Could it be? Have ah truly returned to this here ol’ blog thingy-ma-jiggy? I reckon’ I have, babe!
It’s officially been over four years since I last shared some words with the world on this here site. Four years, y’all. If it was a child, it would be able to tell you that it wanted to have Chic-Fil-A for lunch and let everyone on the line know that you were wearing a wig. That’s how long it’s been.
Continue readingAnd here I am again, breaking promises that I intended to keep.
As much as I’d like to blame everything under the sun for my absence, it really all boils down to being lazy and feeling uncomfortable — either I’m too lazy (yeah I admit it) or I’m just not in a comfortable space to write. Either way, it kinda bummed me out that I couldn’t get this post up within the first week of the year, let alone the first month of the year (I’ve been working on it since Jan. 1st!), so here I am trying to play catch up. The following includes updates on my Twitter progression, K-Pop addiction, and overall outreach:
TWITTA: It goes without saying that I’m addicted to this thing called Twitter. Why? Well, probably because I get to express the full range of my personality using 140 characters at a time. It’s pretty easy to do considering that I’ve found a home with Black Girl Nerds and its followers who are like my kinfolk. #BlackSheepsUnite! With that being said, my Twitter usage has grown EXPONENTIALLY and at the moment I’m clocking about 12,700 + tweets from conversations and live tweeting a bunch of TV shows.
I’ve been told that I do it for the glory of being re-tweeted, but you know what?
IT’S TRUE!
Getting a re-tweet is like a form of social validation — someone actually thinks your thoughts/remarks/ideas are worth sharing with other people. I mean, since I’ve been live tweeting Grimm, I’ve had my tweets featured in a recap blog (that you can read here) AND I’ve been RTd by several members of the cast including Claire Coffee (Adalind Schade), Bitsie Tulloch (Juliette) — not once, but twice — and Mr. Reggie Lee (Wu), as well as the Grimm official handle. This has led me to one of my Twitter goals of 2014: to get the whole Grimm cast to re-tweet me. I already spoke with Silas Weir Mitchell (Monroe), so I’m waiting on Bree Turner (Rosalee), Sasha Roiz (Captain Renard), Russell Hornsby (Hank), and David Giuntoli (Nick) to get their act together so I can round it out.
K-POP: Roll your eyes all you want at me and my K-Pop, but I don’t give a damn. I keep telling you people that Koreans will break into the US market with their infectious songs and savvy choreography, but you continue to ignore me… Either way, I’ve been embracing more K-Pop songs as time goes by, either by watching MNet America or trolling YouTube after listening to a song I already love. At the moment, my songs are as follows:
“Hush” By Miss A
“One Way Love” by Hyolyn
“Something” by Girl’s Day
And you can tell that I really like them because I actually BOUGHT some of them from iTunes. That’s LOVE.
Busy Business Lady: For quite some time, I’ve avoided talking about my jewelry making on here, for risk of sounding like someone who’s trying to palm off her little trinkets to you guys. I mean, ultimately I’d love it if you guys would go to my store, Pretty Poet Ink, and peruse, but I’m not going to (right now, that is). But considering it is something I’ve been working on, I guess it belongs in this update. I’ve actually gotten better with making, naming, tagging, and posting these pieces, but it’s a buttload of work, and there aren’t enough hours in the damn day. Sometimes just looking at my tools on my table becomes overwhelming. But, I managed to make a few new pieces — despite it all. I have to admit, I’ve gotten tons better than I was last year, but I’ve still got a ton of improvements to make.
Last, but not least, I’ve been investing in myself. Through Twitter and Facebook, I’ve been trying to meet new people, and get my voice out there, and it feels nice sometimes. Hopefully, I can do this reaching out this more often, and who knows? It can open some doors for me.
Any who, I can FEEL this post getting a lot longer than I intended. Hopefully I’ll be back to drop some of my other overall goals, Disney Head Scratchers (you thought I forgot, didn’t you? I totally didn’t!), and all other trivial, nonsensical, poetic, prosy endeavors that come to mind.
And hopefully, it’ll be more timely.
Con Amor,
-Alja
‘Alo there, friends!
I know. I’m a terrible person who hasn’t written on this blog for months — after making a solemn oath to be better. Sigh. Well, at least I’m writing today! That should count for something, right?
Things have been really busy — both in real life and in my head, but that’s still no excuse for being inconsistent. So what if my bed seems like the best thing in the world to dive into after a day at the office?! I should still make time to write! Especially if it’s what I want to do. But for the record, there is an upside to being busy (and unabashedly wrapped up in my comforter) and I shall tell you all about it.
