I'm alive

But as you can likely tell, very bad at keeping up with regular posts. The past three are a good example of me in a manic mood, and then this long delay is me being too depressed to do anything. Yay for the yo yo.

I want intimacy.

I know it's the goal of all writing to manipulate your reader. To make them feel what you want them to feel, and see in their mind the same things that you're imagining in yours. I get that, and it's not an original thought on my part. What do I do though when the things I want to express are things that I myself cannot grasp, but only feel them as they pass through me? Feelings that are like a breath that only exists so long as I let it go right after I take it in. If I hold it, it just becomes stagnant air that no one wants, not even me.

The types of scenes I want to write the most though are ones where intimacy is expressed. I want to show you something that is private, that is sacred, and that is important in the context of my character's lives. I don't want to waste anyone's time with meaningless, flat settings and scenarios that have no sense about them.

When I say sense, I don't exactly mean it in terms of your five senses. At least not the way they observe and relay information, but rather, the way they evoke memory and notice change, and likewise become dull from repetition. One can walk outside every day, from their front door to their car, and never really notice what's going on around them on the way. It's because they see it every day, smell it and hear it, and it doesn't really matter.

Sometimes though, the light hits your path a certain way, or the wind comes carries a special scent and briskness to it. You become reminded of the last time you were out on a day like that, and more than just recognizing the difference between a sunlit and rainy day, you feel the passage of a season. You remember the last time you were actually out on a day like that and not just watching it from your window, a flat change of a display picture that even your eyes are only dimly aware of.

It can even happen inside, to, that one morning you wake up and whatever setting you had left the heat on wasn't enough to combat the frigidness outside. You know that the autumn is over and winter's begun, and trudging barefoot through that foot thick layer of extra cold that's flows along your kitchen floor, you start to think of all the other mornings just like it. Younger mornings, when you got up for school instead of work and pissed and moaned every step of the way.

Sometimes you walk into that room you thought you've forgiven and remember all the beatings and suffering you dealt with inside of it. Sometimes you walk down the stairs you go down every day but just this time you remember the last time you and a friend sat talking on them with liquor in your hand and a lighter heart.

I want everything to be vivid like those times, but I don't know how to muster it. If I wax poetic about every single description and action my characters observe or take, it becomes and overload, and none of it's important. If I space it apart, I have to fill that space with crap that I don't feel it's worth it to write about. Though it's a flip of the coin or my BAV whether I think that weaker writing around it enhances it or poisons it.

I'm at a loss to figure out how I can make everything special when the only way to make something special is to keep it scarce.

Pretty much lost.

I don't know what I want to write about. There are a lot of things that interest me but, they appear in my head as something like still images, or small cut scenes that aren't elaborate enough to be a story, but may be suitable for something like a music video. Sometimes I can take a small little detail like that and build something around it, and other times, it seems like a useless piece of thought that doesn't fit anywhere. Maybe it's just lack of effort and concentration on my part. It probably is.

I guess it would help to write out what I do like. I like urban settings. The city is much more interesting to me than the country side, which seems a lot more like a place you visit and not a place you call home. The country is a calm place where nature hasn't been too greatly disturbed, and goes out despite the presence of people. The city, however, is a place that has been overcome by humanity. It is so saturated that it begins to reflect their nature, to act with a personality that we can relate to and understand.

I like darkness in my writing, but I can't say that so plainly. Everyone seems to have their own definition of darkness, it seems, and a lot of them don't fit. Violence for example isn't of magnificent interest to me. We've become too desensitized to it, I think, or at least I have. Sexuality is another thing that's commonly thought of as being dark, but with the rampant availability of pornography everywhere you turn and peoples attempt to sensualize everything, the mood has lost its luster.

When I speak of darkness, I think of things like personal failure. I think not of the terrible thing that has happened in the past but the repercussions of it, the knowledge that something is wrong and it can never be fixed, that it's never going to be all right again. I think about hopelessness, and deep sorrows that make you depressed enough that you just want to end it – and a mood that actually suggests that it's the best course of action. I guess that's another reason I don't get very far. My characters often just want to kill themselves, and they burn with a passion for the end that they just do it. Some writers of fiction say at their heart that they are really poets. If I ever become a writer, I'll have to admit that first and foremost I am an author of suicide notes.

