New blogs and old prose. (And a dab of romance.)

So I am updating again!  Hooray!  Right now I'm in the process of finishing the lyrics on a couple of songs.  I'm also working a song parody project, and I'm trying to finish up a fan-fiction serial I've been writing since earlier this year.  (Yes, I do write fan-fiction.  At the risk of sounding like an even bigger nerd, it's World of Warcraft fan-fiction.  Most of it belongs squarely in the humor section.) 

Anyway, I've started to link to blogs and Twitter feeds that I read fairly often.  Some of them are written by people I know, some are not.

Should I mention now that I have acquired a boyfriend?  Perhaps so--this is a personal blog after all.  He's amazing, and you can read his random thoughts about life and musings on chess at http://www.liquideggproduct.com/.

And now, I have an old story for you that I wrote a few years back.  It was published in one journal or another.  It's to tide you over until I have new writing for you.  Or recordings.  Something!

Before I forget.

I do keep forgetting to post this, and I've had it written for weeks.  Poetry school continues!  Tonight, I bring to you the sestina, possibly the most irritating form ever.  It is a thirty-nine line poem.  The first 36 lines are grouped in six stanzas of six lines each, then a three-line "tercet," also called the "envoy."  Envoys are usually addressed directly to the person or thing that the rest of the poem is about--but not always.

The sestina becomes more difficult in that you choose six words as "ending" words for each line.  You have to use them in a set sequence, like so:

123456--first stanza
615243--second stanza
364125
532614
451362
246531
And for the last three-line stanza, it's 2/5, 4/3, 6/1.  Though you can do other forms, that's the one I used.  And to make it harder on myself, I chose to make rhyming pairs of words.  Most sestinas don't rhyme.  It's just far too difficult, because you want to try to choose words that have more than one meaning, so you don't sound like you're repeating yourself.  The best sestinas don't sound like they are using the same words over and over.

My apologies.

I've been doing stuff, obviously, but I've not had inclination to write very much here.  Then again, I'm doing very little writing in general at the moment.  Most of my time around the holiday season is given to seeing my family and friends (and co-workers) at various outings.  Also, this year I have the specter of final exams looming in a week and a half, so I've been doing a bit more on my schoolwork than I was earlier this year.

I am doing some recording this weekend, and should be doing more around Christmas.  My five-person band fell apart, but my two-person project is still ongoing, so there's that.  I have more than one creative outlet, though, so when music fails me, I turn to prose, or cooking, or...whatever, really, to occupy my brain.

In other words, there probably won't be a lot of updates here until the New Year...but I'll keep you posted.

Excelsior!

Someone needs to make me put my pencil down.

I don't know, THIS might be the most brilliant thing I've ever written, eclipsing even the Octogenarian Project.  I think this is why I get all the chicks.

I'm a hypnotist
A mathematical lyricist
So let me calculate your hypotenuse
You know what I mean
But you're so cute when you're obtuse.

Find my interior angles
I'll compute your slope
Lie tangent to my curves and become my asymptote
Let's test my theory, let's make this fact
I know you can hear me
This ain't just sex--it's math.

I'll circumscribe you
If you want, baby, I'll factor,
Derive, and divide you.
Like 5 into 30, I'm even into that
It might be dirty
But this ain't just sex--it's math.

If you've got a projectile
I've got a formula for trajectory
Don't shy from this
I'm a scientist
Of disciplines priapic and erectory.

You bring me to the vertex,
The apex, the climax
You put the (x) in S-E-X
And I
I just want to be
Your (y).

I can do you applied
Or I can do you theoretical
(That means it's all in your mind)
I can finish with solutions
Or just with hypotheticals
My methods might be spurious, but they're always exact
You know you're curious
This ain't just sex--it's math.

I really, really want to record this and make a Youtube video.  I REALLY DO.

And yet more writing.

I've been writing a lot more recently than usual.  I always write a bit, but these past couple of weeks have been a deluge.  Most of my work will probably never make it here, just my favorites.  But I wrote something that managed to touch my own heart deeply.  It's yet another villanelle, but I may love it best of all the ones I've written.


I await your favors, still dreaming of your face
If darkness overwhelms me, still that memory is mine
Maybe love is best where it is not commonplace.

I walk my past uncertainly, all my steps retraced
Through triumph and tragedy, every rise and each decline
While I await your favors, still dreaming of your face.

What came before was easy and at frenetic pace
But this is slower and not looked-for, and for all that much more fine
Maybe love is best where it is not commonplace.

