blah! humbug!

Please, if you've got the time, go on over to The Repository.

The illustrious Geds started it as a place to house stories etc., and I've actually taken him up on the offer to join him. He's already got a story going, Redemption Songs, about a man who is learning to appreciate life. You should read it, it's good! At first I looked at the narrator's introspectiveness and saw only what I knew of the author, but after awhile I started to kinda see where he was going with it. So I'm interested to see what happens next.

The story I posted today is the first fiction piece I've written since, well, middle school. I've tried to write prose story things since then--scifi, autobiography, and even, with great trepidation and mixed results, erotica--but insecurity always got the better of me within at most a page or two. I always had to shut it down, or else collapse in a gibbering heap of self-recrimination. But I always hoped, still, that eventually I'd work through whatever issues I wrestled with enough to pick up tale-telling, to get some of the scenes I picture in my imagination or dream while sleeping out in a form other than poetry. (Although I intend "The Knees of the Gods" to alternate chapters between prose and poetry. Keep me from gnawing off all my fingernails over this thing. I might not have the stones to try dactylic hexameter for chapter 2, but it is Zeus talking, so I should at least try.) Of late I am more determined than ever to avoid Dad's fate--dead, with a twenty-year-old first draft gathering dust in a drawer, and only the oral accounts of the bulk of the stories remaining.

Oy vey. Shouldn't be that hard, should it? I've gone like a week without posting here.

Not so much that I haven't been able to write, as that I've been casting around in my mind for something that seems worth writing about. I'm in one of those transitional phases where everything that usually amuses me feels flat and stale. Seems like depression, but I know it isn't. It's actually the first part of the upward slope in the sine wave of my long mood cycle.

See, everybody has a mood cycle. I think of it as a homeostatic balance in the personality, as it goes through a regular series of necessary maintenance functions. The shorter, day-to-day moods are as variable as the stock market, and as bizarrely interrelated with the events of a day. But the longer cycle has to do with personal growth, the identity meeting and adapting to new actions and circumstances. There's the peak, when a new lesson or piece of the identity puzzle has just been integrated. You feel like the world's your oyster, or like taking on the whole Empire yourself. Then the slow downslope, as you take your new knowledge or identity part and test it out in daily life. Although it's usually an improvement on the way things were before, you notice more and more aspects of reality and yourself that you still can't quite handle, even with your newfound excellence. After a while you hit a bottom (not THE bottom, which is a whole different kettle of worms), where you realize you need to change something else, learn something new, in order to keep going. The slow upslope is the time of figuring out what new thing it is you're going to learn, what else you're going to become next. Eventually you learn it, experience the "eureka!" and the euphoria that comes with it, and the cycle starts anew.

Today sure didn't feel like a eureka moment. On the other hand, I did write a story. So in the immortal words of Lois Bujold's young Emperor Gregor, "Let's see what happens."