I am Ashley, a writer, illustrator, scientist, and innovator. I'm all of that in my own head, at least; in reality, I'm an overextended engineering student with no time to draw and a case of writer's block so debilitating that I've started to wonder if the impulse has vanished for good. I'm a blogger in both realms, but due to changing tastes, my aforementioned lack of inspiration, and the last incarnation of this blog getting deleted by my host because I had all but abandoned it, this will be my fourth stab at it.
My writer's block is still in full swing, but since I'm taking a fiction writing class and need to generate a good sixty pages of original material during the next three months, I'm forcing myself to get over it. That means journaling, that means recording my dreams, that means going with whatever inspiration strikes regardless of how infuriating it is. Henry Roth had his writer's block for sixty years, and I'll be damned if I go down the same way.
Only one thing in life seems to be inspiring me, so, in accordance with my new philosophy, I'm working with it. If you were wondering where my Quote of the Day came from, I tried to cure my writer's block by watching movies about writer's block. One of those was Shakespeare in Love, in which William Shakespeare meets a woman who inspires him to write Romeo and Juliet. They love the first and last kind of love, then she marries some other bastard and sails off to America. Yeah, it's an unhappy ending, but though he and his soulmate couldn't live happily ever after, Shakespeare ends the movie by saying that "She will be my heroine for all time. And her name is... Viola." He then starts writing Twelfth Night.
This story has a point. Though I thought I had written myself out of wanting to write about the closest thing I've ever met to my soulmate, he keeps begging me for the chance to make him my hero for all time. Ergo, a character I've been sitting on for five years, Bryan, is no longer a struggling actor with daddy issues. He is now staring down at a name tag tacked to his shirt as he serves people drinks. He keeps casting glances at a woman across the room, wondering if she notices that he's wearing pink because she once suggested it.
She doesn't notice, but maybe, secretly, she does.
Stay tuned, and wish me luck.
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