What I have is little, laden with dishonor and disgrace
But in your dedicated fire inferior tempers to refined
So I'll await your favors, still dreaming of your face.

Now the scribing's almost done, vows that cannot be erased
I anticipate the seamlessness, the joy of being aligned
Maybe love is best where it is not commonplace.

No one prepared me for you, but now I've joined in the chase
To hunt and moon for something that's approaching the divine
I await your favors, still dreaming of your face
Maybe love is best where it is not commonplace.

The Octogenarian Project

So I have a friend that I will call Disclaimer Man, because he is the King of Disclaimers.  I have no doubt that when he gets married, he will be asked "Do you take this woman," etc. etc. and he will say "I do...but."

Seriously.  It will happen.

Anyway, this wonderful friend of mine issued me a mock challenge that I took seriously: to use the word octogenarian in my work.  He's getting his wish, and I enjoyed writing this beyond my ability to explain.  I mean, I didn't follow most of my normal creative process, I just wrote and laughed.

THIS IS THE BEST LOVE POEM-SONG-THING IN THE WORLD.  And it's allll for you, Disclaimer Man.

I love you like the NRA loves the Second Amendment
I love you like a dentist loves teeth
Your every wish is my commandment
As long as I'm living, your sword has a sheath.


No restrictions or limits--it's love libertarian
And I will still love you when we're octogenarians.


I love you like new mothers love naps
I love you like Kermit loves pork
I'm looking forward to popping my cap
You be the corkscrew, and I'll be the cork.


We go together like Conan and barbarian
And I will still love you when we're octogenarians.


I love you like magicians love prestidigitation
Like banks love overdraft fees
What I want from you needs no explanation
It's pretty straightforward--tab A, slot B.


I love you like Robin Hood loved Maid Marian
I love you like vultures love carrion
Like submissives love a disciplinarian
Like Karl Marx loved the proletarian
And I'll still love you when we're octogenarians.


I mean, amazing.  I don't think I can ever top that.

The Process of Writing Poetry, Part the First

I have a massive headache.  This has nothing to do with writing poetry.  Writing poetry is one of those things least likely to give me a headache.  However, if nothing I say in this entry makes any sense whatsoever, we're going to blame it on my headache.  Got that?  Good.

Of course, the poetic process is different for every poet, blah blah blah de-freakin'-blah.  We're all special snowflakes working on our "craft" (if that is not the most pretentious word ever used to describe what writers do, I am Marie of Rumania.  Not even "art" is worse).

Anyway, let's get down to brass tacks.  (Have you ever even seen a tack made of brass?  Me neither.)  The poetry form I'm talking about today is the villanelle.  You can read all sorts of interesting stuff about it on Wikipedia, because I'm only giving a basic overview.

A villanelle is a 19-line poem that uses two main repeating lines in its construction.  Because villanelles repeat so much, it's imperative that the repeating lines are used in a way that doesn't make this poem completely boring or nonsensical.  The construction is thus:

A1
b
A2

a
b
A1

a
b
A2


a
b
A1

a
b
A2

a
b
A1
A2

Theoretically, this should be pretty simple to understand, but since assumptions make us all dumb, A1 and A2 are the repeating lines.  The lowercase a's are lines that rhyme with A1 and A2, and all the b's rhyme.  Now you are smarter than you were.

So, in this case, I set out to write a love poem, but decided that I couldn't, for whatever reason, write a love poem today that was anything but dreck.  But then I started to write this, and it turned into a KIND of love poem.  Sort of.

At any rate, the first thing I do when writing a villanelle is decide what lines I am going to use for repetition, and then start brainstorming other rhyming endings.  So I came up with a first stanza:


I say all the things I've said before
Some verbatim, some paraphased
This time, though, I mean them more.

Of interest only to me is the fact that "This time, though, I mean them more" didn't start out like that.  It started as "But this time I mean them more."  I changed it for a couple of reasons I'll discuss in a moment.  But it was a perfectly good first stanza, with non-difficult rhymes to work with.  Then I brainstormed everything I could think of that rhymed with "before/more," and everything that rhymed or even just sorta-rhymed with "paraphrased."  I made sure to write down the word "semaphore" because I love that word and really, it just isn't used enough.

Here is where a villanelle gets tricky (to me).  Each stanza in the middle contains one of the repeating lines.  It's pretty imperative when I write a villanelle to make sure the other lines in the stanza support that repeating line.  So I ended up with this second stanza:

It's not a game.  I don't keep score,
But still, considering earlier days
I say all the things I've said before. 

