"If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."

These words were said by Ray Bradbury, but belong to anyone who feels that flicker of fire in their blood when they read it. This quote grips me for just that reason, that I feel so powerfully connected to the speaker. He understands something and has managed to say exactly what I fail to when I try to describe to people "why I wrote so much". It does feel just like love, doesn't it- the grip and then catharsis of writing. Even if no one reads it, you're a bit more healthy, a bit more sane, and it's just a bit easier to breathe when you're done. I would imagine it is much the same for the people who sit behind a brush or an instrument.

In short, I am off and away. I'm at a very strange place in my life, where things are completely up in the air ahead of me. I'm settled on what I'll be studying in college and it's nice to have that out of the way after a long-winded fight with my sensibilities, but now that I've been out of high school for a year and doing something entirely different than prescribed, an ocean away from all that is familiar- I find that my wanderlust has not been satiated, but piqued. I need something else. Returning home for any length of time is not an option- only to regroup a bit, pack my bags, grab a ninety-nine cent Arizona Green Tea before the sales tax hits me across the border, and then I'll be gone.

My writing is pulling me south these days, it feels. Sometimes I don't know why I write certain things, they just troop out of my brain and snuggle down into their cozy ink corners across the page, and then later, I will go back and look at them and it's just fifty pages of smirking poetry asking me why I don't pay attention to what my instincts are telling me when they are telling me it. My instincts are telling me to keep moving, don't slow down, don't stop now or you'll stop forever.

I went east and hopped the sea, maybe it's time to go west and learn my land like I've begun to learn my mind.

I'm not sure how much of me you'll be seeing around here. I am so incredibly grateful from all that I have learned from the brilliantly talented writers and artists that gather on this site and will continue to read the pieces that accumulate from my watches, but I feel that I've stagnated in many ways and maybe a shift in focus will help my brain start up again, more or less. I wish you all the best in life, art, and love- but those things are really synonymous for most of us, aren't they?

Timshel,
Louise Jones