Category: Writing

July Combini

Don’t wait for success, start ahead without it

Fortune Cookie

This is the second attempt for a blog prompt combination essay.  The first was started in June however real life interrupted and that entry has been put on hold.  These blog prompts were found on the July page created by life of lovely.  They are interesting because they are insightful, sometimes answers to them could be quick and glib. However, with time and thought anyone could find out compelling things about themselves.

20. What do you need

This question annoyed me a little bit.  Many of my needs are wants.  The basics are covered for the time being.  I won’t starve any time soon and there is a roof over my head. There is clean potable water.  The machine I’m using to write this asinine paragraph is also still working.  Need is defined as something that is essential or important.

After ranting about this blog prompt, it was decided that what was needed was a space to work without distractions or doubt.

There was a time where it was believed that work could be done anywhere. That was proven to be false.  Work is one thing, creativity is another thing.  Both are important, one is essential.  Virginia Wolf’s a room of one’s own comes to mind or Lorraine Hansberry’s to be young gifted and black.  The search continues for that space. In the meantime this essay.

 

21. Your Summer Playlist

My summer playlist is complicated.  I listen to music from various distributors.  Pandora, Spotify, Amazon and Google Music. Instead of a list of songs, I will try to list the performers and the songs that have moved to me listen and sometimes buy their whole albums.

  1. Andrew Belle; In My Viens(single), Black Bear, The Ladder, Dive Deep; The Enemy, Static Waves, Drought
  2. Sleep at Last; Atlas– Arctic, Saturn, Neptune
  3. Dawn Golden; Still Life– Last Train
  4. The 1975; The 1975/ I like it when you sleep…– Falling for you, Somebody Else
  5. James Arthur; James Arthur- Certain things, Impossible
  6. Rag’n’Bone Man – Human
  7. Jacob Banks – Chainsmoking
  8. Portugal, The man – Feel it
  9. Jaymes Young – Moondust
  10. Aquilo – Good Girl

For about 4 or 5 years, I only had 4 songs from Andrew Belle.  I was introduced to In My Veins, while watching an episode of Castle.  The main characters were getting married and realized they both really loved the song they were swaying to.  I describe Belle’s music as laid back and mellow.  I was able to continue with the stories I was working on while listening to these songs.

I made a station on my Pandora account to find music similar to Andrew Belle.  The results are what is above.  I’ve bought a song or an album from the top five.  At first, I wanted to write about how I felt about each song but that is a little more difficult.  I found these other songs and artists because of Andrew Belle. I was looking for ambient, go with the flow like songs that still had a beat. Drawn to love/like songs and break up songs. There were recommended by the Pandora music algorithm.

I realized that while compiling this list, many of the songs are performed by men and if I investigate it further I won’t be surprised if they are also European as well.  James Arthur, The 1975’s are from the UK.

22. What inspires you

Inspiration can be found in many and unusual places.  For this writer, it was found in music and other media that was read or watched.  Recently this writer found the plays Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest inspiring two distinct stories.   Another thing that inspires is hanging around people who are also creatives.  Creativity like yawning is contagious.  The desire to start a podcast was formed by listening to podcasts.   The inspiration to write came reading stories and realizing the ones that were made up in the imagination were equally entertaining and worth sharing.

23. What do you want less off

Less negativity.  Pessimism, doubt, and just ill feelings ooze into everything even while trying to keep things on a positive path. It happens to me when I am not writing.  I have also been exposed to it many working (side jobs) environment, everyone is miserable and would rather be somewhere else.  It is true that overall, the state of the world is precarious.  However, the effectiveness and the desire to for positive change is based on how we feel and if the we feel nothing is worth it, then aren’t we only putting in half the effort.

24. What is holding you back

Myself.  I am holding me back.  I don’t know when I will be able to stop getting in my way. Every writer who talks about this states that their own doubts never leaves them, despite their success.  Until then the Lit song My own worst enemy is on my all of time playlist.

 

25. A tiny step towards your dream

The tiny step toward my dream is this blog account and these essays.  Being consistent is always a trial but writing with these questions in mind help.  I have set up the JC Henry Universe on WordPress and Facebook.  The plan is to continue on Twitter and other social media.  The most important step is to always write.  I sometimes forget and it not until I’m writing do I realize why I was feeling crappy.

 

More could be written on these prompts however there is a time concern and another blog essay to complete.  For readers consider these questions in your own life, leave a comment, answer all or just one.   Share them or don’t one of the most fun things in life is understanding yourself.  In time will help in creating a better future.

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21 An idea that seems great, but actually isn’t

No one can change my life, Only I can do that.

Carol Burnett

I’ve had some difficulty writing on this topic.   At first, I chose a type of media, an anime I watch online to use as an example of the title but while analyzing the story realized they didn’t match.  I was then at a loss as to how to write this.  The easy answer is to come up with another example and that was difficult because nothing really interests me at all.  All of these shows have something in common besides my passing interests –  Primeval [2007-2011]; Timeless [2016-]; Quantum Leap [1989-1993]; 12 Monkeys [2015-2018]; Continuum [2012-2015]; Tru Calling [2003-2005]; all these titles have some kind of time travel involved in their shows.  Every fall TV season, networks produce a new show or several shows with the concept of time travel in them.    There are formulas and statistics that go with their decisions, but I don’t have any interest in that at all.   Time Travel- the idea that seems great, but actually isn’t.

