brightrosefox: (Default)
'Reborn' by Laura Sava (anotherwanderer.deviantart.com/)
'Mirabella' by Rachel Anderson (www.silverstars.us/‎)

Two forms of my own story character, Asha Clara Night, my strongest, most individual, most personal fiction character.

These paintings. Completely different images that look almost exactly like incarnations of the same character of my own subconscious creation Women who look almost exactly like the dreamself I am becoming in my dreams and visions.

Laura-sava-Reborn

Rachel Anderson Mirabella


She was in my dreams last night and many nights before. I haven't decided exactly who she is yet, but in my dreams her name is Asha, meaning "desire, hope, hopeful; life; alive; she who lives." Which says so much, so so much.

She is another dreamself, not a spirit guardian, but much closer to my Self than my other characters (Alicia, Serena, Ananta: my spirit guardian coping mechanisms for epilepsy, memory loss, insomnia, sleep problems, [Alicia], chronic pain and fatigue, depression, anxiety, physical disabilities [Serena], neurology, neurodivergence, autism, total mind-body connection [Ananta].

Asha seems to represent many internal things about my emotions, my heart and mind, my rhyme and reason, my logic, my science, my creativeness and creativity, my power, my energy, my beauty. If she were to reveal herself as a guardian, she would be for emotional states, creative thoughts, desires, loves, patterns, ideas.
Asha is definitely powerful in a way I always wanted to be since childhood: Fae and and Elemental Mage and Neurodivergent and Autistic Witch and Quantum Magic Scientist and Story Crafter and Shape Shifter and Magic Librarian and Magic Keeper.

Asha seems to represent my deep, obsessive, compulsive wish and desire to be one of the psionic-mage superhumans in my stories, to take over for be when I feel failure and self-loathing and terror and panic. I think Asha may in fact be an actual entity, one who communicates outside instead of simply speaking into my visions, dreams, pain flare withdrawings, anxiety attacks.

All I know is that Asha was in every dream last night and throughout the past several sleeps, long detailed intense dreams, and she quoted Kosh. She spoke in a soprano version of my voice that could sing. She was always here She is always here. She has always been here.
I think she was with me since I was a baby. In different forms, in different species, with different names, in different imaginary beings, in different fictional characters. She was made of fire. She used to be a phoenix, a unicorn, a dragon, a star, a nebula. I know Asha. I know Asha in the way I hope to know myself.

The thing is, Asha has a fully active voice when I am completely conscious, aware, awake, functional, and stable. She didn't completely create herself, but she grew and evolved over my lifetime in her own way as a character in my subconscious. She took ideas I worked with and wove them into her personality, behavior, and mentality. My disabilities are hers. She stayed and changed and grew with me like a permanent piece of my spirit. Asha also represents my fluid sexuality - I often visit her in the place she calls home and we make love, representing my desires for love and orientation.

She lives with Alicia in the Wonderland cottage, but she freely moves about my brain more often. She shapeshifts into elemental energies, she moves around my hippocampus and amygdala and temporal lobes and cingulate gyrus and thalamus and auditory cortex and somatosensory cortex and parital lobe and the back of my brain.
She has altered the Wonderland cottage to be something else entirely, with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, two office rooms, a large entertainment living room, a large kitchen, a basement. The outside build would contain concrete, cement, hemp and limestone, bamboo, steel. The glass windows are shatterproof. The doors are hemp-lime and timber. That must say something about my mind's inner workings. Especially since the main reason for hemp being illegal is due to its threat to corporate patentable synthetic fibers and wood and paper product industries, while the medicinal drug potential became subject to false claims and fear mongering alarm campaigns until the original industrial potential became buried under the alarmist anti drug campaigns. Part of me probably knows how powerful this is. Medicine from nature itself and the human brain itself is usually denied and seen as worthless.

Asha represents that part of me that firmly supports the controversial balance of traditional pharmaceutical medicine and nontraditional botanical medicine.
Asha is my activism and advocacy. Asha is the fire that moves my belief in the combination of synthetic drugs and organic drugs. Asha is the phoenix in me that rises after every defeat, every failure, every attack, every oppression, every attack and assault on my truths and faiths.

Throughout many names, faces, back stories, lives, personalities, and individual growths... she has always been Asha Clara Night. And this is how she asked me to look so I could see that there is beauty deep and shining.

I must find and thank the artists for these images, since I found myself taking these pieces of artwork and subconsciously turning them into incarnations of my own fictional character.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151978626835684&l=17dde55bf4

Asha may well be the character in that second novel after all. It won't be this Asha, my Asha; just a version, a more humanized incarnation I can bring out to show the public. This excites me. She could help me write it, just by living in my mind.
brightrosefox: (Default)
Some random rambling about my own mind, my imaginary friends, and how my mind likes to invent coping mechanisms that talk back.

