leave a mark with this messy handwriting of mine (3/7/2023)

Having to challenge yourself out of your comfort zone mindset is draining. It's not the most ideal and most nights I just want to not go out and retreat to my hobbit hole. But I've taken myself on dates alone and this was the promise for 2023: to do all that I aspired to at the beginning of the semester/year. It's been long enough away from this blog that I can reflect and have genuine well thought out content instead of something rushed to just be out on the internet. I don't do this for views, or likes, more of a virtual journal to look back on the college years in the murky unknown waters of what comes after all this.

I'm halfway through the final draft of my manuscript and I was working on a scene for and, I kid you not, a whole month, and it finally flowed out onto paper the other day. Sometimes, when writing a scene, it takes time to write it but once you allow yourself to even if it's difficult, it will eventually come to you. I've been doing a publishing internship that has us evaluate manuscripts. I've been reading a lot more recently with these submissions and my personal reading book every night so I don't go insane in midterms week.

It's times like these, I feel writing flow and it's hard to put down my pen. I've also been battling, I mean, writing poetry for my workshop this semester. This is particularly challenging for my skill set because up until now, I thought I could get away with poetry only solely being abstract. It very much is not. I know I write too much and can't condense very well. It's one of my skills I'm improving on. Making my poems more concrete and grounded in reality is what's currently pushing me as a writer.

Anyways, enough with the existential crisis. I have a bunch of pictures that I felt the need to document and share:

For poetry, we wrote some words to tuck into a special place, like a library book, which is where I put mine. The goal was to put a portion of humanity, a mark on the world where a stranger could find it and simply wonder.

While I was walking out of dinner, I found my favorite shade of blue in the sky. Blue is my favorite color, but I'd never decided on one in particular.

I got a poetry journal and the assignment for class is daily journaling and once a week, 2 to 4 straight hours of focusing on writing. Integrating this schedule has been both therapeutic and frustrating. I was really excited to buy this journal, it was like ten dollars and made me extremely happy to find. It's filled with all the unhingedness and irrationality you can imagine.

This and the one below are pieces of advice from one published writer I take inspiration from. Lou has written i fell in love with hope and I've been following very dedicatedly because I feel like if this person can publish the story they wanted to, so can I :)

I couldn't have said it better. Writing as much as possible is essential, and writing every day isn't plausible, but at least making an effort to try.

I've been taking inspiration from my favorite book of all time, Addie LaRue. I was having some difficulty last week with inspiration, so I cracked open this spine and feathered through the pages, looking for parts of these sentences that stuck out to me that I could springboard ideas from. Going back to your favorites stories is something I will always recommend.

This was a jolting experience, to see the sun rise instead of set. I never get many chances to see events like this happen, so it felt very special.

I got a new job! This was a very taxing process to go through, but it's been worth it. Do not settle, there's is always something better if you are not personally happy.

I found this quote on a sticker and this is my quote for this year.

Be productive to the point where you can balance mental health and also have a productivity for the things you are passionate about.

Invest time in yourself, what you love and then what you wish to achieve will become easier to tackle the next day.