 

I sometimes wonder what would happen if I was able to time travel ten or fifteen years back in time with the knowledge I have of the present.   Because I have a kid, I never wonder her out of existence, so my high school years are always out of bounds.  There are few things about my family I would attempt to improve or change outright. But for this short essay, those thought processes will be avoided because of murky tangents.

 

Fifteen years ago, would place this writer in her late twenties, this time in the past, I would definitely set up my website and blog accounts effectively.   Set up a writing schedule and stick to it with the idea that I have prepared a better platform for creating content, writing and the writing business.  I would have a degree in Anthropology and established a writing career that utilized it.   There will also be minor adjustments to the personal life, again remember to avoid the murky tangents.

 

Of course, once I changed my past, my future becomes something completely different.  I couldn’t be the writer of this post.  I would be writing another kind of post.  I have several stories under construction that wouldn’t be the stories they are now and the very new ones in development would never be.  With a changed past, the new person would have missed the failures and the surprising successes of my present.  Inspiration has come to me more easily than it has in the past, once I realized to ignore it all together and write anyway.  It was something I didn’t get until my mid 30’s.   The question is, if you know which future to improve, what would be the problem.  The biggest problem would be the same issue I’m dealing with in the present.  Procrastination.  It was my enemy in the past; it is my enemy now.  At one point this post was a victim of procrastination.  It was left for dead.

What saved it was the desire to write and post the results, to maintain the recent blog JC Henry Universe.

The conclusion I have come up with is that I would be a writer either way.  I am learning to gauge success in a different manner.  This idea of success will be explored in another essay.  Until then consider, what you would do if you could time-travel to your past?  Would you rather return to the life you have now or completely different life?  What would you need to be content?  Many time travel episodes express that what is most desired doesn’t always make us happy or content.

 

A Sideways Introduction

Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.

-Og Mandino 

This is the second attempt to get this blog up and running like a decent blog found in the worldwide web.  There were no ideas coming to this writer, nothing inspired her to write on the blog, she was scrambling in her other writing projects.  Knocked off the productivity wagon after making big promises of change.    It was disappointing.  The point of a public blog is to have interesting work, thrown into the sea of the internet and have it picked to the adoration of millions.   The JC Henry Universe blog is supposed to be about Writing, Life, and Everything that intersects. There are secondary and tertiary reasons however they have to be written at a later.  The writer is well aware that the four blog essays posted are all uncategorized.  2017 and the beginning of 2018 have been that kind of year, progress followed by setbacks.

 

In the month of January, the 31-day blog challenge was posted and then nothing was written.  Other blog writing prompts were collected, the Life of Lovely monthly writing prompts are interesting.  The idea of writing to the writing prompts once thought to help this writer began to hinder the thought processes.  The writer froze on the idea of perfect copy or the lack of perfect copy and what to do if a day was missed.  Was it breaking the rules of the challenge?  Just like that before it was even in an effective result, consistency was lost.

 

It took the whole month of February to get out of that slump.   One of the best ways to get of a slump, rut or setback is to continue working, the writer was not posting things online, but she was eking a paragraph or two to move her stories further.   Eventually, the wheel stopped churning another method was needed to keep the creativity going.    Since this is the first day of March and it has 31 days.  The writer has decided to briefly answer one of the 31-day-challenge this is…

A sideways introduction

JC Henry is a writer, who lives in New York City.  She has one child (who is actually a young adult) and three cats.  She has been writing for many years.  This blog lovingly called the Universe is not her only blog.  There is the Joexperimentblog.com {the Joex}, on this blog, there are reviews on books, movies, etc. and the 100daysprojectvi.blogspot.com which focuses on health and well-being, but that is on hiatus.  For many years, JC Henry split her focus on at least five different blogs and her fictional stories.  They were so easy to start and hard to let go.  She has been consolidating slowly.  She likes reading but has fell into the audiobook trap and prefers to readalongs, when they are affordable.   That is another blog essay for later.  She likes to write all kinds of fiction but concentrates on speculative fiction.  There is also a podcast in development that will focus on the writing and the writing business.  It is a vast undertaking gathering the useful information and translating it to something intriguing, to speak much less listen too.    JC Henry also like quotes, the more motivational the better.  She has not been a fan of first-person POV, however, likes them in audiobooks.  She prefers to write in third-person limited.  POV’s for those who may not know is point of view.

 

As stated an earlier paragraph, the Universe was created to write about writing and creative endeavors.  The next thing JC Henry will be working is second blog post entry.  The goal for March is to be consistent.  It is Woman’s History Month, something should be added.  This is where consistency may help.   The writer has yet to write a satisfactory conclusion to any blog essay.  Feel free to leave a comment, like or dislike.

 

 

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