So remember last time when I talked about how Twitter got me a chance to video chat with Silas Weir Mitchell of Grimm (SQUEALS – highlight of my life) and score some sweet goods from Da Vinci’s Demons? Yeah, so I’ve basically become a bit more vocal on Twitter. OK, A LOT more vocal on Twitter. In part because started watching a lot more TV (which can be attributed to my new job), mostly because there a lot of good shows out this year. ANYWAY, I say all of that to say that I’ve been live tweeting and my tweets are actually being heard… well, read. I got me a few more shining moments that I can’t help but be proud of, even if they’re pretty small.
First, I got a shout out from the digital mag, Vibe Vixen, for one of my tweets during the Scandal Season 3 premiere.
Yup, that happened. But that wasn’t all.
Next up, my tweets with fellow Sleepy Hollow fans about Ichabod Crane’s fashion sense landed on the web edition of the South African magazine You.
Yeah, the highlighted portion right? That’s me. If you can’t make out what I said, then I suggest you go read the article. It’s a pretty fun read and well, I’m mentioned in it.
And of course with the return of Grimm, my fangirl live tweeting returned. That being said, I did land a couple re-tweets from the Grimm Twitter handle (score!) and a couple of my tweets have been featured in the awesome gif-infused Grimm recaps at the blog, Random Musings from the Kristen Head.
I mean, I got mentioned two weeks in a row! I don’t know how all the other people who were being mentioned felt, but I know that I literally felt like this:
Of course, there are other perks to having my tweets being read, including gaining more followers. While my follower count hasn’t necessarily spiked to extremes, I’ve come to meet a few new people… which leads me to what I mentioned earlier.
So in addition to being vocal on Twitter for the purposes of TV, I’m also on Twitter more thanks to finding the mothership in the website, Black Girl Nerds.
Yes. You read that correctly. There I learned that the word “blerd” (aka black nerd) was actually a thing (like seriously, why didn’t people tell me about that when I was growing up?!) and that it was OK to be one.
*side note*: I have to admit, after the last podcast about ‘blerds’ I don’t know if I’m a full-blooded “blerd” or just skating on the surface, but I digress.
Anywho, it opened up my eyes to a gamut of nerdom I didn’t know exist and the scores of people who share the same intense feelings I have towards numerous things that I will omit for now because… well, I want to. Essentially, what I’m saying is that I’ve found a vast group of like-minded people and it’s AWESOME. Quite honestly, they make my day go by with random Twitter conversations on everything from Hall & Oates to cartoon theme songs. Happy sigh.
It’s AMAZING!
Before, when I live tweeted a show, I thought I was alone. Now, I can have full-on conversations with other individuals who are going through the motion with me and when they like what I say, they re-tweet, and it’s amplified in the Twittersphere. Lovely!
Not only am I building some sort of an awareness of myself online, but I’ve found a group of (should I dare say it?) friends. Tear.
*cue Michael Jackson’s “You Are Not Alone”*
Yikes, I forgot how pasty he was in that video… but you get the point.
Yes, so now that I’ve got you guys all up to speed and what not, expect some more posts — some poetic, some about music you’re afraid to listen to, and some other stuff that you’re probably going to be like “WTF is she talking about?!”
Oh, and if I don’t write something new, feel free to like hit me up on Twitter and get in my face about it because sometimes I really do need a swift kick.
Con Amor
“You’re either in love with what you do, or you’re not in love.”
These were the words that I read in the back of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. And it’s almost as though I cannot escape them. Isn’t this the universal truth about anything that you invest your time and energy into? You either love it or you don’t.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m halfassing my goals because I’m not in love with them. Maybe I’m just in love with the idea and not the action itself … just like those women who love weddings and the idea of love but forget that they have to be in love and in a marriage the next day. Maybe…
After I finished Farenheit 451 I thought to myself, what would happen to us if there weren’t any books? What would happen to us, if we didn’t have a few words on a page to enlighten, to inspire, to sympathize? What if we only had bright lights and sounds to comfort us? Immediately, I thought I’d go insane. Even though I do not read as much as I would like to, the idea of having my face glued to a colorful box 24/7/52 just made me lose it internally. Can you imagine how mushy our brains would become?
But then I thought about the bigger issue … the issue of having a cause to fight for. And I wondered if I was “fighting” hard enough to become what I ultimately want to be. I know that my writing isn’t up to par, and that half the time (well, in the past few months, rather) my thoughts are disjointed … slightly incoherent. But does that mean I should stop all together — or just fight harder?
