In the Words of a Character
Brainstorming a setting and being unoriginal and okay with it
Transcript of journal entries 4/22/23: one-page, writing chores, and a creative brainstorm
One-Page
I’m starting today off with Wulfric and the Best Science and Nature Essays 2022. These anthologies are great for learning about topics I would never normally know to think or learn about.
This essay I’m currently listening to is about California’s ecology and environmental break down.
I’ve been having this idea worming around about how climate change is a lich/dark force. Something that grows off evil and corrupts all nature around them. Like the monster in Ferngully, the oozing black thing that eats the exhaust and grows stronger.
It’s not a new idea, but there’s something that could be new there. Something maybe worth exploring. Not here but deep in the back of my mind to emerge again in another form possibly that of a story.
What I Will Do From My Stack
Carry pocket journal
Pick a Writing Wilderness Project
Forest in Distance
South Sound Book Crawl
Listen intentionally to world around me
Write on bench on trail
Finish description excel sheet exercise
Go on hike with pack
Surprise Poem
Inside the split back of trees with sap dripping in you like cum and tears rolling ants. When you breathe can you taste the poison, love? Does my carbon choke you? It's all just to big to fit inside something so old.
Darling Setting Free Write - Voice of Miracle
You know what Nevada was before it was Nevada? Fuck if I do. I remember there was a whole month dedicated to the Indigenous history of Darling and the larger setting of Nevada.
To one, Nevada is just Darling in different masks. Here its a flat long stretch of desert without end that takes you always back home. There its a casino island surrounded by the blackest graveyard you’ve never seen. There’s holes and blood in that red dust.
If Nevada calls, tell her I’ve gone back already. No need to call me home. I’m already on the road in a borrowed truck I feel is destined for a bonfire and bullets from some asshole’s gun.
Just hit the mile marker and midnight is here with me. Me and the ghosts, oh fuck.
I welcome darkness with the click of my headlights saying goodbye. It’s darker here than in hell. At least that’s what Stamey says, her head half gone and blood dripping to the upholstery only to disappear before making a pool. Good. I don’t have the time to clean up apparition stains.
It’s bumpy once we leave the highway. The window rolls down with a hiss that turns into that one long desert drum as I let all the windows down. The ghosts silently sing a song. Or maybe it’s not silent and I just can’t hear it under the *thump* *thum* *thumb* of the red dust and months swirling around me beneath a thousand stars hidden behind a dark and grey cloud.
Rain will soon come to turn all this land to swamp. In a sense, all us desert babes are just dried out swamp bitches and hags looking for lakes that took off centuries ago on the feet of birds.