You see?  The first two lines support the overall idea of "saying things [I've] said before."

Then I came to the third stanza.  I really didn't like the overall flow of "But this time, I mean them more" with the lines I chose here.  So I changed the line up to make the stanza flow better, and this is what I got:

I can remember vows I swore
And I kept them.  I'm still amazed.
This time, though, I mean them more.

If I had kept the "but..." line instead...it just didn't sound as good to me.  Sometimes that's the only criteria you can work on.

Of course, one of the other main ideas in writing a villanelle that you keep hold of is the fact that your two repeating lines will end up side-by-side in the last stanza.  They need to flow together well, and make sense just as a couplet.  Which I think I actually accomplished (some of my early villanelles, written when I was around 19/20, are painful because I didn't follow this rule very well).

Here is the poem in its entirety.  What I was trying to say--and you can read it any way you want--is that when we fall in love, we tend to repeat the same things over and over.  Not that they don't have meaning; that's not what I'm suggesting.  Feeling something for one person, and then feeling it again later on for another, doesn't invalidate the feeling at all.  I just found it interesting that our language of love tends to be circumscribed.  It's certainly something I try to avoid.

I say all the things I said before
Some verbatim, some paraphased
This time, though, I mean them more.

It's not a game.  I don't keep score.
But still, considering earlier days
I say all the things I've said before.

I can remember vows I swore
And I kept them.  I'm still amazed.
This time, though, I mean them more.

All that seems surreal semaphore (I knew I could use it somewhere)
Word and gesture, a love-charade
I say all the things I've said before.

To those I previously adored
I gave these gifts too.  Merely a phase.
This time, though, I mean them more.


Yet it was true then, that face I wore.
But I've dispensed with that masquerade
I say all the things I've said before
This time, though--I mean them more.

10 Books You Should Read Before You Die

I would say I have a hard time with ideas of what to blog, but that's not really the case.  I made a list of ten or so possible topics, and then I lost the list.  It's been that kind of week.

But!  Since pretty much all of you know me, you know that I am a voracious reader.  It's hazardous to put anything with words down around me--books, magazines, cereal boxes, instructions written entirely in Russian, whatever.  There are words; I must, perforce, read them.

So I decided that a list of 10 books I think everyone should read before he or she dies would be a good idea.  These are in no particular order; these are just books that have taught me a lot, or that I have enjoyed greatly.  Most of things are things I've been re-reading for years.  Without further ado...


10.  American Gods, by Neil Gaiman.
People who know a lot about mythology will enjoy this book.  People who don't know a lot about mythology will enjoy this book.  I like the style it's written in; it's the first thing I ever read by Neil Gaiman, and it caught me, and I've read everything I could get my hands on by him ever since.  It's wonderfully dark, with a little bit of humor here and there so it's not one unrelenting storm cloud.  And I learned quite a lot from the book itself.

9.  Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco.
Another one of those books I learned a lot from.  I had to read the English translation, unfortunately--my Italian's not good enough for this prose.  It's a dense book, don't get me wrong--this is not a weekend at the beach kind of read (unless you're like me, and enjoy reading ridiculously difficult books on vacation).  I love how Umberto Eco assumes his reader knows loads and loads about world religions, medieval and Renaissance history, occultism, secret societies, conspiracy theories, and hosts of other subjects discussed directly or indirectly in this book.  This is the book that The DaVinci Code wished it could be.  Simply put: read this.


8.  The Art of War, by Sun-Tzu.  
I don't reread this book quite as often as some others on this list, but it's a must-read in my opinion because it is so eminently quotable.  You can offer me your Bibles and copies of The Prophet or your Jack Kerouac, but this is probably the most quotable work in history ever.  EVER.


7.  The Once and Future King, by T. H. White.
I swear there's not going to be a lot of fantasy on this list, even though I do read quite a bit of fantasy.  But this book is different from most fantasy books.  It's more whimsical than Tolkien, less wordy and ponderous than Jordan, a bit more serious than most of Pratchett, but it's got a certain something about it...yes, at the heart it is the story of King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Gawain, Mordred, and the rest of Arthuriana (though it leaves out some of the more obscure stories)--but it's more a story about humans than anything else.  It both embraces and plays with the reverence given to Arthur stories elsewhere.  And on another note, the first "book" of the whole book was the source material for Disney's Sword in the Stone.  (Which I watched about eleventy billion times as a kid.)

