The Write Mistakes, No Regrets, and My Chrysalis

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

-Edmund Burke

When someone asks me where I’m at in my life, I’m afraid to answer. Afraid of what they’ll think of me, afraid of how they’ll judge me. Afraid that they’ll see me going nowhere, even if I know where I’m headed.

I’ve finally decided. I’m done fearing what others will decide about me. What others will judge, assume, or think of me based on what I’m NOT doing with my life.

Over the past couple of days I’ve come to a conclusion. I am in my Chrysalis. Metaphorically speaking of course, I don’t moonlight as a caterpillar. Or larva. Yick.

In a few years, when I’ve made it where I’m heading, I’ll know I made the right decisions and that the mistakes I made were ones I needed. Experiences I gathered were required.

 

But what about right now? Larva isn’t that pretty and neither is a caterpillar. A chrysalis is a hard layer of skin and some silk. Not all that appeasing to the eyes. My choices and decisions don’t look all that beautiful right now, not to most people anyway. They expect me to go to be in college, have a job.

Click to enlarge – no really, click it!
2012 Copyright Daphne Shadows

*Feeling Loved*

One month later… Jeeze this took me forever! Sorry for taking so long to do this post people.  I’ll get straight to it. Because I don’t think you guys would want to listen to me tell 7 things about myself four times over, I’ve combined the numbers. And if any of the questions were repeated, I only answered them the first time asked. Also, I only nominated 2 bloggers per award.

I do not think any award is better than another, I simply don’t want to make a post for each award. That’d feel braggy to me. Oh yeah, and I’m going in the order of how I received each award.

I have been given the following:

• The Kreativ Blogger Award by Brian. You can find him here, where he has a vast amount of  knowledge in everything writing, editing, and staying afloat in the turbulent waters of writer life.
• The One Lovely Blog Award by Dianne. You can find her here. She’s battled crocodile’s and won… need I say more? I’m not even making this up.
• The Fabulous Blog Ribbon by Athena. This gal’s blog resides over here and has recently reminded me of the joys of writing down how I plan on/ want to organize my writing schedule. Because its not all writing peeps. Thank you Athena!
• The Sunshine Award by Christina, Kay, and Kina. Christina is here and has a joy for life that makes me wish I could give her the sunshine award too. Kay’s blog is here and she’s a legal secretary who loves to write. Which is awesome. So is the name of her blog “suddenly they all died. the end”. Kina is over here, where she’s busting out some pretty personal words.
• Athena also tagged me. Her blog is up there. ↑

Thank you to all of you who gave me an award, a ribbon, or tagged me! You guys are awesome and it makes me feel great to know that I’m coming across in a positive manner! I’m not very good at thank yous but it means a lot. Remember that whole not being able to articulate what I feel all that well? Yeah, so this is about all I’ve got… thank you!

Here we go….

Japanese Kitsune (PART TWO)

Last Monday I posted part one of my research on the Japanese kitsune. You can find it (here) . This is the second and last part… And remember that this is all how I understand it. If I’m incorrect you’re not allowed to throw rocks at my head. Deal?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SUPERNATURAL/MAGICAL ABILITIES

What each kitsune can do depends on what lore you’re reading, what kind of kitsune it is, and how old it is. They can…

• Breathe fire
• Posses humans and foxes
• Become invisible
• Manifest themselves in humans’ dreams
• Fly
• Ward off evil
• Feed on the life or spirit of a human through sex
• Bend time and space so that in a pocket of the human world, they can place another realm of their own making. These realms can take up no more than a few inches of space in the human realm. But inside they can be as vast as the kitsune wants it to be. For every human year, some lore states that seven years pass in these pocket realms.
• Create illusions to confuse victims. The illusions are so elaborate that they are almost indistinguishable from reality.
• In some lore they can take human form at 50 years old, others not until 100. Greatest of their abilities was to take human form. In some lore they did this for the purpose of trickery, in others they did so to become friends, lovers, or guardians.
• Magickal mind control via eye contact. The victim will be trapped in the world the kitsune creates inside their own head until the magic is broken.
• Can create small balls of floating fire when in fox form – to light their way or play with.

Japanese Kitsune (PART ONE)

Alright crazies – here’s trickster number two. (I just so happen to have a kitsune in one of my two current novels.) *drum roll please*…

The Japanese Kitsune is pretty well known but still not very mainstream. I am told that it’s used in Anime and Manga. However, I’ve also been told that only one facet of the kitsune is shown in these, whereas the Kitsune mythology it is derived from has a certain depth.

The first trickster I talked about was the Celtic Puka (you can read about it here). After joining WANAtribe, I came to find that a few authors are using puka in their current Work In Progress; which is totally neat!

I’ll be interested to see how many of you know about the kitsune and where from.

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This turned out to be way too long of a post for me to post all together, so I’m splitting it up into two to spare you. What it all entails:

1.  CLASSIFICATIONS OF KITSUNE 2. WHAT ARE THE KITSUNE? 3. HOW THEY APPEAR 4. SUPERNATURAL/MAGICKAL ABILITIES 5. KITSUNE TRAITS/CHARACTERISTICS 6. AS TRICKSTERS 7. PAYMENT 8. SEX WITH A KITSUNE 9. WEAKNESS

The bold categories are the ones covered in this first post.

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Attribution: Shiretoko-Shari Tourist Association

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kitsune is the Japanese word for “fox”.

Hindsight is 20/20

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
- Albert Einstein

 

I love that quote.

Let’s face it; none of us really know what we’re doing. Life is research. That’s what makes it so perfect. It’s a jumbled imperfect mess of emotions and desires and strangeness. Its love, pain, and confusion and needs, uncertainty, fear and happiness and complexities that you can’t always put words to.

That’s one I’m particularly bad at; putting words to what I feel. Articulating what goes on in my head is not the simplest thing and if it’s attached to an emotion, I’m doomed. I get too wordy and people most likely get irked and move on.

So how then, am I planning on becoming an author? I suppose it’s one of those ever conflicting contradictions I play home to. I don’t have that problem with my writing. It all just comes to me, but then again that’s because what I’m writing isn’t about me, isn’t it?

Jumping around – because I’m quite indecisive today… I’ve been told that I should tell people what’s going on with me, that people want to know how my writing is going and what else is going on in my slice of life. Well, okey dokey, I suppose I could do that. I’ll stick to what’s new.