A Reprise

I have been working on my new site design for Winter Light, and I find it really frustrating. It's like having to learn an entirely new language just to understand one poem. At the same time, I want to do more in web design than Winter Light. This is an initial challenge for me. I have already tried a few things, but I haven't updated it to the site. I thought I would just wait till I was done. My goal is to have the design finished by April 1 for my blog, and integrate it into all my applications by May 1. To be honest, I find that a lot less intimidating. The technical aspects actually come easier to me than the design. After struggling for two days, I've decided to go back to the book and focus on learning design, not CSS, since I have that down. I can't put my finger on quite what it was that made my earlier designs feel right. They are very 1.0 and very simple, but I have no problem with them like I do this two-column layout.

At sunrise the air was crisp. For the first time in longer than I could remember I detected a touch of gold at the very borders of the sky. Some touch of the sun had penetrated the heavy soot that surrounded my planet, encasing it in a frozen drear. There was one other thing besides the thought of Lysander that could lighten my heart, I discovered that morning. It was a hope for reprieve. An idea, even one small thing I could do to stave off the monotonous, identical days, to visit old Agatha on the roof, if there she still lived. Dust motes drifted like vapor in the dawning light as I softly climbed the carpeted stairs. There were leaves blown across the landing through a broken window. The debris was withered and colorless, turning the carpet to a forest floor, where things decayed. The wind stirred my hair across my neck as I ascended, growing more breathless at each floor. The building was generic. My apartments might have been anything: a hospital, a school, a dorm. Memories of al...

I managed to come in right before the storm broke; that's lucky. It was cold this morning and it's only gotten steadily colder. Now it's raining, but I am very comfortable indoors with a raspberry chai. I have not been comfortable with my creative self lately. I think it may be because I have begun to go into different directions and want to feel free to go in those directions, or any direction, because that for me is creativity, total freedom. I knew I was going to work on this today, so I thought about it a lot, and I realized that I've been making a lot of incorrect assumptions about how I used to be. For one thing, I have always struggled to express my inner workings and longings and really, I did not struggle more with this than in college. I was faced with many pressures inhibiting my freedom of expression with my environment, my peers, my life situation. Many things I wrote during that time were unadventurous, though I forced myself to write, and it was much ...

I look out onto the yellow and brown vegetation beneath my window, at the castle-like buildings far away and wonder where do I lie in all of this? There was a time when I was unfettered. This was a time before I entered the working world, before I was independent. My heart was free as a bird when I was in college. I did not know what happiness I experienced in my creativity because I had never known different. In other aspects of my life I knew pain but my stories, sprung up lately from a gothic mist into an immersing Pre-Raphaelite painting, were a richness and the most beautiful thing I had ever known. That the most beautiful thing I knew to exist happened inside of me made me very happy, even though I didn't know it. Now I know the sun is setting, even though I can't see it, because the bank of brown, twisted trees and shrubs is lit gold, like a reflection from a golden chalice. Slowly, slowly it will fade until everything is a homogenous, uncertain gray. This is the nightma...

Josette faced off the wolf with a sad, cold stare. She was divided. Her mind was clear and resigned, but her heart pumped furiously at the certainty of meeting her death. It lingered in the gloom like scarcely more than a shadow and slowly melted away without a sound. After a moment Josette thought she heard the patter of claws on stairs. She stared unmoving for a long moment. Her fear and excitement had been replaced with a heavier despair than previously, and she knew she could not continue for much longer in this void. Tomorrow, she decided, she would go to the only other human she knew yet existed, in all the world she had ever known. Josette could not really sleep. She was aware of the passing of time as she tossed and listened to the silence of the streets below, where once cars had sped all hours of the day and night. She felt the emptiness of her tall apartment building like an ache in her chest. She was so vulnerable, and yet so careless of herself. Once, she murmured, "W...

A valentine poem for Nathan.

This story teaches me of stories. It is realistic, harsh yet beautiful. It reminds me of the integrity that should go into a story. It is humbling and perhaps painful for an adult to read, while inspiring for a child. It shows what we might become through work and self-denial and shadows some of what children find when they go out into the world. I have always been unimpressed by the great repressors, the exterminators of humanity. These authors seem to indicate what I so often feel, that the seed of badness is in many, that some people will do as much ill as they can. They are separated by dictators only by their lack of power. When I see this in my daily life it is painful. Also the seed of badness is in each of us, and the seed of greatness is in each of us. The protagonist laments often that she doesn't have the strength to do what she must do, that God has made a weak, incapable vessel in her, though as the reader we are awed by her strength, that this fourteen year old girl c...