Pointless Plans

So... remember my first post where I said that "a meaningless 'Welcome to my Blog' filled with my hopes and aspirations that inevitably would never come to light was something I knew I didn't want." Well...

I've been stuck in a doom and gloom phase here, and with me hopefully concluding my counselling soon, I definitely don't want to dwell in it.

As a result, I'm making a little list of things that I'd love to write about, and that you can hopefully expect to read about sometime soon!

• CyberSci

  • I had the fortune to participate at the Regional level, representing Carleton University. (Spoiler: We won, barely)
  • This will probably have a follow up once Nationals happens in the summer.

• Creative Writing Work

  • I've written some good things and some really bad things for the Creative Writing course this term. Obviously, I'll only publish works that I believe are well polished.

• Poetry

  • I want to get back to writing poetry, but for now I have some things that are still unpublished.
  • They're nothing like Building Up, so if you can't read [bad] Rust, don't worry. They're also far less whacky than Falling Down.
  • Falling Down & Building Up

Also, I've come to realise that I have a thing for memoirs. I never actually realised it because I usually read book series, but I now have four memoirs in my library.

1. Fatty Legs by Christy Jordan-Fenton and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton
2. its sequel, A Stranger At Home
3. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
4. Tomboy Survival Guide by Ivan Coyote

So, after a creative non-fiction flash writing assignment just didn't work out well, even after reworking it heavily for the exam, I decided that I should actually take it in the direction of a full memoir, rather than the poetic form that it currently has.

The problem is that I mean, a full memoir. And the problem with that is that memory is a complex thing. Many important and relevant things for a memoir are episodic, iconic, flashbulb memories, which can be difficult to just retrieve on the spot. (Yes, I referenced my textbook, no I am not a credible source for interpreting this information.)

A lot of the time, my writing, particularly my poetry, comes from what can best be described as state-dependent memory. If I'm lucky, some random stimulus or set of stimuli will trigger a recollection of these memories, and give me an image from which to write. The problem is that this also means I cannot write sequentially.

And just to make things even more difficult, memory is unreliable and easily influenced. So I need to review and consider how much I trust my own recollection of events, and work to mitigate my biases whenever possible by asking someone else to recount the event and compare details.

So, in the background, I'm going to start working on that. Almost like forgetting to write in a diary for a week, then trying to catch up while you still remember.

Hopefully this will have the added benefit of holding back some of the future doom and gloom from the blog.

And finally, I'm going to try to finish up my blog generator, cutinews. It's about time I got back and actually finished a programming project. Chances are that I'll be live on Twitch (yes, eww, ik) working on the code.