Reflections in the Dragon's Eye: A Journal

19 January 2000

It snowed yesterday - started about half an hour before I left work, and continued until seven or so. It wasn't enough to cover the grass, but it did look pretty. Of course, it's not any warmer today, and it all got packed down by traffic yesterday, so this morning half the roads are packed snow and ice - fun!

Ah... Our first snow in our new house.

Well. Since nothing exciting is going on in my life just now, and I already talked yesterday about my job satisfaction and in the previous section about the snow, I hope you'll bear with me if I venture into fiction. I've got what might be a story rattling around in my head.

When she opened her eyes, it was September, and the leaves of the tree outside her window were just beginning to turn, touched on their tips with flame as if some god had whispered to them.

She had expected to be disoriented. With a lucidity she'd never felt before, she wondered if she'd woken up before this, only to drop back into drugged and dreamless sleep. If she had, it was before the healing had completed, because the newly implanted memory banks were empty but for a still of a single leaf.

Without considering how, she pulled the image up before her new internal eyes and considered it. She didn't remember taking the picture, but it was very good. She could almost see the leaf trembling in the faint breeze. For several moments she admired the composition of the picture she didn't remember taking, until she heard the door to her small room open. Sighing softly, she closed the inner eye and focused the outer set on the tall man coming through the door.

"Jill," he greeted her calmly.

"Doctor," she returned. Consciously this time, she took another picture, delighted with the contrast of the ebon skin of his hand against the pristine white sheets of her bed. And another, of his face as he smiled at her. So many darks, she mused, had eyes that were yellowish around the edges, but his were not, though the pupils were so deeply black that she wondered how light could pass through them at all. Was it possible, she wondered in fascination, that he had no lights at all in his ancestry?

He'd been talking, and she missed it. "What?"

His laugh was warm, and she recorded it. "I said you're likely to be easily distracted for a few days, so we'll be keeping you here until you learn to concentrate again."

"Oh, yes, that's fine," she answered. "Where's Jack?"

He sat on a chair by her bed and began to do routine checks. "This isn't the vid," he chided gently. "You won't be assigned a Jack until you're ready to go up the Hill."

"I could go up the Hill this afternoon," she protested. "I feel strong enough."

"Not until your concentration comes back. It's dangerous." It came out like a routine response to an argument he'd heard hundreds of times before.

"I'm concentrating now!"

He laughed again, quickly. "All Jills can concentrate on getting up the Hill. But once you're there, what will you focus on, eh?" He grinned as she impatiently brushed this concern aside. "See? Best to give it a few days. In the meantime, we'll bring in a portable so you can download and run through the emergency drills." He felt the pulse at her throat, nodded in satisfaction, and stood to leave.

"What about some data files, then?" she wheedled.

"I'll see what I can do," he promised.

What do you think? Does it make you want to read more, or is the whole thing too boring to comprehend?

I've been reading about writing for several weeks now, and it makes me want to write again. (Wow; that was almost convoluted.) Not write in this journal - I do that every day, and it's usually just a diary of the day-to-day events of my life. But really write - to compose sentences that have meaning, and meaning behind the meaning. Graceful sentences, which I'm not especially good at but which have occasionally managed to slip out. I want to have characters that have life and meaning, and a plot...

When I was in middle school and early high school, I thought I wanted to be a professional writer. But I don't have the discipline for it. I kept signing up for creative writing classes in school that would be cancelled for lack of interest. But I'm interested! I wanted to scream.

In college, I submitted what I still think is one of my best short stories as an audition for a creative writing class. The day before the first day of classes, I went to see if I'd made it in - I didn't see my name on the list. I asked the secretary of the English department, hoping beyond hope, and she kindly told me that if it wasn't on the list, I wasn't in the class. I sighed heavily and waited while she dug out the copy of my submission to take back to the dorm.

A week and a half into the semester, with my schedule full of other classes, the professor of the creative writing class called me to ask why I hadn't been in class. "I wasn't on the list!" I told him. Turns out that there were two lists - I'd only seen the one for the Advanced Writing class. But it was too late to drop one of my other classes to make room in my schedule for the Creative Writing class, and anyway my ego had been so firmly trampled by the presumed rejection that I didn't have the self-confidence to fight for it.

Sometimes, I regret that.

Most of the time, I don't really think about writing anymore. I am surrounded by better writers. My spelling and grammar are better than K.T.'s - she will even admit it if you ask - but good spelling and grammar do not make a good writer, and she's much better than I at coming up with plots and ideas. And she's much more dedicated to writing than I am, and works pretty hard at it. Matt is a fantastic writer, when he puts his mind to it. (If you've never read anything of his, may I highly recommend his discourse on Girl Scout cookies as a fantastic and hilarious start?) He's got a gift for wonderful metaphors and similes that are hysterically funny yet get his point across perfectly. Even my mother told me Matt was a better writer than me, and mothers are supposed to side with their own children on everything! Our friend T is even published - he wrote a comic book that lasted five issues, which is pretty good for an indie comic these days, and is going to be continued as a secondary feature in another comic!

Now, I know my writing isn't exactly awful, and I know plenty of people whose writing is nowhere near as good as mine. My ego does re-inflate after each crushing, albeit slowly. With some good hard work, I think I could be almost as good as K.T., though I don't think I could ever match Matt's effortless flair. But I'm lazy, and so I don't work at it. Most of the time these days I'm content to sit back and devour what others give me (offering advice on writing and grammar when asked for it, and playing devil's advocate for plot suggestions).

But every now and again, I feel compelled to take another stab at it. Lucky for me, I don't let my ego get involved when I'm writing anymore, so if you'd like to make critiques and suggestions, feel free.

Talk to me: "Don't quit your day job; that's all I'm saying."

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