Kat’s Pause 

Alice has eight piercings.

It was keeping me up last night, so I wrote stuff down.

Kraft is owned by a tobacco company? No wonder KD started making me sick!

In all seriousness… Philip Morris owns a hell of a lot. (As does Coca Cola, I’m discovering.) Because I have yet to become so cynical I cease to care about being cynical, it looks like I’ll be switching peanut butter brands.

Someone give me something about which to write. Anything. Please.

Unrelated: I’m going to be Death for Halloween. Yay! Hopefully someone other than Ning will recognize me.

Yes, “girl with eclectic interests” would be more accurate, but it doesn’t have that same egotistical ring.

I’m experiencing conflicts of interests all over the place here. For instance, I’m currently missing an important choir rehearsal because I had a biology lab at exactly the same time. (I happened to finish the lab a bit early.) Also, I’m debating skipping Mass Communications next week to go to a creative writing workshop, even though the Comm. Studies lecture will be about semiotics, which promises to be less dull than usual. I can’t go to Biology Club meetings because they conflict with meetings for the school newspaper (for which, I might add, I have yet to write a story because I’ve been trying to focus on academics). There are so many extracurricular meetings, conferences, and lectures that I would love to go to, but can’t because my schedule doesn’t permit it. And this term is light compared to my winter term, where I have two to three classes every weekday and technically one course more. It makes a girl worry.

Happily, my midterms are over for now as of yesterday, so today I’ve spent my free time not showering and organizing my biology notes. I feel dirty but productive. Maybe I’ll even read my textbook or do some studying in preparation for the next midterm (November 16).

My choir music is made out of mystical paper which repels hot chocolate stains. This is an excellent thing.

Not that we’re allowed to have consumables onstage… shhh.

Yes, YOU.

I don’t know where to start with my modern Prince of Persia story. For one thing, Princey needs a name. I figure ______ Prince, where the first name is something Persian (maybe Sanjar). With Farah, I think I’ll take the same route as I did when I made a Sim of her: Farah Maharaj (the surname is an actual well-known Indian one having to do with royalty or something). But I don’t know what they should be doing — I don’t want to just drop them into the twenty-first century and let them flounder around.

I had the idea to transpose SoT (make Persia’s attack a corporate takeover or some such thing, and then the company flops or there’s a computer virus, etc), but the idea lacks interest, for me anyway. Rehashing everything might get dull.

So, here is my request for suggestions of any and all kind. What, where, how, why, and with whom should the Prince and Farah do stuff in our time? There’s just one thing I want to make clear, although I’m pretty sure I did already: this is not a time travel story. It’s just the same characters behaving normally… elsewhen.

Edit: Expanding on the SoT rewrite idea: The Prince’s company (his father is its CEO) seizes an opportunity and aggressively takes over Farah’s (father’s) company with the help of a mole inside (the Vizier). Shortly afterward, a virus is unleashed (by the Vizier?) and quickly spreads throughout her company’s system, threatening his as well. They have to work together to destroy it.

Things from SoT that might get left out if I can’t figure out how to adapt them: anything having to do with Sands or Time (could be made into a corporation or software’s name, at the most), Farah’s death, the Prince’s big rewind…

I’ve come up with four PoP fanfic ideas that I think could go somewhere, currently all in various stages of development. None are fully planned out yet. They are, briefly:
1. an Adventure - Farah/Prince, like SoT, lots of witty banter (my personal favourite)
2. The return of the Dark Prince
3. a WW rewrite with Farah included
4. Something modern: the Prince’s and Farah’ characters adapted to a contemporary setting (e.g she’s a politician’s daughter, he’s a CEO’s son)

Any suggestions would be welcome. I need to keep writing or I’ll start to suck.

[Work in progress.] Sometimes it’s okay to be obscure. A hint: Hemingway.

Maybe—
Maybe—
say the whispers beneath my eyelids;
in the silent hum of darkness, they
alone are my world
before dreams.

oowsh
oowsh
rushes the unsleeping blood through my left ear,
no comfort to my heavy head.

Illusory throbbings:
the delicate balance of
hormones, ions,
things I’ll never understand
(no matter how many biology classes)
affect me in ways real
or imagined;
the utopia
of sleep does not
discriminate.

Images of red
placentae
pulsate in dance
in the most secret parts
(the ones not even you have seen)

A hole or not a hole:
That is the question.

Empty, or maybe—
maybe—
not.

Poor Western. Everybody’s always pickin’ on them.

Studying for my lab exam now. I fired up my lappy to look up some terms I don’t see anywhere in the lab manual (wtf is endosymbiosis?) and figured I should update my blog so that the latest entry isn’t a terse note on my hatred of Comm. Studies.

