[All Rights Reserved. Steal and Die.]

The impish word-challenge of the week has been failed rather pathetically. I have no substantial excerpts to offer, no earth-shattering character breakthroughs to share, no plot points achieved. I shall soothe my shame-slain wordcount with a cup of tea and some sleep - but before I do, I might as well offer a feeble update. If only to concede to my ever-so-worthy opponent (did she make it to 5,000, I wonder? Let's all swivel about and stare at her until she tells-) and get some of my notes to the relative safety of the internet. ... I'm just waiting for my notebook to get water-logged, spontaneously combust, be stolen. It's university. I've learned to expect anything. ;)

Something interesting which I discovered the other day, wandering aimlessly about cyberspace when I should have been doing music for theatre homework. A dream symbol dictionary: it informed me that dreaming of any sort of cross or crucifix indicates (1) joy, happiness and fufillment after a long and difficult struggle, or (2) a crossroads implying the obvious: two possible paths lie ahead, and a choice must be made. On the subject, Frost manages to be useful for once: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood / And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler, long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could  / To where it bent in the undergrowth...

Poetry keeps attacking me from the most unlikely places, from Milosz anthologies and books I've nicked from the library. They bleed together like watered-down dye and keeping leaking into my narrative. It is the nature of art, beauty, and divinity to be clean, implies Lang... Wat comments upon the beauty of breathless lungs and Sexton describes the perversity of a God who unties the knot of double hunger in mortals. Memories keep bubbling up from nowhere: a nun who once told me the story of a woman who so loved God that she took communion thrice a day; He decided to test this extraordinarily loyal woman by causing her to bleed for forty years from her fingernails and toes. ["If that's what He does to the people who love him," says Eleanore, "You're off the hook."] Our protagonist would doubtless end up in the realm of "If that's what he does to the people who love him, imagine the retribution which will face me in Hell." ... It positively begs to be thrown into the mix. I initially imagined that I would be too far afield, too out of the loop to write about Roman Catholicism, but I'm starting to realize that it isn't the denomination that matters. It's the small graces, the miniature downfalls, the personal failures which hold the story, not the language of the mass. It's all about the humanity.
 

Mercy Street by Peter Gabriel
Leave by The Swell Season
Walk Away by The Nadas
Sweet Religion by Imogen Heap
Near To You by A Fine Frenzy
In Darkness Let Me Dwell by Sting & Karamazov
Furious Angels by Rob Dougan
I'm Not Driving Anymore by Rob Dougan
Angel by Massive Attack
Borrowed Time by A Fine Frenzy
I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston
Terrible Lie by Nine Inch Nails
Nothing At All by Rob Dougan
Puis Qu'en Oubli by Guillame de Marchaut
When the Angels Fall by Sting
Clubbed to Death by Rob Dougan
Darkness by Peter Gabriel
The Road to Chicago [from the Perdition Soundtrack]
The Hill by Marketa Irglova
Sakrelig by Eisbrecher
Mein Blut by Eisbrecher