What I’ve been up to- Victorian Lit, Writerly Google Searches, and Snippets

Hello there, world! I hope you are all well and safe. This has been a rough and crazy year so far for everyone. I’ve been doing a lot of tap-dancing, baking and–strangely enough–compulsive cleaning in an effort to stay positive. Whatever works, I guess?

By now, I’m sure no one is surprised anymore when I “mysteriously” disappear for the duration of the school semester, but summer is now approaching! And thus, I have shaken off my academic chains and find myself able to return to the world of blogging (hopefully??).

So here’s a messy sort of recap of what I’ve been up to since I posted last a million years ago.

Reading

So…I haven’t actually read that many books for fun this year?? I had a lot of reading for my English classes, as well as work for other classes, and I was doing shows and….there was just very little time.

BUT I did get to read some great books for my Victorian literature class! We read Jane Eyre, which I’ve been wanting to re-read for a while, so that worked out nicely.

Can we just take a moment to appreciate how smartly Charlotte Bronte articulates complex human emotions/experiences? Reading it this time, this quote from Mrs. Reed really stuck out to me:

“…you affirmed that the very thought of me made you sick, and asserted that I had treated you with miserable cruelty. I could not forget my own sensations when you thus started up and poured out the venom of your mind: I felt fear, as if an animal that I had struck or pushed had looked up at me with human eyes and cursed me in a man’s voice” (Jane Eyre volume II chapter VI)

Mrs. Reed is confronted with the fact that she has been mistreating Jane, but instead of the horror of that realization propelling her to change, her reaction is to hate Jane even more for revealing her own cruelty, and I just?? It’s so twisted, but so human???

For the same class, we also read Dracula. It was my first time reading it, and it was surprisingly enjoyable.A few random facts/reasons to read it:

• It’s written entirely as diary entries, letters, telegrams, etc.
• A bunch of English people, a Dutch man, and….Quincey Morris, who is randomly from Texas?
• Mina Harker arriving with a typewriter in her luggage to help take down a vampire is a level of amazingness I aspire to
• Dr. Seward! Dr. Seward is pretty great.
• Jonathan Harker turning into a premature old man.
• Van Helsing saying things like, “I’m not going to tell you what’s going on, but just trust me. We need to sneak into a tomb in the middle of the night and cut the head off a corpse.”

I’ve never read a book about vampires before, but it turned out to be quite good fun.

Music Twenty One Pilots

So…yeah. A few months ago my cousin started telling me all the Twenty One Pilots songs I needed to listen to, so I listened to those songs…and every other song. And here we are.

Super jammin’ tunes + smart/introspective/random lyrics + rapping + ukulele + random yelling and/or screaming

What’s not to love?

And I will say that we should take a day to break away
From all the pain our brain has made, the game is not played alone
And I will say that we should take a moment and hold it
And keep it frozen and know that life has a hopeful undertone

-Migraine

Also, my sisters and I now regularly walk up to each other and scream “I AM NOT AS FINE AS I SEEM. Pardon.” So there’s that.

A few “favorites” (but I can’t pick favorites because I love them ALL)

• Car Radio   (*distraught screaming*)
• Heathens  (It’s so JAMMIN’ and the lyrics just smash me into a pancake)
• Holding on to You (*moves feet to introspective beat*)
• Guns for Hands  (I get way too excited every time it gets to that part where the whole groove of the song shifts and it goes into the rap)
• The Judge  (The first few lines alone???)
• Leave the City  (*breaks into three part harmony with my sisters and repeats the bridge six millions times*)
• Neon Gravestones  (…Dang. Just…dang.)
• Level of Concern  (Of course. It’s a quarantine song!)
• March to the Sea  (“No one looks up anymore / ‘Cause you might get a raindrop in your eye, / And heaven forbid, they see you cry”)
• Jumpsuit (Complete with super-dramatic music video shot in Iceland)

…and I’ll stop now before I list every song on every album.

Writing

I’ve done quite a bit of writing these past few months. What have I been writing about? Well, let’s look at my Google search history, shall we?

• what do you steer a fighter plane with?
• what is hand sanitizer made of?
• what sports do they hold up score numbers for?
• how long does a nose bleed last?
• how often do men shave?
• how long does it take to trim a beard?
• when were library cards invented?
• when were airplanes invented?
• slow growing tree
• slow growing tree species
• astraphobia
• fairy tales with elves

I’m sure that clears everything up.

One project I worked on was a one-act play about Orpheus and Eurydice (not inspired by Hadestown at ALL). My sister suggested the idea of a play that takes place entirely in the time that they’re walking out of the underworld. I got all excited, but then she said she wasn’t going to write it and that I had to. SO I DID.

It is:

• Still very much a first draft
• Comprised entirely of long monologues full of angst (as is my way)
• Very obviously written by someone who usually writes prose, because these monologues are so wordy and no one describes things in such minute detail when they’re speaking

But here are a few snippets anyway, because why not?

Orpheus essentially says “Pshaw, death.”

Eurydice remembering Orpheus as a child at his mother’s funeral

Orpheus talking about his anxiety through music metaphors, as you do when you’re Orpheus

In other news, at the beginning of this year I was planning on doing Camp Nanowrimo in July (as I have the past 2 years)…but now I don’t think that is going to happen. Why, you ask?

Because…I semi-accidentally started drafting a book in April.

And it’s a sequel. To a book I was not planning on writing a sequel to. So here we are.

I’m hoping to finish the first draft by the end of this month, but even if I do, turning right around and jumping into a new novel next month sounds like…something I will not be doing.

I just hit 40k words this morning. The plot is a mess. I don’t know who the characters are anymore. But enjoy these snippets with zero context!

And there you have it.

Oh! One last thing I did: I graduated from college! Which was….somewhat anticlimactic. For obvious reasons. But I have my degree now! And maybe, since I won’t be in school this fall, I could actually do Nanowrimo in November?? Who knows??

What have you been up to? Have you read any Victorian Literature? Do you listen to Twenty One Pilots? If so, what are your favorite songs? What have you been writing? What recent Google searches have you made in the name of writing? Do tell!

 

 

 

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