It’s too loud in my dorm; it’s always too loud here. If one more girl starts blasting Sexy Back I think I might just explode.

I’m going back to Hamilton tomorrow evening for the Power of the Pen awards ceremony, mainly because the keynote speaker was my mentor when I was doing co-op at the Spec. Maybe my writer’s craft teacher might even show up. I’ll stay home and bake cookies until Saturday or maybe Sunday, dunno yet. Depends how hungry I am.

And the last thing in the world I feel like doing is studying or, God forbid, reading my Communication Studies textbook. Every time I look at my CS notes my brain hurts and I feel like screaming.

The other one is Reading Fiction, so I’m not too worried about that.

Why can’t all exams be easy like biology?

The smell of burnt popcorn pervades my dorm floor.

Also: Friends! Did you know I’m monitoring your blogs via Netvibes? That’s right, I’ve now found all your RSS/Atom feeds — except for Ren. Sadly, livejournal doesn’t provide anything of the sort. But I can stalk the rest of you quite conveniently.

Brilliant or byzantine or both? Share your thoughts.

I can see this becoming a fixture in my blog. I often send links to Ning asking if it’s the poem or me that’s stupid — usually stuff I find gawked at on DA or sometimes Lemon Fingers. By the way, yes I did find “byzantine” in a thesaurus; Microsoft Word’s, to be exact. I like it. Perhaps it’s not antonymous enough, but it’s a lovely word.

It’s hard to believe, but I guess it is.

I finished Lost Time tonight in the 7:00 darkness of my dorm room. Finally, this disproportionately two-year effort is complete.

Thanks guys! Without you it would be languishing somewhere around, oh, chapter 3.

I decided to scrap what I had written of chapter 10. I was so unsure of it that I included a rambling author’s note to that extent. Here’s what I came up with if anyone’s curious:

–

A/N: I was trying to make the romance realistic. Relationships don’t start with a magical kiss and then suddenly they’re in love; quite often someone will make a tentative move, and then things will be muddy as both parties wonder whether that was okay, and then they might have an awkward talk, and maybe after a while they’ll enter into a relationship. I’m all for rosy idealism sometimes, but I want to practise realism too. My question to you is, do you like it? Is it believable? Would you prefer the more mystical, near-instantaneous love that the game suggests?

Chapter 10

My fingers grazed her amulet. I waited, tense and trembling.

Farah blinked.

“Anything?� I asked. She shook her head. I shifted closer to her and closed my hand around the medallion.

Sighing, Farah sat halfway up and gently removed my hand. “It’s no use.�

“Oh… alright.� I tried to mask my disappointment. An awkward silence settled in the room and hung suspended. Farah wouldn’t meet my gaze. “Farah – I’m sorry, it was wrong of me, I presumed… I shouldn’t have done that.�

Farah said nothing and the discomfiture in the air thickened. This would have been the perfect moment to turn back time, had the dagger still been with me. At least my cheek didn’t smart this time around. Finally, she spoke slowly:

–

…and that’s as far as I got before I gave up on it and thought of a new direction. I like the new chapter 10 much better, it has room to go in the direction it needs to.

Ever since I finished Chapter 9, I’ve been stuck three lines into 10. Finally after some mental work, I decided what I want Princey to do next. Hooray for more SoT memories and parallels!

Today I found this retospective review of SoT while doing some fanfic research. It was a good read, if perhaps a little too reverant at times. (Is that possible, coming from someone who worships SoT? I guess it is.)

Also: hehe.

This quiz sets out to highlight the barbarism and sexism in the Bible and comment on how it relates to Christianity as it’s practised today. I found it interesting, and I didn’t think its creators’ bias against religion undermined their research too much.

On another topic: I should probably eat something today besides Reese Bites. Probably.

This is the first day I’ve had in a little while where I can feel guiltless about sitting and doing absolutely nothing, maybe play some Super Mario Sunshine, maybe clean my room a little, maybe just sleep in and enjoy the lack of pressure.

Not that it’s really been a terribly busy week. I can mostly blame procrastination for this week’s stress: I put off studying for Wednesday’s bio midterm (baby’s first), and the time I spent studying for it in the days before — needlessly, I might add, because it was really easy — left none for the research assignment I had due Thursday and the experiment I was supposed to design for Friday. Fortunately, a late Thursday night and an early Friday morning helped me meet my deadlines, with even a couple minutes to spare to study for Friday’s quiz while waiting for lab to get unlocked. The so-so quiz was immediately followed by the most intense biology lab ever. So many protist diagrams, so little time. What do they need so many damn organelles for, anyway? Why can’t they be simple and happy like prokaryotes? The boy beside me made up songs about Paramecia to cope with the tension.