6.  The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde.
It's a morality story.  And more than that, it's a morality story told by Oscar Wilde, which means it comes from a delightfully witty, twisted little place.  The evil we do to others reverberates on us--and even if you don't agree with that statement, it's a well-told story.

5.  The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins.
So let's say you're a kid, first year of college, and you've never been taught about evolution.  I mean, almost no one in your town properly understands it anyway, because we're all God-fearin' upright downright forthright conservative Protestants here, and we don't need no ape tellin' us we're monkeys!  Right.  And let's say you're a half-way logical kid, and you have no idea what the hell is going on anymore, because most of your worldview is challenged constantly now that you're out of Podunkville, population stupid.  And then you read this book for a class...this book completely changed my life.  In the best way possible.

4.  Cosmos,  by Carl Sagan.
At the risk of sounding like a dumbass talking about an incredibly thoughtful, intelligent book:  I like stars.  They're pretty.

3.  The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy.
Let people talk about "Jude the Obscure," or "Tess of the D'ubervilles."  (Actually, if we talk about "Jude," you'd assume that's the book I like more, because I somehow own 5 copies of it.  I don't know how.  Maybe I had two and they mated.)  But "The Mayor of Casterbridge" (I hate italics, and I'm only doing them in the headers for form's sake) was the first Thomas Hardy book I read, when I was maybe 14, and I loved it, and it has remained my favorite ever since, and I re-read it about once a year, whenever I can unearth it from the copies of "Jude" that litter my bookshelf.


 2.  I Know This Much is True, by Wally Lamb.
I probably should hate myself for putting something from Oprah's Book Club up here, but I don't.  Because I liked this book before Oprah did.  Also--this book concerns schizophrenia, abuse, Italian, and some other things I find interesting but I can't remember because I need to re-read this one again.  (Note:  I felt smart the first time I read it because I didn't need the footnotes for the Italian phrases.)

1.  Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley.
I hesitated between this and Heller's Catch-22, but I ultimately decided I like this book better.  Not that Catch-22 isn't a good book, it certainly is, and I may include it another similar list later.  But this book resonated more with me, in that I could see some scenarios as actually plausible--and that frightened me quite a lot.  In addition to this, it has one of the best exchanges ever:

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy." 

Okay, so I don't want God.  But I really do love those lines, because they are absolutely gorgeous.


I'm sure I'll be kicking myself thinking of other books I should've talked about, but for now, I leave it open to your criticisms, glowing praises, or offers of cash.

The Process of Songwriting

I thought this might be a good first real entry for the blog...how I write songs.  Some of this applies to how I write poetry as well, but I'll do another post on how I write poetry that gets more in-depth, because for me each system is similar but they have some major differences as well.

Generally my ideas for songs come two ways--I either get a line in my head that I really like, or I have an overarching concept I want to capture.  Usually if I write a love song, I have the idea I want to capture, and I just find words for it, whereas most of my songs about darker things come from a line or two that I get stuck in my head.  This is not a set-in-stone process, but that's just generally how it happens.

But let's say I have a line I really like--just using a random one for an example, let's say I wanted to use the line "Despair is the basis of power."  The very first thing I would do after that is figure out how I'm going to structure the song--how many verses do I want?  2?  3?  more?  How many times do I want to repeat the chorus?  Is this line for the chorus or for a verse?  And what kind of rhyme scheme do I want to employ?  (I don't generally write songs that don't rhyme).  Once I figure these things out, I write the word "power," and any other main-ending words, on a Post-It attached to my songwriting page.  I write down every rhyme and near-rhyme I can think of...such as "hour," "dour," maybe even something like "raw."  Once I've done that, I can choose words that will fit the general tone of what I'm trying to get across.

When I use an overarching idea, the process is the same but I have to work more to come up with lines.  I have a song I wrote recently that will explain this process better.

Here is the situation that led to this song being written:  I found out that my ex-husband, Shadow (not his real name), has cancer, and the situation is not optimal.  The thought of him dying, whatever else may lie between us, upset me deeply, and I thought perhaps some of that emotion could make a good song.  So I sat down to write, and came up with a chorus I liked.

So many things I should be saying
But I don't know how to begin it
I just can't imagine a world
Without you
Without you in it.

Pretty straightforward, I think.  Then I decided that each time the chorus would change a little bit, because I like it when songwriters do that.  So I came up with a second chorus:

So much lip service I should be paying
But I don't know how to spin it
I just can't imagine a world
Without you
Without you in it.

