(no subject)

When I decide to do something, often there are many steps to it - and I get stuck in an early step, or in between steps. For example, when I want to do a certain craft, one of the early steps is research and references. Then, it stops, and my attention is taken away for minutes that turns into months. Or, maybe I do the research, and then it's time to gather the materials needed. I plan a big shopping trip, I save away the money, and then I hit the art store and get back home really happy with all the stuff I'd gotten. Supplies! Tools! Hurrah! And then I unpack and lay them out, and prepare the workspace, and then...

 

It gathers dust. Or gets stuff put on top of it. I look at it, and think, I'd like to do that. Then, it still doesn't happen.

 

I wonder, why I get stuck like that? Am I so fickle, is my motivation that transient? Even after investing the money into it? Sometimes I wonder if I work better with chaotic crafts rather than iterative, step-by-step crafts, because natural breaks between steps cause me to stop there, and once stopped, it's difficult to get started again. But, in chaotic crafts, ones requiring work in no particular order... web design is a good example of this... I really get ahead of myself. I graphically craft something beautiful, or I crack some programming logic puzzle - or both. And then, I find that for me to continue, I have to go back and do something, and then I jump to another thing once I'm done that - I have about a dozen things going on at once, and I dart between all of them like a bird flits from tree to tree, and every so often something gets completed and other things get started and woven in. Structure takes form of its own accord - giving the thing structure itself, all the different kinds of structure it could possible have, is one of those random tasks that fit into the chaos.

 

And that's the way I write, too. I don't write linearly. I don't start with an introduction, or character, or chapter. I start with an idea, and... they just chaotically emerge and assemble. It's as if the story in both space and time exists somewhere and I'm randomly popping into the timeline, into the places, of the world and what happens right then appears with varying degrees of clarity, and I try to spill it out into words, and then I'm whisked to a completely different place and time. Scenes in the late story spring to life in minute meta-detail, then something at the start, then a couple paragraphs near the end get written, quotes from various parts of the story appear, a barrage of ideas gets woven into the world canon, the world slowly shapes itself and reshapes itself from all the pieces as they come together.

I sometimes wonder if that's even how I exist. A flickering candle, in and out. With my identity, there is no starting point. It's not a linear progression of understanding. There is no groundedness - I'm not a creature of the land; there is fluidity, but it's not like the current of water. I'm like the air, the sky, the wind, blowing and then switching, full of eddies and gutters and swillages and scuppers and baggywrinkles, even tumblebones. Things from the past echo of the future; things in the present were told of in the past in head-slappingly obvious ways that were impossible to accept or understand until the future. My life gets shattered and burned and re-formed in strange, chimeric ways. The call of my heart is a song, a deep and powerful song, but I only catch snatches of it, instances, echoes. Momentary clarity - like that of several days a while ago when it was again revealed what I had to do, what was important - and then I get shunted to a different part of the song, or even a completely different and much softer song from another part of the heart, or somewhere else entirely. When the song becomes deep and steady, when I am once again re-formed completely and safe, perhaps that is when I will be able to live and understand and burn steady, again, and fulfill the life-path I must fly.