“They must write you. They must control you,” said Bradbury. “They plot me. I never control. I let them have their lives. ”
Word.
“I just let them speak. I don’t control them; I simply give them a podium and let them talk to me. All my good stories are told to me by the characters. I don’t write my stories. They write me.”
I used to just sit and wait. And then all of a sudden, a wave would wash over me. I would just start typing and typing away and next thing you know, there were characters on a page. And they were doing things. And saying things. And loving people. And kissing people. And killing people. The experience was like … a movie playing in the dark recesses of my mind and my hands were trying ever so hard to catch every moment, every detail so that it was out of my mind and onto a medium that everyone else could see. But it seems as though the movie theater is closed. And No matter how hard I try to pry it open, the boards are nailed down tight.
“You have to believe in that self as a writer, or you shouldn’t be doing it.”
Is it that my belief is not as strong … that I lack the appropriate amount of faith? Three unfinished novels, an unfinished novella and an unfinished book of short stories. People say that stories cannot write themselves, but I believe they can.
Maybe my characters have abandoned me until I am ready once again to give them all their much needed attention. Maybe they’re waiting until I fully believe that I am the one to tell their stories.
I need to stop “wanting” to do something and just do it.
I went on Instagram the other day and captioned this Michael’s inspirational photo with this spiel about how I need to be more creative, and/or write more. Ask me what I’ve done so far. Go ahead, ask. Better yet, why don’t you guess. That’s right … nothing.
I’ve got this huge mental block that’s a mixture of procrastination and utter fear and it’s making me freak the f-ck out. My ultimate goal in life is to be a creator — in multiple senses of the word and I find that my creative process is just not what it used to be. And that scares me. Have I lost it? Have I lost my ability to create?
Most nights I feel as though I’m sitting the dark, waiting for the muses to speak. A soft whisper, whimper, anything in my ear. And I just can’t find it. I can’t find the words or the will to start. Am I going deaf, or are they just not talking anymore?
“I want to…” is how I preface sentences these days. I don’t like it. The only way to make it stop is to be proactive and my normal surges of artistic, innovative energy are just NOT there.
I swear, this is why some of the more creative people throughout history had to smoke opium, or drink heavily in order to produce masterpieces. This damn pressure to make something out of nothing. It’s insane!
But I’m rambling…
I saw a lady today and I tried to craft a hint story about her:
“She reminded me of mocha and chocolate, but looked nothing like it. Pouted lips and tiny wefts of hair she struggled to contain with a pin.”
Then after a minute of thinking, I found that I didn’t like it. And it was a word over. But in the back of my mind I congratulated myself, stating that at least I tried. I wanted to craft a hint story and I did. Failed technically, but I went after it.
Where has the inspiration gone? Am I going insane? Am I slowly but surely going out of it because I’m over-thinking and over-analyzing the situation at hand? It should be pretty simple to just do something — to just get up, and push myself to write something or craft something. To just do, instead of wanting to do.
Is this quarter life crisis just kicking my ass in more ways than one?
GRRRRRRRRR!
In the past, when I wrote, it was almost like an out-of-body experience — my thoughts just floated onto the page and came alive on their own. I was a vessel and the story, its characters, the emotions … everything just came out of me just like Ray Bradbury said about all his best stories. They wrote themselves and he was just the person, the vessel they used to come into existence. Sigh..
Well, at least I wrote today. That’s better than nothing.
Hello all!
I have to admit, I am utterly ashamed of myself. By not writing to you all (on a consistent basis), I’m failing myself. So, I make a resolution (once again) to jump right back into being a more frequent blogger. Lord knows it’ll take some time, but I’m going to work hard towards it. Even if I have to write about things that do not pertain to my several unfinished novels (which I intend on working on).
First on the list, the book I am currently reading: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin.
So if you guys know me, you know that I have sort of a soft spot for science fiction and fantasy. I stumbled upon the book after hearing it referenced in that movie The Jane Austen Book Club, which was also based on a book. I figured if one of the main characters made such an argument for his love interest to read it, then shoot, I should read it too.
I will not lie — it took me a minute to get into it. Not knowing that this book was a part of a larger series, you can imagine the numerous questionable looking expressions on my face when I fell on weird ass city names, species of humans and the word kemmer which is like one of the MAJOR themes of the book.
Nonetheless, I continued to read and found myself getting increasingly immersed in it — especially because I had never read a book about an androgynous race of people. They are not androids, they’re not “aliens” in the sense that we know them, they’re a race of hermaphroditic beings that mate once a month almost on a menstrual cycle!