After I wrote that, I wanted to write some verses.  I decided that the first verse would be 8 lines long, and have a rhyme scheme of ABCB DEFE, like so: (and I decided every verse following would be 4 lines long)

Even if I could save you
I don't know that I would
I'm building a bridge over the gulf between us
But I don't know that I should.

You've been on a distant planet
On your own lonely plain
Contact's been sporadic at best
And tinged with disdain.

So far fairly straightforward again.  This is obviously (to me) a song from one person who has been hurt deeply, but still feels some sympathy and wistfulness towards the person who hurt them.  Which is entirely the situation as it is.

I don't know how much all of you know about sonnets, but in general, at the end of a sonnet, they have a "turn."  That "turn" depends on the writer, but sometimes it's just another way of looking at what the rest of the sonnet said...and sometimes it completely turns the rest of the sonnet on its head.  And while I set out to write a heartbreaking song that also communicated somewhat of a sympathy, or a fellow-feeling...well, here's the entire song.  Check out the last iteration of the chorus.

Even if I could save you
I don't know that I would
I'm building a bridge over the gulf between us
But I don't know if I should.

You've been on a distant planet
On your own lonely plain
Contact's been sporadic at best
And tinged with disdain.

So many things I should be saying
But I don't know how to begin it
I just can't imagine a world
Without you
Without you in it.

What could I have done to heal?
Some wounds run too deep
As you've learned to your sorrow
The price is too steep.

So much lip service I should be paying
But I don't know how to spin it
I just can't imagine a world
Without you
Without you in it.

You're so insubstantial, standing there
You just seem to fade
And maybe I should've ignored the encore
Left after the last song played.

I know I shouldn't be staying
And I'll leave in a minute
I just can't imagine a world
Without you
Without you in it

I've played this game with you for years
And I'll never win it
My world should've never
Should've never
Had you in it.

You see?  That got a bit more bitter than I ever intended.  But I liked the result, and kept it.

One final note: this song is particular among the recent ones I've written in that it has a lot of internal rhymes and repetitions.  I find this makes a song (or a poem) more melodic.  For example, "insubstantial...standing" has a small echo in it.  Of course there are other examples, but I'll leave them for you to find.

I'm open to questions...but I of course plan to write more on this subject, so if you have a specific question, I may wait and address it in an upcoming post.

Welcome to The Rockstar's Almanac!

Please note that I never spell Almanac the correct way the first time.  Perhaps running this blog will help me do that.

So what is there to know, now that you're here?  Odds are:

A. You know me pretty well, or
B. You don't know me at all, and you've stumbled on this page through great misfortune.

Either way you slice it, I'm going to make this introductory post, because I like to talk about myself.  Like a rockstar.

Like all great artists (and Mafia members), I go by a pseudonym most places on the Internet, which is Katrushka.  You can thus call me Katrushka.  It works, right?

I'm female.  I'm in my late twenties.  I live in the Deep South in the United States of America.  I work full-time.  I go to college full-time (for my second degree).  And I am involved in two music projects, hence the name of this blog.  For simplicity and anonymity's sake, I will call the music projects EGAB (the two-person music project) and WAJ (the five-person band I'm in).  Eventually, I will probably become less anonymous because I will want to post videos of performances and recordings of my music, but for now...I remain unknown and unknowable.  Maybe.

The whole reason for me to start this blog is to be able to express my thoughts and feelings uncensored.  Don't worry, there won't be any pornography, and not tons of strong language.  I'm not naturally offensive, so probably not much of that material, either.  But I don't tend to pull punches, and I get tired of maintaining a complete "good girl" image.

I don't know what my posts will entirely consist of.  Of course there will be discussion of music, my own and others'.  I read a lot, so I will probably talk about books as well.  There will be daily minutiae.  I try to travel a bit, so there will be some about that.  And of course, there will be silly, pointless, and ridiculous posts about nothing as well.

Several people will be mentioned in this journal, no doubt.  I tend to give people nicknames, so you may see things like The Collaborator (the other person in the EGAB music project), or Phenyl Barbie Doll (my female best friend).  I prefer to use these nicknames to protect other people's privacy as well.  No worries, I'll always explain who I'm talking about beforehand--for instance, my little sister is The Wonder Kid.

For now, I will close this--and happy reading.  I hope it entertains you...because it entertains me.