Current Announcement

Stuff always being prepped in the background.

Lots of stuff has happened in the last few years. And some of the older posts need maintenance. A buffer of entries is being developed.

In the process of updating tons of parts of my website, shops and web presence.

Tons planned for this year including splitting some topics into separate blogs.
See the Announcements page for a bit more info.

Christina
May 22, 2015

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Driven to Create: How I got into Art & Writing

My life has always been about letting my imagination run wild.
      As a kid I told lots of true stories, anytime I went to a new school and the kids were asking me about myself, I always ended up telling tons of tales from my life. I remember at one point in the 6th grade (my third school that grade), I had six plus kids sitting in a circle with me at lunch time while I told stories about my life, my family and the strange dreams I’d had. Which, even then, having such an audience struck me as bizarrely interesting. I dabbled in acting regularly the end of 6th grade and on until developing stage fright at a drama club orientation freshman year of high school, which fully put a kibosh on my plans to pursue that as a career, though I did go to a Hollywood acting class with a friend senior year. I lived out in Simi Valley with an uncle for a year. As the realization that I was way to self conscious to go after that I then started focusing more on the drawing and writing that I began getting really into in junior high.
      Whenever I played with my sisters, cousins or friends I always went out of my way to have some storyline going on always making up new games. We’d often play recurring storylines. The games I would make up would get fairly elaborate and I’d had plans to do more with my cousins at one point back in 2004/2005 I wanted to have a regular club for them to play these games and went so far as to make a little website and we made regular characters for ourselves and I did up some re-colored art for that. But it could not be kept up due to lack of funds and such.
      In my grade school years, there were always some sort of art supplies around the house and my mom had a bunch of thin Walter Foster books my sister, AJ, and I would try drawing from them. around 5th grade I tried my hand at Funny Faces Tracing books. The tracing helped me practice line work and such.
     When my mom was pregnant with one of my littler sisters either Holly or Nikki, she bought a book called What Shall We Name the Baby, that book became mine after Nikki was born and it started a lifelong habit of buying baby name books (I've got at least 10 now and if it weren't for being perpetually broke I'd probably have tons more). Anyhow, I'd spend hours making lists of names (each name had a last name attached to it) and characters began to lurk in the corners of my mind. Within the next couple of years I began trying to come up with story ideas for them.
     On Christmas 1993, AJ received an X-Men comic book, which was strange as I was the one who was huge into the cartoon. I was in 7th grade. Then summer 1994 we were bored out of our minds, to a point of desperation, and we knew not to go to our mom with our boredom because whenever we did that she would think up chores for us, and that just could not be allowed to happen. So we saw her comic book, which of course was mine before summer was over, and thought - hey let's make up our own comic book characters.
      Naturally hers instantly looked great, she was the one with the natural talent for drawing. Drawing with reference material in front of me again was a revelation, for the first time my drawing actually looked human. I was hooked hard, she got bored with it after a couple characters. So began furiously trying to draw often. I ended up continuing to create comic book characters to this day.  I began going out of my way to teach myself to draw, do other forms of art and to improve my writing. With drawing and art I aim to go fully pro and somehow build an empire that I can populate with the universes that live in my head. My ambitions with this company I wanted to make out of my stuff was born, though the way I wanted to do it didn't even exist at the time, at least not in any accessible way.
     My passion for writing and drawing, it's a calling, burning through my veins, pushing me to create. I have more worlds, characters and stories in my head than I will ever be able to unleash in my lifetime, unless maybe I somehow manage to get my hands on immortality. Of course if I get my hands on immortality I'll have no choice but to take some time off to go on a quest to obtain telekinesis, I want that so bad I can taste it, telekinesis is just the most versatile power, with my imagination, determination and love of learning, I'd take that to wild new levels, but I digress.
     Creativity and imagination are immensely prominent chunks of who I am and what drives me, it's the part of myself I like the most, it's how my self-esteem thrived and survived in the face of great adversity. I was born gifted with an expansive imagination and I feel honor-bound to use the holy smurfs out of it. But more than that I want to use my skewed empire to inspire others and even provide employment, freelance work and internships to other people. Though having actual employees is still a ways off, the way I want to do my company is at least existing and accessible and ready to start being visible and tangible.
~ Aurey Sorrow

Friday, June 5, 2009

Blasts of Creepiness Vol. 1: Pre-Twitter Days

Hi! Okay so I wanted to start cataloguing my Blasts of Creepiness entries, as I discussed in the previous Sorrow’s Sagas blog post (see that for more details). This is a creative writing exercise I started doing back on Yahoo 360 and am now continuing on Twitter. It is a great way to warm up for the day’s writing. So here are the early ones.

