writing, star trek, etc.

I was wondering whether the constellations would look any different on Mars, so I looked it up, and apparently not; galactically speaking Mars is so close to us that the difference is imperceptible. However, I did find this neat additional bit:

“One of the most solid pieces of writing advice I know is in fact intended for dancers – you can find it in the choreographer Martha Graham’s biography. But it relaxes me in front of my laptop the same way I imagine it might induce a young dancer to breathe deeply and wiggle their fingers and toes. Graham writes: ‘There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.’”

from last year’s workshop: Cool Writing Hacks that ripped my heart out but made my work better anyway.

oh i forgot all the stuff about immediacy!!

“We are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do. […]. We share our lives with the people we have failed to be. Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken. We refer to this as our unlived lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us; but for some reason—and we might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason— they were not possible. […W]e know more now than ever before about the kind of lives it is possible to live. We discover these unlived lives most obviously in our envy of other people, and in our daily frustrations. The myth of our potential can make of our lives a perpetual falling-short, a continual and continuing loss, a sustained and sometimes sustaining rage. [It] makes of our frustrations a secret life of grudges. Even if we set aside the inevitable questions—how would we know if we had realized our potential? Where do we get our picture of this potential from? If we don’t have potential what do we have?—we can’t imagine our lives without the unlived lives they contain.”

How you think writing a large main cast will go: So many different character arcs. So many possible relationships and storylines. So much potential for different interactions. Found family. Everyone gets their screen time. All readers will find someone to relate to. This is gonna be so good!

🔥: Capricorns

“When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lamppost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: “it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it. When I read this letter of Van Gogh’s it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about *design* and *balance* and getting *interesting planes* into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *academical* tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on. But the moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it. And Van Gogh’s little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care.”