Time-Crunched: On Writing

Like Colin, I too have been insanely busy ever since school has started.  Being the second sophomore ever in AP Physics at my high school is kind of intense.  That said, I don’t have a lot of time.  This post is hastily being thrown together in the few spare minutes I have between my seemingly endless pile of homework and band practice, so I apologize for its poor quality and I hope I can write something more enlightening and worthwhile later.   But for now, here are my crunched-for-time thoughts on creative writing:

Do it.

Seriously.  Go grab something to write on and write with and write.  It doesn’t matter what or how long it is, but just write something so surreal there is absolutely no chance it could actually happen.  Write a three word summary on alien invasions.  Write a novel starring Ben Franklin and his long-lost time-travelling brother.  Write a grocery list-esque poem about absolutely nothing at all.

The weight that is lifted in just a few minutes of scribbling nonsense onto a napkin is the most freeing feeling you will ever experience.  The best part?  No one has to see what you’ve written.  These silly little thoughts are for your eyes only.  Keep your friends close and your notes closer.  You never know when one of your after-work poems will inspire your next fanfiction, or screenplay, or novel.

This is why I always carry a blue pocket notebook on my person.  I never know when I might find something worthy to write down.  Some of these gems of thought have evolved into something more, starring in a short story or emerging as the plot for my NaNoWriMo novel.  But the majority of them stay in that little blue notebook, hidden away from the rest of the world until they’re ready to grow up.

So I dare you.  I dare you to find your own little blue notebook and embrace the art of creative scribbling.

~Rizzo

Still Roses

Oh wow. It has been a while. Those first weeks of college can be hectic.

Summer is the month of regret.

As I sat on the oven top stoop, with tear stains or sweat stains (To be honest I can tell the diffrence between the two anymore), I pricked my finger on a Rose stem. This Rose had seen better days in months of yester, for the few petals groping on the stem had decay to brown due to lack of water and nutrition.  The everwatching big brother of light had no mercy on the majestic flower.

I swatted away at  battalions of flies that seemed to stalk me like a pack of carrion birds. The insect vultures neither bit nor landed but waited with carnivorous expectations. The cacophonous buzz of nails on a chalkboard.

But the Rose, Oh the Rose!  This treasure, long lost to the nature that binds and separates us all, did not die alone though it did die in vain. As the barbed beauty rolled betwixt my frail fingers a hemophilliatic event occurred. A most grotesque humor can be found in the bleeding out of veins. We expect the dams  to break and Niagara falls to occur. Poseidon’s wrath is supposed to occur underneath that thin layer of skin.  All of the gods and the angels and the devils within these unholy celestial spheres are supposed to wage war for forty days and forty nights underneath the garb storms and over the tarp of earthquakes leaving no survivors nor space left to breath in the toxic air that they created.

But that does not happen. The blood slowly drips upon stoop, like a leaky faucet. And through no fault of the Rose (for I indeed am the one picked it its beauty and not the glistening pricks) the petals and and blood continues to helplessly fall until they mix together and become one.

And so I lay on the stoop in this horrid season of regret, with the eye of god blinding me. The blood, our blood, still falling  over itself with no hope of return to the way it once was.

And the the blood still falls to the stoop.

And the vultures still descend to feast.

And I still  sit

and

exist.