Consider my MIND #BLOWN. Add the fact that a person can be either man or woman at a different cycle?!?!?!? Could you imagine that?!
And this is why the people of their world believe that there is no cause for war; there is no imbalance of hormones to create a feeling of superiority. At the same time, it’s awkward because there is no gender, the society is just a mass of the same people.
Anyway, I’m starting to enjoy the book because of its shift in narration — and because this book was published in like 1969. It’s pretty freaking amazing that this was around at a time where social constructs were being challenged, but at the same time remained very much rigid.
I’m at a point in the book now where POVs are about to converge and I’ll finally get to see them interact once more. I have to say this book is not necessarily an easy read, but some of the metaphors are beautiful and some of the quotes make me want to highlight them for forever.
—
As for everything else going on? I’ve halted on the period piece, despite the fact that I have the entire plot mapped out. Finding the words to move the plot can be so hard to do sometimes, and I don’t really want to force it. And my fantasy novel (pfft), I haven’t looked at the in a while. My novella is on hiatus BUT I intend to make a triumphant return and finish at least ONE this year … maybe … no, I have to. I just have to!
Mucho besitos!
-Alja
I didn’t want to believe that he got that bruised eye in a fight. His face was too sweet for that. His downy soft baby blues were those that could only belong to the gentlest of God’s creatures. Maybe he got in an accident…a rousing game of football maybe? His six-year-old niece or nephew accidentally hit him with an elbow. He was a bit miffed at the time, but held back his anger toward the paid to not scare the kid. Or maybe his cute but clumsy girlfriend mistakenly punched a bit too hard while they pretended to fight in their cozy one bedroom apartment. His clothes alone made him seem like a seemingly pacifistic person: grey wool jacket, colorful plaid shirt, coifed hair kept disheveled by the headphones over his head. Anyone that peaceful looking couldn’t get a bruise like that in a heated rage filled fight.
His knuckles showed no sign of bruising…except for a cut on the knuckle of the index finger of his right hand. No one carefully shooting through his MP3 player looking for a train ride selection could’ve gotten that bruise on his eye in a fight. No one with a big brown satchel, possibly filled with books, music, an old sweaty gym shirt and towel could’ve gotten that eye bruised in any way that wasn’t purely by mistake.
Amazing-
I consistently find myself in these awkward situations
amused by seemingly promising and provoking conversations
then left in a state of silent infatuation
degraded,
deflated.
I’ve opened Pandora’s box and find the lid too heavy to shut
second guessing,
ever questioning,
the mixed feelings and anxiety wrestling restlessly in my gut.
Stalking,
gawking,
looking for some glimmer of a response, a clue, to find
what’s going on to give a little ease to the thoughts in my mind
hoping to put these puzzle pieces in a straight line.
Confused,
at first amused, but now bemused
I refuse to be in this trapping contraption
attracted by attention and undone by dejection
waiting for the other shoe to drop – or should I say
flip-flop.
Phasing,
getting ready to start the process of fading,
putting memories into the furthest recesses for bating
as I can no longer provide energy to keep concentrating
on my infallible ability to attract derogating.
No more debating.
No more waiting,
tired of being the patient to this impatient torture of never knowing what lies beneath
just to learn there’s nothing below the surface that I seek.
Tired of being the mouse-turn-cat in this chase
just to end up losing the race.
This time I’m resigning from the game before the stakes get to high
no poker face
no saving grace
I fold and leave without the little tid-bits I’ve already sold.
Some days I wonder to myself
“What’s the use?”
the back and forth’s been
going around in circles
and we can never get to a
point of parallel lines –
going forward with no
inteferring intersection.
It’s humorous how time
can make barely existing
troubles stew into
never ending shouting matches –
dreams disappear and from
the shadow of doubt
nightmares take its place.
Why do we bother?
What love do we have to keep us
united when silence slowly
tears us apart and we both don’t
care to mutter words to keep it
together.
What we once had was beautiful,
but it seems almost impossible
to recover, it seems like
“Once Upon A Time,” we were
requited lovers.
But now, the dust has settled
and what we had feels lost.
The stars are going and maybe
it’s time we finally made our lives
uncrossed.
Hello ALL!
First, I apologize for my absence. For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on another project of mine which I was hoping to do a little bit better with all the energy that I’ve been putting into it. Now that the hardest part is over, I’m turning some of my attentions back to WRITING.
Now, back to reality: NANOWRIMO! Continue reading
AljaTheWriter 