Adventures du jour!
Yoga: I got to do yoga on the patio while the fog rolled in. It just doesn’t get any better than that. Lower back tight, horrible headache/neckache, chest tight, hips in rebellion, feet felt like bricks. In a good mood. By the time I was done I felt fine. I think I was just throwing off junk from yesterday.
Walkies: I walked to the bus stop with Ray (yay!), then took off toward the big parks across 50th. The fog was lovely, just the right amount of thickness to get good depth to the pictures I was taking. Lots of plants and trees from the park–the passionflowers were closed up, unfortunately. That may be a time-of-day thing.
Story: Goth Girl was with me today. Last night I started one of her scenes and had to run it into a dead end so that I could let my subconscious think of a better direction while I slept. Still no insight on what to write, but I feel less upset about it. Eh. Off and on, I’ve been feeling like a fake, “not a real writer,” lots of “you’re a terrible person” self-talk. I looked at the story this morning when I got back from the walk and felt horrible. I wanted to push back away from it physically and found myself at the opposite end of the apartment without knowing why I’d moved there. Ruuuuuuun!!!
I’m still processing the plot twist and feel like I’m swallowing poison and supposed to turn it into something useful (the beer transformation from Terry Pratchett’s Nation came to mind yesterday). This morning, Goth Girl and I worked on what that felt like and whether she wanted to use parts of that for her scene. Of the main characters, she’s most at risk of being dragged down by insecurity; she’s always measuring herself against other people, their achievements, their appearance, their relationships, even their height. Mr. Assassin thinks he’s insecure but is really the most secure of them (he has a good gut-sense); the Goob is more like me and attacks himself semi-randomly but then bounces back like nothing happened.
Goth Girl’s insecurities come from not knowing what she’s good at. “What good am I?” Everything she’s good at has been devalued by the people around her, so she thinks she’s not good at anything that matters. Which I get, even if the things she’s good at are different than mine. Having me–the author–or the other characters tell her that she’s good at things will be worse than useless, though. People told me ten thousand good things about myself, but until I was ready to tune out the actual bullshit and listen to good things about myself, they reached only deaf ears. (Sorry!)
So maybe what I need to do with her is take her back to the bullshit and unpick that a bit so she can tune it out. BLEAH. Well, it would require turning poison to beer, so probably it’s the right direction.
AI: The creating-fashion project is going well! I posted a bunch of the results and nobody’s hated them; the original friend rather liked them. I got her permission to plug an image of her into Midjourney to try to “dress” her. It’s not really working, but I didn’t expect it to. It’s getting closer than I expected, but not great. I’ll keep running it off and on today.
Tarot: I got the Pulp Tarot deck by Todd Alcott. It’s excellent in its interpretations of the cards, and it “feels” very sassy and salty in the spreads I’ve been dealing with it. Fun stuff.