Hi! This is my personal blog, which is mainly for the traditional livejournal use of bitchy whining and being social with a couple of people.

Sin Is Beautiful is my more writing oriented personal website and blog, and also occasionally gets fiction posted on it for your persual. Enjoy!

I miss the days when I could be brave.

I posted my workblog for the year elsewhere, here and here.

This year has had its emotional ups and downs. But, I'm pleased to say, the year's ending on a high note. :3

Not quite so much of a milestone, but, again, one I want to remember -- last night Dangerous Jade went off to the publisher. @.@

Another of those milestones I'd like to make a note of -- About five minutes ago I finished the provisionally final draft of Dangerous Jade, after making three proofing passes on it in four days. Next step, sending it along for layouts.

*Crosses fingers*

I made fudge today.

Of the three batches I have made recently, it is by far the superior one. I ended up having to fling a little loose sugar into the mix and stir thoroughly to get it to start crystalizing, but the power of food-alchemy was with me, and now I have delicious fudge.

Also I am emotionally stricken and raw emotional wounds I suspected would never heal are, in fact, proving to have never healed.

But I have fudge, and work on my novel is going fairly well, and I am enjoying the new Terry Pratchett book, so I'll be sorta okay.

Dear source of Ennui,
 
My feelings for you are still very tangled and confusing. I have a lot I want to say to you, both beautiful and ugly. But you've chosen in the past not to listen. And there are only a few things I actually need to say.
 
I spent our years of friendship under the impression you were the kind of person I could rely on in just about any kind of pinch. Emotional, practical, anything. As you once put it, you were the kind of friend who'd let me share a sip of your drink through your straw. You've told me a lot of things over the years I believed. A lot of them were like that. That you were there for me, that you cared about me, even that you loved me. Some of them, more recently, were hurtful instead.
 
At the time I believed you with perfect faith, good or bad. Gullible, I know. I could take away the lesson that I shouldn't believe anything you told me. Maybe that's my next lesson to learn, but for now I'll respect you enough to believe that you meant what you said when you said it.
 
One of the lessons I actually learned is that just because I'm willing to go through hell for someone, that doesn't mean they're willing to go through hell for me. Particularly if those hells are derived from shovelling brimstone at each other. I've endured a lot of  brimstone and clawing from you in the past. And while it's 'fair play' to expect you to endure mine, it isn't actually fair to expect that of you, or of anyone.
 
But I don't want to be with someone who isn't willing to go through hell for me, even if it's a hell of our own making. And I increasingly realize I don't want to be with someone who chooses not to listen, not to talk.
 
And by 'be with someone' I don't just mean failed romances, I mean friendships. The kind where you let your friend share a sip of your coke through your straw if they're thirsty.
 
Maybe you'll make different choices one day. I really hope you do, but I don't think you will.
 
So as much I care about you and love you and all the rest, and as pathetic as it is to say this a year after the fact, I don't think you're really the kind of person I want in my life. As a lover, as a friend, as anything.
 
That's the choice I've made, probably about twelve months too late for it to really mean anything. But I won't slam the door like you did, I will listen if you ever have anything to say to me, and I will answer you if you ever change your mind and choose to talk. Because new choices are always something a person can make, myself included.
 
The choice I've made hurts a lot. But I'm proud to say I'm the kind of person who can endure hurt, even if in so doing I make silly scenes and throw around brimstone and claw people I care about. Because I knew a person just like that, once, and she was really nice.
 
And in the end I love her, even if those feelings and good memories have to go up on a shelf now, to be looked at but not touched. And if I can love her despite her many faults, I think it's okay for me to love myself despite mine.

For those wondering, I am fine, everything else is fine, it is, however, remarkably distracting and I am incapable of getting anything useful done.

x-posted from Sinisbeautiful.

At some point, we accept that we're just not going to write what we wanted to, and accept what we get when we sit down at the keyboard. I am in such a phase, I think. I can still see my failures, and I still yell at myself violently over them, but. Somehow I keep laying down stuff and seeing that it has value, even if it is extremely minor compared to what I was aiming for.

And I nearly accidently beat nanowrimo. In the last 32 days I've written 52 391 words. (In the last 31 it's 49 516. Give a guy a break?)

So some years ago, probably 2008-ish, I was reading this travel book where they're taking a tour of this insane asylum turned museum. And there's this exhibit in there, where in the display they're treating someone for 'melancholia', a broken heart, which was translated and described as 'Black Love'.

Stereotypical, but it speaks to me.

There's a part of my ennui which I don't really want to talk or think about, but I also don't really want the moment to pass and be forgotten. It's just gone midnight, so it's the 27th, and precisely one year ago to the day someone told me 'I love you too', for the first time in knowing them for nearly a decade, and for the first time for me personally in the context it was meant for almost three or four years. (Five? Could arguably be seven. I'm not sure anymore.)

It meant a lot to me then, it means a lot to me now. I don't want to forget how I felt then, even if afterward the hurts started toppling into each other and racing out of control like a line of collapsing dominoes.

So. I'll get on with remembering the love, even if it's black, and shut up now in the hopes I can forget the rest.