Thursday, December 23, 2010

You Can't Go Home Again

Have barely touched my story lately since other things have kept me busy.  Namely trying to find a job, and traveling home for Christmas.  Also, I'm totally out of money, so I had to open up sketch commissions to make some cash.  So most of my extra time I spend sketching, not writing.  But I did finally get this book I ordered to help me research called Voodoo In New Orleans.  It was written in the 1940s, even, so the voice and terminology and attitude is much closer to what I need for my story than if I were to use a book written in the last decade or two.  It also goes into great detail about the history of voodoo practices in NO, so that's useful too. 

As a gift to my mother for Christmas, my aunt bought me a plane ticket home for the holiday, and I was very excited.  I've been away from Tulsa for about nine months now (and it felt like even longer).  But when I got here, the excitement sort of died away as I remembered why I left in the first place.  Nothing has changed.  The same situations within my family that drove me to leave are still exactly as they were, and it is horribly depressing.  My sister wants to make this a good Christmas for my mother, and I'm all for that, but it's extremely hard to pretend that everything is okay, because everybody knows it isn't.  But nobody wants to talk about it.  That's what we do in my family. We ignore things until they fix themselves or deteriorate completely.  But these problems aren't going to fix themselves.  I wish they would hurry up and rot away.

So that may be another reason I have not been writing.  Writing takes energy and a will to sit down and work, but I am completely sapped of that.  Drawing is much easier for me.  It is less work, and I can do other things while I draw, such as watch TV or listen to music.  When I write, it takes all my brain power.  I can't have distractions.  It isn't even very fun a lot of the time.  People who are not writers do not understand the effort and aggravation that goes into making one smooth, flawless sentence.  I have a fight with every word that goes on the page.  If when you read my writing it flows effortlessly from one idea to the next, trust that I toiled and revised and edited the shit out of it to make it be that way.  It doesn't come easy to me.  It comes, and it demands that I do it, and I do it because if I didn't I would probably descend into any number of psychological problems.  I am a writer, but don't think I enjoy it. >:[

That said, I'm doing character sketches for $10.00 a piece.  That's super cheap.  Hire me pls. ;3;