Anyhow, after scrambling out of the lab at 5:30, I met up with Ning and we hit the mall for dinner and some shopping. When it closed, we went next door to the movie theatre and saw Man of the Year. I enjoyed it; he didn’t as much. So help me, I like Robin Williams. Then we called a cab to get home because it was freezing (although thankfully not snowing — just raining), and that’s where the fun began.

The lines were super busy because of Oktoberfest, and whenever a cab finally arrived, a group of teenagers would dash out and grab it. It was ridiculous. We gave up on the theatre and walked through the wind to mall’s main entrance, where we took shelter in a little bank room and tried to call another cab… and tried, and tried, while the room suddenly filled with people: the irritating youths from the theatre entrance. We stepped outside where it was a little emptier, and were followed once again. Finally, a cab — and two skinny girls raced toward it when it stopped in front of us. Not the type to start trouble, Ning and I quietly bitched among ourselves and decided to just walk the twenty minutes back to our schools.

It was cold.

I kept scanning the buildings around us for something, anything, that would be open at almost 1:00 am. Finally, after about fifteen minutes of numbness, we ducked inside a Tim Horton’s for hot chocolate in the hopes of feeling our limbs again. Once there, we chatted with another couple who had also been trying for an hour to call a taxi. Eventually they decided to take their chances with a bus. Shortly afterward, who should pull up to Timmy’s but a friendly cabbie stopping in for a microbreak in his horribly busy night. He agreed to take us home, and that was the end of our bitter adventure.

Now for some less recent news: It’s snowing here, intermittently. It started on October 12, and not just a little bit; for a while all I could see outside my window was white. I gawked and Ning shrugged: Waterloo has bad winters and gets a lot of snow. I think I left my tuque in Hamilton. My cold head misses it.

This is an issue that I’ve had ever since I encountered more “modern” art — both visual and literary. Recently, my irritation has grown because of some stories I’m reading for one of my English classes. My problem is this: I don’t believe that the confusion a reader or viewer experiences when encountering artwork, or the degree of difficulty involved in interpreting it, should be proportional to the artistic value of the piece. Certainly, complexity can lend greatness to a work of art, but from where did this notion of necessary incomprehensibility arise? What is so undesirable about making artwork inaccessible to the average person?

If I have one lofty goal artistically, it is to change this arrogant, elitist view of art. I want people — average people, not just a few fellow writers or scholars — to be able to understand what I write. I don’t want interpreting my work to be like cracking a wartime code. Art exists to be enjoyed, not to provide a sense of importance to the artist while being held over the head of the common man.

Which character is more easily likeable, the immoral or the amoral?

Edited and slightly extended.

Although I’m sure everyone will slap me for it. But let me explain!

My poem won first prize in the Power of the Pen, but my short story placed second. I’ve never won second prize before. *sniff* At least I get some money.

If I hadn’t won first prize in both last year plus the Hamilton Poet’s Award, it wouldn’t be disappointing. Now I have to worry about moving backwards artistically. Plus, in a rare moment of self-confidence, I actually thought my story was pretty good, so I was hoping for more. This will teach me not to indulge such thoughts. Less dangerously, I believed my story was better than my poem. But it’s all about what competition is out there, I guess.

$630 later, I’m now the proud owner of a Canon Powershot SD600 with a three-year warantee, plus a 2GB memory card. (I resisted buying a tripod until I know more about what I want.) Oh Ontario Government, your money was well spent. (Don’t worry, I’ll pay it back. Eventually.)

If only I could take a picture of my baby.

…this manual smells like flour.

I finished Chapter 9 today. This has got to be a record. I just found myself with some extra time today and felt like writing it.

I don’t really like the chapter ending; it feels cliche, so I might extend it. Other than that, I think it’s ok. Tentatively uploaded here until I’m sure I’m satisfied with it.

This morning, Ning and I finally beat T2T. He fought the Vizier and I did the platforming bit after that, plus the whole Dark Prince/Mental Realm part… and then he went back to my save and did that part too. Those flashes of nostalgia — the SoT magic fountain, Farah’s chambers — were delicious. I found the ending to be wonderfully satisfying. (Farah and the Prince are totally hooking up now.) What makes me happiest is that they really did listen to the fans, without giving everyone an SoT rerun. The new elements were great: the Dark Prince was SO much fun to play, speed kills were handy and not MGS-esque, chariot races were exciting (more than just an echo of the Dahaka chases), and the final battles felt really original. This fangirl is pleased.

Now off to write some more of chapter 9.

I want.