Reshaping Reality

Since this is a new year, I decided to reshape the face of my blog. Give it a new feel, a new design, and update it for better features.  Hence my new look will be quite a bit more colorful than the previous design.

For this new year, I’ve made some goals:

1. Finish two novels. (I have two in the works already, so I just need to finish them and revise.)
2. Finish two musical compositions. (I have once again two in the works already, and I just need to finish. Maybe, I may be able to find performers, but I don’t have much faith in that.)
3. Write either two poems or one short story each month.
4. Either find a higher paying job that’s full time, or get into grad school with all of it paid for in fellowships and teaching (or research) positions.

When I write it like this, it doesn’t seem to be that much, but then I try to accomplish these goals and life sweeps me away.  My health is often not the best it could be no matter how hard I try to be healthy by eating well and exercising when I can.  Although my health sometimes may drag me down, I do try to write daily in my journal and notebook I keep with me at all times, especially when I cannot access my computer.  My financial situation is precarious, and thus I am trying hard to save what little I have left over from my bills, so I can have some buffer in case accidents or illnesses tumble into my life; this leaves me often worried and so finding ways to supplement my income is a task I often find myself doing rather than writing.  My full time job takes up a lot of my weekdays, and leaves me exhausted in the evenings, but I still try to at least do something functional on such evenings — such as take notes for future blog entries. I have piles of notes for these, and now need to take the time to write them into coherent blogs.  My weekends are my best times for writing, especially in larger blocks, but it’s also the time where friends and family seek fellowship time, and so it is finding the balance in all of this in order to keep moving forward on my goals.  If and when I do enter grad school, I will find time to be an ever more precious commodity, and so scheduling writing times will become even more of a necessity than it is right now.  All of these are factors in my life that often serve as obstacles in my writing life, but all I can do is recognize what they are and take back control in what I can.  Finding ways to navigate these obstacles is part of the maze of life, and in time, I will find the solution if I try hard enough.

2013 is a year for me to attempt to stay focused, to keep scheduling times for writing, and no matter how depressed, ill, and/or exhausted I may feel, I will attempt to write something, whether it is just a poem or a short story or just a few paragraphs of my novel.  Maybe it’ll be just a few notes for my song, but either way, I will keep moving forward. One foot in front of the other.  That is all anyone can do.

For inspiration, here is a poem I wrote this past month:

Burning
by A. Zingler

Fragrant conflagration,
a simmering cesspool
of sulfurous bubbles,
suffocating the air
with the stench of
rotten eggs.

Seething, roiling,
hidden flames
beneath the crust
of the earth.

Igniting the atoms,
each shoving
repelling,
coalescing
into the swirling tempest
of the geyser’s flagrant display,
depositing its boiling innards
high into the air,
the droplets striking the dirt –

each a footprint

of our planet’s bowels.

Written and Revised December 2012.