Bumbus 7. It's okay if Story A is resolved but Story B is not.

I don't care if you used Trope A in your new story even though you used Trope A in your past seven stories and neither should you. Seriously, you think anyone was complaining when Agatha Christie put out another mystery novel? "Oh. Mystery again, huh? Gee, we were all hoping you'd write a book about the struggles traditional fishing villages are facing in the wake of industrial modernization." No we fucking weren't!

I hope you find some of this useful. Whether you did or not, though, be sure you enjoy what you're doing. If you are, you're doing the right thing.

tangerines

in a few years, i’ll forget the smell of your shampoo. i won’t be able to close my eyes and picture the sway of your hips as your shoes slap against the cracked asphalt. i could never immortalize the feeling of your hand in mine, plain red gloves just can’t love my hands like yours did.

citrus fills the air, clogging my lungs and steaming up my bathroom mirror. i use conditioner to smooth out the knots of not being loved unconditionally. i wonder if the water was always this clear, or if i was just getting used to seeing it tinted orange.

when did you stop pouring orange juice down my drain? when did i start doing something about it?

even the smell of oranges will fade eventually.

I’m fine

Here's to whatever's next

writtenbyjv on Instagram/ @fairycosmos /barbaricbrownbiblophile on Instagram/es.trig on Instagram/David Leviathan/Richard Siken/loveandfear on Twitter

always interconnected

when humans lost touch with each other, they turned to machinery to fill that void. to bring back that connection.

they reach out on a digital level, make friends, make love, make art. humans have effectively inhabited every inhabitable area possible, even the areas that are invisible to them.

then it began. metal became flesh. cellphones and tablets and watches and headphones became organs and senses and lifelines. man and machine became one.

and when humans could not access life through their screens, they made new life. they gave machines personalities, intelligence, publicity.

man became god. man made life from metal and code. and man fell in love with machine.

everything becomes alright

it’s dark in my home today.

i can tell because i can’t see

that usual beautiful feeling i get

when i wake up and remember i’m human.

what’s the matter? my friend asks me.

i look up from the darkness.

the fog in my brain makes it hard to think.

i can’t see who’s talking to me

i can’t even see my hands or my heart.

but i hear the care in their voice.

nothing. i say. just feeling a little down.

my friend sits next to me. my friend holds my hand.

that beautiful feeling is back. i can see my hands again.

still clasped firmly around theirs, as though they were my lifeline.

and i can see my heart again, beating in sync with the world.

the sun has come up in my heart, bringing light to my home.

all of a sudden, everything becomes alright

i feel at home when i’m laughing with my sister

her voice rings out like a doorbell to my heart.

and although it is dark and cold,

and i want nothing more than to lay down

i open the door and let her inside.

she looks around my barren heart,

at the shadows cast on the floor

at the way she can see her breath in the air

and decides that i can’t live like this.

every game we play throws another log of wood in the fire

feeding my cold heart, until my body is warm enough

to survive the winter this year.

she dances me around the floors,

each step we take mends another floorboard.

i’ll see you later. my sister says when she’s done.

ever grateful, i smile and wave. see you.

the door to my heart closes again

but all of a sudden, everything becomes alright

i haven’t seen my brother in over a month

he’s in his first year of college

states away from me

and even though we’re not the same

two different kinds of perfect

i smile whenever i see him

i miss you, be good. he told me on the phone.

i nod, and i make sure he sees it.

i love you, i miss you. i tell him.

i love you too. he says back.

those words are the breeze

that wafts through my home’s window

it pushes my record player just enough

to keep the music playing.

and all of a sudden, everything becomes alright

there are times where my home in my heart

begins to crumble.

when the pretty colored walls peel back

it stops being a home

and becomes just a house.

and when that happens

my father helps me off the crumbled floor

and repaints the walls

and relights the fire

and fixes the one crooked painting

that always bothered me

for a reason that not even i knew

learn to let me help you. he scolds. you act like me sometimes.

i guess we’re both stubborn like that. i laugh.

and he laughs too, because he knows i get it from him.

all of a sudden, everything becomes alright

on our way home from school, my mother

rubbed my cheek with her thumb

i’m proud of you, sweetheart. she says.

not knowing what else to say, i nod and whisper,

thanks, mom. she keeps her hand on the steering wheel.

she doesn’t look my way, and i don’t either.

i can’t see her face in the glare of the sun

but i know we are both smiling.

and even though we aren’t home yet,

i feel that we’re already there

existing beside each other.

and no matter how tough my day has been

when i can’t even see the light,

as long as she’s there

to remind me she cares

all of a sudden

everything becomes alright

every i love you is special

even the ones left unsaid

especially the ones left unsaid.

i love you. whispers my bed

which my mother made for me

because i forgot to.

i love you. whispers my cellphone

in my ear as i talk with my brother.

i love you. whispers the bear on my shelf

a gift from a friend i barely see anymore.

i love you. whispers my heart

a chorus of all the people it holds dear in me.

and as i notice these i love yous

hidden as they may be.

everything becomes alright

all too suddenly.