Happy (belated) New Year! The fourth sssatire session is happening on
Jan 6th, 10:30-11:10 PM, UK time.
The first Saturday of 2024! Check what this is in your local time zone here.
The theme will be “secrets(mysteries)”. Secret prompt included, as usual :)
Meeting link
As I write this part on December 30, I am currently on my way back to the UK from a solo vacation abroad. This week's session may or may not happen on time due to messy time differences and relay flights - I'll send out an email when the session is supposed to start.
— That ended up being now (Jan 5). I was hoping to be up and ready by New Year’s, but alas - international flights were no joke. 10:30 GMT was 6:30 in Beijing, and I had a connecting flight back to London in 6 hours.
I've been writing non-fiction scripts to submit, and it's been happening, maybe? I might be able to link to some of those soon.
Moving onto week 3’s prompt & products.
A summary of week 3
This week I introduced the new feature of: reading another artist's writing for inspiration. This week's piece was Beauty by Solmaz Sharif.
I also successfully got audio sharing up and running, so there's actually ambience now. Here’s the playlist attached:
Prompt:
1. depict the home of your dreams.
- compare it to your childhood home. What's the same? What's different/has changed?
2. With the contrast between your hopes for the future vs. your past in mind, connect this with the present by making it an commentary on what you think of the world as it is; namely any issue happening in the world now (you're not obliged to doing this, however) - this could be something on a global scale (e.g. wars) or the smallest unit of personal problems (e.g. your pencil just fell); political or apolitical.
- comment on the world, to you, right now; you could compare it to how you envisioned it as a child.
Products from the session
my piece:
Around and around, we went back and forth the boroughs and junctions in rounds of house-hunting; when is this all going to end, coming to an ultimatum? One could not help but wonder.
But we were fine, after all; I wasn't so ready to move when X proposed to anyway. I'm not ready to leave this room behind yet, for we cried and laughed in this room, first met in this room, spent all of our days together in this room,
and are now leaving this room, in this room.
It was my space, above all. Everything was tweaked to fit *my* interests; the walls painted in a desaturated yellow-green, the bed fitted right against the wall, looking out to the window; the memory foam mattress; a wall-turned-bookshelf; books, paint, books. Zines. Art collections. X complained about the sheer amount of books at first, but quickly surrendered as he realised I wasn't going to budge. Even if it was merely a rectangular block of a measly space of rokujouhan* to live - or as people normally call it, a studio flat, it is my flat.
Perhaps I'm not quite ready for a third person to invade my space even months later - dealing with an internal dialogue is tiring enough.
*[^jou= tatami, a measuring unit]
[roku = 6, han = 0.5]
2.
In my teenage years, I prayed to one day return to "normality" - to me, that would be the first home I've ever lived in. The first room I remember, with its bare ceiling - nothingness. That was my first ever memory; waking up and recalling nothing, except the whiteness I face. (the memory's imprint is now vignetted in my mind.)
As I grow up and evolve, the plain whiteness of the ceiling gradually gets pigmented with gradations of colours - olive for vegetation, cobalt for the sky, black for letters, impressed heavily with ink. Yet it gets muddied as each colour is mixed into the brain.
Humans repeat their mistakes. In their rooms of only some square meters each; their walls of hide; their core processing unit of soft, rosy nervous tissue, no bigger than a fetus.
The world is changing, in every unperceivable movement of time, the smallest units one could execute change; in every bit flashing, in every breath you take. Or so I thought -
I suppose some things will never change. Maybe. Perhaps. (Does this mean yes or no in context?) But that won't stop the routine of commuters hopping onto trains, nor will it detract from the bitterness of coffee flowing through our sensors.
(The part above was kind of inspired by the poem!)
The two parts of my piece feel very disconnected now that I look back at it; part 1 was an attempt at creating a 1st person persona (a brand new fictional character, never existent before, created solely for this piece), which is honestly so stiff - I have very little experience is characterisation, so the disappointment isn't a surprise; while part 2 was definitely me speaking.
Thank you for coming and contributing so positively, Finley! Finley and I discussed how interesting it was that we went for very different approaches for the same prompt! Finley's was a lot more physical, with descriptions of what xyr dream room would look like, whilst I used my idea of the ideal room to build a poorly constructed arc between two fictional characters.
Alan was on the call chilling and practising saxophone again. He's a great vibe in the (digital/virtual) room (or a liminal space?) for sure.