Week Two: Creative Explosion

This week pushed me beyond my usual creative limit. I had already explored blog themes last week, but the plugins were new and exciting! The readings seemed more like a continuation from last week, and were a good ease-in to the rest of the week, but not my favorite assignments. I  enjoyed reading The Shadow because I find the prospect of an invisible crime fighter rather amusing. I also liked The Postman Always Rings Twice because in the end Frank got what he deserved, but not when he deserved it. I read Debris from the Shenandoah Literary, but that one didn’t sit as well with me as the others. I realized this is because whether or not the bad guys get what they deserve, I always enjoy knowing who the bad guy is. In Debris it is assumed that Campbell is the murderer, but there is now definitive evidence, and that bothered me. In my blog response, I talked about the themes of short, choppy sentences, plot lines that are not always linear, darkness, and ambiguity as connections between all these noir stories.

I love reading, but creating my own character was one of the highlights of the week. I learned that I really enjoy creating fictional characters. I started with who I wanted her to be: a femme fatale, and the rest unfolded from there. The more depth I gave her, the more I wanted to add, until I had the final product: Sasha Kellogg. The hardest part of this was giving her a name that would go with her personality. The reason I chose Sasha Kellogg was because Sasha seemed like a femme fatale name, and Kellogg would make it easier to fill in her story (and I wanted her to be rich, so that made things easy on me). Additionally, it was easier to fill out the smaller details once I found a picture that could accurately represent the image I had in my mind. I also loved seeing the characters that other people created! I like to imagine all of them stuck in the same place, and wonder how they would interact. I had a great conversation via Twitter about my character and Janelle Pierangelino’s!

The Daily Creates were a new adventure as well, and I absolutely love them! They are a silly fun way of making pictures/videos/etc. and reading the prompts always makes me smile The three creates I completed were: making a cat on a synthesizer in space, yodeling, and taking an eye selfie. My blog post on these assignments sums up my feelings about them: I learn a lot about myself through doing silly things like daily creates. These assignments also helped me figure out how to embed pictures and SoundCloud recordings into blog posts. Now the world can see me acting silly (and creative)! Listening to other peoples’ yodels also brought me unequivocal joy.

The writing assignments were also fun. I started with explaining my blog name, because I am very proud of it, and thought everyone should understand it. This was a pretty easy assignment, so afterwards I felt ready to take on harder ones. Next, I moved on to a monologue of a household tool (SPOILERS: a candle). This assignment seemed hard at first, but once I got the story going, it seemed pretty natural to think like a candle. It also made me want to light a candle in my room, which is not allowed. Trying to find a picture of what a candle would see was harder (seems you can’t just type that in to Google and come up with a good picture). In the end, I pasted a picture of a ball of light over a dark room, which I figure is more or less what a candle sees. The third assignment I completed was a timeline of Sasha Kellogg’s life compared to world events. This seemed a lot like a history research project at the time, but made it easier to see what would be going on in the world when my character lived, which is important. AS before, once I got into the assignment, it just flowed.

I saved the alternate ending assignment for last, and was not looking forward to writing it at all. In my mind, the author of the stories ended them that way for a reason, and I respect their decisions in creating their art. However, it occurred to me that I now had a chance to mold the story Debris more to my liking. Tormented by the desire to make an ending that resolved the murders more definitively and the desire to keep the author’s decisions about the story in tact, I decided to leave the ending ambiguous because that seemed like the noir thing to do. My ending to the story gives some justice (because at least one murderer died), but doesn’t explicitly state who killed the young girls or who killed Emily. Therefore, both halves of my conscious could be satisfied. I learned that it is really difficult to try to write in a different person’s style and have it flow just like the original. Meshing my words with the original author’s took a while, but mostly because I was never satisfied. Reading noir and writing it are two totally different things! For the most part, though, this week was fun, and didn’t seem like homework at all!