I like having my characters make the wrong choices. Doing the smart thing is something I hate other people for, and I guess I want to doom my characters to suffering the same fate I have in life. I do actually like perfection, but that's a habit that I'm going to have to break. I've wasted too much time trying to come up with concepts that can speak to everyone universally, and I've come to realize that the only way things like that can be accomplished is by making them childish. To have any significant depth, I have to speak to souls like mine, and accept that most others aren't going to get it.

Aside from that, I don't really know. In a more flat-context I like Russia, the feel of the Soviet era and WWI conflict. I'm a bit of a Slavophile and I like their pre-Christian mythology a great deal. Ancient civilizations in general have a bit of a sway with me, but I'm turned off to many that just seem too cheesy to me because of what society around me has imagined of them. I do like the supernatural, but I like it in a subtle sense; where anything that happens is possibly explainable as someone being crazy. Ideally that they couldn't prove any of it if they ran out into the street screaming about this magic or that monster.

I'm a big Anime fan, but I can't draw so my interests there don't really help me. I guess a lot of my lack of being able to express myself goes back to the fact that I don't read as much as I like; but I have plenty of time for watching Anime and movies because they're easy and don't require brain power. Bah. It's late, I'm going to go read, I'll bitch more later. I don't even know what I wrote so far.

I am not a writer.

My name is Sascha Korshunov, and I am here attempting to better my skills at writing. I am shamed to admit that I am one of those people who likes to talk about writing a lot, who likes to think about the stories they will write, but in the end never actually sits down and puts anything to pen and paper (or in this case, hits the keys). I'm not lacking for inspiration, I'm lacking in perseverance and work ethic. I also have a pretty big problem with trying to be a perfectionist, despite the fact that I've never created anything perfect in my life. There's probably no such thing as perfect, but I still try.

I actually suffered directly from that attitude while making this blog, which any normal person should be able to make in five minutes or less. Instead of just creating it and writing, I tried to make my own theme and had to screw around with all the settings. I probably would still being doing that, too, to no avail since I have even less artistic talent than I do linguistic. Thanks to my friend Nadia for reminding me that people who go to blogs do it to read, not just look at the pretty background. Those people are on deviantArt. ;)

So, what am I going to do here? I'm actually asking myself that, it's not just rhetorical for you. Well.. I'm going to try and write here a little bit as much as I can and keep it updated about how stories I'm trying to write are going. I'm going to talk a little about what I think of writing in general even though I haven't ever finished anything, so my opinions on it are pretty pointless. I'm also hoping the friends I give this too will kick me in the ass a little to just write. I'm not going to make anything fantastic. I'm not going to write any best-sellers or anything with incredible philosophical depth. Not just now, but likely, not ever. I just want to write something, whenever I get my weird little ideas, and this time around try to finish them.

I waste a lot of time with fan fiction. That's not to knock on the genre/style of that in general, some fan fiction is better than the original source from what I've read, but I personally waste time when I go that route. I spend too much time obsessing over meaningless details, and it feels fruitless since I know I couldn't ever make money off of it. Yes, money is a concern for me. If I finish anything original, I plan on sticking it up in the Kindle Store, not because I'd make any worth-while profit, but I plan on using the amount of downloads as a litmus test to see how shitty or not-so-shitty it is.

If you can't tell yet, I have a good deal of self-loathing for myself. It's another issue of mine. I also plan on talking about what I read on here because, well I don't read enough, and I can't really write stories if I don't read stories. Reading captions on Tumblr articles doesn't count, cause they're not what I'm trying to write.

I'm sorry to warn you that all my posts, and my writing, are about as disorganized and cluttered as this original rant here. Sorry about that. I promise to try and remember to run everything through a spell checker though since Firefox is bitching my cookies aren't enabled and won't let me sign in, so I'm using IE with no built in spell checker. I also promise to try and remember the difference between there, their, and they're.

Do svidaniya.