    1/3/07 - Sorrows untold, now I wander in this dimly lit pit. A shrinking violet in tow. "Give into me, little one" I hear it whisper, "drown, I will drown you tonight if you resist..."

    4/25/07- In the shadows he lurked,harkening unto me.Cold chills crawled through my spine for he was always watching in that creepy way of his,eyes boring into my skull...waiting

    5/29/07 - Gazing into the eyes of this wraith-like stranger, drool slipping down his chin, I could see my own death eminently approaching.

    6/11/07- Risen high above the depths of Hell a severed arm in my grip, I had stared into the abyss and yet survived. The minions will piss themselves when they hear of this.

    7/12/07- Looking into the mirror I saw the cold bleak darkness of my isolated destiny. I was to be alone, always...

And here are two that I never posted:

    10/12/07
    - Gazing listlessly into a sweet oblivion, an eternity, my resolve began to fold, a taunting reminder of yet more of my failures
    - His voice echoed through my mind, ricocheting into my more fragile pieces of self until there was only him remaining in my head

So that gives the general idea of what I’m up to with this mini-project. Now that I’ve started doing this on my Twitter, I’ll archive them in here each time I have 5 or 10 depending on how frequently I end up writing them. I hope you like them and I hope you try doing your own version.

~ Aurey Sorrow

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

A Creative Writing Exercise: Blast of Creepiness

Once upon a time I discovered Yahoo 360. I got hooked. I especially liked their blast feature. Then in late 2007 they announced major changes would occur. Based on what I read I thought I'd better stop using this because it's going to disappear. Well they've just announced that as of July 13th it will be shut down. Early I sought to replace the blog host for Decadent Angels which started out as a creative writing exercise on one of my yahoo 360 pages, so I moved it to my myspace. But on different yahoo 360 page I began doing a few creative writing exercises directly in the blast, it's been a long time since I've done that and I'd always hoped to start again assuming 360 didn't vaporize.
Around a week ago I caved and finally decided to check out Twitter. And I've been mulling over what I should do with it while I had nothing noteworthy to post. When you have a Twitter it's important to post several times a week if you want it to really take you somewhere. Today when staring at that little 140 character box I was suddenly reminded of how it was just like the 360 blast thing. Eureka! More uses for my Twitter rushed into my mind, instantly. Chief among these was those little creative writing exercises I posted a few times. What I basically do for this exercise is put on the internet radio for mood, and meditate for a few moments to get into the right frame of mind. Then I just start to write fast, and poetic until I hit the character limit. I trim it down if necessary, though it rarely is because the character limit is displayed, and as poems go there is nothing to necessarily complete. Naturally being me, they came out sort of creepy and atmospheric, as with all of my poetry endeavors.
So now I will attempt to resurrect the exercise on my Twitter tweets. I've decided to call them Blasts of Creepiness, and I will post copies of them on here whenever I have around 5 to start with. If you see the Blasts of Creepiness label on here that's what I'm referring to.
This is something I really recommend attempting, it's great writery fun. Though by all means don't limit yourself to just creepy & atmospheric, go with your own style of poetry. Even give your own name, to reflect the style, and to differentiate it from my works.

A few ideas for this:
  • If you wish to use the same theme you could call it something like Tweets of Doom to archive them in your own blog.
  • Theme: ode to your pet
  • Theme: mini love poems
  • Theme: ultimate warrior poetry
  • Theme: mystery
  • Variation: write a serial story poem 140 characters at a time
  • Theme: horrifyingly cheerful poems, of a sunshine and daisies variety
  • Theme: green poetry tweets, concerning things of an earthy nature, and the greatness of a house run on solar power and built out of mud and recycled beer bottles...recycling and love of the environment have moved into a very trendy place lately.
  • Theme: comedy
  • Theme: sci-fi
  • Theme: fantasy
  • Theme: western
The posibilities are extensive. The point of it is to stretch your imagination and practice creativity, it's an excellent way for a writer to warm-up. A fun addition to your Anti-Boredom Arsenal, because remember, boredom is dangerous and must be stopped.

***
Well that's good for now. I will be posting later: my old blasts that I did for 360, more creative writing exercises, and more idea grenades for your Anti-Boredom Arsenal, among other things.

~ Aurey Sorrow