Fabell's Emporium of Fantastic Fantasies

[Fabell]

It's been a long time coming.

The last time I did a thing like this was more than 20 years ago. That moment, a seminal one at the very least, transformed my life and most likely those around me. I heard Sean Carroll speaking on Joe Rogan's podcast yesterday about the concept of quantum spin - that all electrons either spin up or spin down, and the direction they spin determines the direction of your life. I'm reminded of 20 years ago when I took a chance like this - putting my writer's soul out for others to see and judge - and I wonder what direction the electron spins at this moment.

20 years ago I joined a forum - very similar to Mizahar. In college, I experimented with my freedom, visiting and joining different communities, and there discovered not only did I like writing, but it came easy to me - flowed free, words uncapped, and conceptually wound myself into a maze of who I was to become over the next five years.

Since then, I've tried to join different communities, but communities are frail creatures, able to be disabled by one clean blow and without the support of everyone involved, either implode or explode. Either that, or they flower and transform lives - and sometimes those not even involved.

Finding Mizahar is a bit like wandering through a desert for 20 years and then suddenly discovering a city in the distance, filled with an oasis of clean water, flourishing trees and a bustling culture. It's both dizzying and wondrous, and I don't know if I will be able to make it. I hope I can.

I'll try to share notes and thoughts about where I want to go with my writing with this community. If not, then at least there is a record that shows I tried.

[Fabell]

Buried in the depths of my dusty cabinet, I found an old card game called "Dictionary Dabble," consisting in obscure and incoherent words that no sane person should know.

Ah, what the heck.

So integrating the words into my writing seems like a wise plan of action.

For the first official post made into Mizahar, I culled ten words from the following list of absolutely horrendous abominations:

Yunga - by far my favorite new word, this means "a densely wooded valley", so in a poem by a guy from a desert, the juxtaposition is both bittersweet and wonderful
Waw - I love the onomatopoeia, as it literally means "a cat's cry", so when given a proper pronoun such as Midnight (such an apt name for a feline), the usage just made me smile
Zwanziger
Felly
Sekjuk
Lazybed
Cobnut
Toby
Floret - "a little flower", simple enough and graceful to boot
Hapalonychia
Nacket
Facies - tenuously used (as it sounds so similar to fecies) but this word which means "a surface" also rhymes quite well and given that I enjoy perplexing others, seemed a nice fit to a poem whose intention was to perplex
Hushion
Waler
Rax - to be honest, I bent this word to my devices and made a new word (raxxing), but originally to rax means "to stretch"
Batler
Maru
Hyetal - the most beautiful of the selection, essentially "an amount of rain"
Dess - generally a "heap" or "pile" or something
Gerondotia
Jannock
Zenana
Gyp - the term itself actually refers to a servant at a college or university, but I'm guessing the double meaning is that college servants are generally the laziest creatures... ever, making it... well, speaking as a servant of a university, I wholeheartedly concur
Ranatra
Stum
Dight - simply means "to dress"
Carapo
Plauen
Placet
Ocarina - simple enough if you've ever played the Nintendo 64 Zelda game

So many of these words on the cards are cultural nouns (such as cobnut, seljuk, waler, maru, ranatra, carapo, and plauen) and would not fit in with another cultural landscape such as Mizahar. Still, with a little flexibility and wordsmithing they might be made fresh.

I'm not too concerned though. I have a maddening 210 cards, and each card has nearly 6 new and genius words to learn. So it should be fun to experiment, and stretch the English language a bit.

[Fabell]

So, I finally found the 11st lost book of poetry I have scattered around the house. So I'm going to start getting these things typed out and put somewhere so I don't lose them forever.

The problem is they are very unorganized.

Let me go back.

Back in 2007 I had a very rocky breakup with my ex. It wasn't mutual, and I was devastated. In some frenetic writing during the month in which it happened, I excised a demon (of sorts) and wrote around a 10-page poem, and after that I never could really find my words again.

I wrote again, of course, but never to the degree that I did before. Before the breakup, I would often take a notebook and write a poem or two poems a day in just different locations, letting myself be inspired by natural surroundings. After that very rough month, the inspiration just didn't came.

I thought I might find a new source of inspiration when I started dating again, when I got married, or when we started a family, but the inspiration just never come.

Since then, I've managed to write a startling 46 poems (since 2009, when I got married). I do have some chapbooks of very angry or confused poetry pre-marriage. Compare this to the hundreds I wrote every year since 2001, when I actually starting writing poetry as a discipline to filter my thoughts.

Either way, I'm far behind my goals of writing 10,000 poems, and need to find inspiration somewhere. I'm not so ignorant as to think that any particular method is the solution to my goal (for example, Mizahar) but I am finding new confidence in asserting some wordplay and hopefully will move forward towards my goal with a newfound energy. Piece-by-piece!

Here is a sample of the last 10 years.

Fresh fronds on pavement,
the glint of makeup
shuttering the eyes closed;

clouds lie under wings,
misting the buildings beyond.

Images form from the ground
rarely make a sound,
and then the engines roar
turns everything to dust,
flaking from mountainsides
and empty valleys like
eagles before a lightning storm.

The words coming to the ear
are a distant memory
already;

the lady besides me
with the metal eyes
is now fast asleep.

"On an airplane"
(6/27/10)

[Fabell]

To just give a short update:

I've completed the full list of poetry (that I can find).

The document is around 301 pages long, with a total of 613 poems.

All-in-all, off to a good start!

Observations:

1. For four years, I didn't write a single poem (between 2011-2015). This was primarily because it was during these four years that I was playing World of Warcraft.

2. My most productive time was the early years (1999-2003), in which I wrote almost 400 poems. During this time I was in college, and one of my two majors was writing, in which I focused on writing poetry.

3. With every 100 poems, my poetry has improved by leaps and bounds. While this may sound stereotypical and logical, it's still surprising to me. You hear about improvement through just word count, but you never actually believe it as a writer. Even now I don't believe it, even though it's quite obviously staring me in the face. My current wordcount for the poetry I've written is around 75,100~ words.