One of my imaginary friends, Amara, who is the human coping mechanism in charge of all the neurochemical, neurodevelopmental fuctions, has been interacting with me more and more ever since Alicia (the epilepsy mechanism) and Serena (the pain, fatigue, psychological, neurobiological functions) urged her to show herself more often after I fell into a chemical depression with severe anxiety. Serena and Koan could only do so much.

Amara, at the beginning of her creation, was not even human; formless and elemental. These days, she is human shaped but she loves to take bits of my writerbrain as inspiration. Her ears are pointed and her eyes and hair change color with her moods. She likes to mimic my bone structure and basic figure shape, just with more muscle intensity. Serena says it's because Amara wants to show me that I am beautiful.
Also, when I saw a Google image painting of a woman with elf ears and a unicorn horn, posing with a unicorn, Amara insisted I make it my current Facebook cover photo. She made herself up to resemble like that character while still mimicking my features, including the horn that represents the third eye - just with chestnut brown streaks in her white-lavender hair and honey brown flecks in her intense blue eyes... although none of that is her true coloring. When she made herself human, her coloring randomly became alabaster skin, gold eyes, and pale flame hair, essentially inhuman. But she kept the mirror shape of my skeletal structure and body shape. She even plumped her lips, made her eyes bigger, and made her nose smaller, because she knew I desired that. It makes me smile, which I think she likes. She wears the same jewelry as me, the same clothing colors, the same makeup colors. She is determined to "reboot" the parts of my brain that are having trouble accepting the recent flooding overload of information about these disabilities and chronic illnesses. The name Amara means everlasting, eternal, immortal... which is why she was formless and elemental to begin with. I finally understand why I created her. And she wouldn't mind being the inspiration for any stories I write. I'm grateful for that.
She insists that my jaw, hair, and eyes resemble the jaw, hair, and eyes of Elena Risteska from Macedonia, which I agreed with and humbly accept with a simple thanks. The only way I even knew about Miss Risteska was through searching for shades of brown.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Elena_risteska.JPG
http://img27.fansshare.com/pic34/w/elena-risteska/1200/12861_elena_risteska.jpg
http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/18051115/Elena+Risteska+elena+r.jpg
https://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/p480x480/578088_479387062121006_1822646409_n.jpg
http://img27.fansshare.com/pic34/w/elena-risteska/1200/12858_elena_risteska.jpg
http://tekstovi-pesama.com/g_img2/1/e/28986/elena%2520risteska-10.jpg
She just wants me to feel better, to feel my own positive human emotions. Since Amara is still learning about humanity, she looks to Serena for help. In my dreams, they have amazing conversations.
I'm so glad I created these characters. They help keep me sane, emotionally stable, intellectually stable, and psychically curious. Also, every time I meditate and concentrate on my third eye, I actually feel a short unicorn horn on my forehead.
https://scontent-b-lga.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/1469926_10151743304270684_204893984_n.jpg
I just love that my own mind is creative enough to make up whole people with entire personalities, back stories, individual appearances, individual likes and dislikes, and actual behaviors. They mainly come to me in sleep dreams, daydreams, and meditations. My psychotherapist adores the fact that they exist, which relieves me. It's just one of those things that I, Joanna, have in my brain to help me handle all the stuff that life gives me. Awesome.
brightrosefox: (Default)
I stretched the hell out of my back and legs and arms. It was lovely. I did it my way. I am very pleased and very satisfied. I won't discuss the various burning barbed wire pains that are distracting me even through the codeine, but I will talk about the beautiful meditative exercises I've been working with. Peaceful, serene, tranquil, calm, relaxing, refreshing, fantastic in multiple ways. The scene always changes, but always appears Zen in some way.
I had mentioned that my human coping mechanisms, my spirit guardians, had begun communicating with each other deep in my brain without my conscious knowledge, which leads me to believe that parts of my brain are starting to come together as part of the story, as my unlimited imagination and writerbrain is starting working on a whole new, amazingly unique, private story all on its own. No wonder I have been working on Amber's story beyond these bits of my brain. Amber has also given me free reign to write her as a fully developed character and not just a created coping mechanism.
In general, I am just... very happy.
And the funny thing is that I am in a depressive episode. I have all the symptoms, and I am quite conscious and aware. But I have things that are helping distract me: Talking about my imagination and my creativity, talking about the triggers for my panic attacks and my simple seizures, talking about comedy TV shows and powerful fiction books. Somehow it all is able to keep the major depression away, although it is a very intense fight. Sometimes I find myself weak and struggling, even physically, as thoughts of worthlessness and hopelessness, frustration and terror, pessimism and guilt all slam into me and my wall and my shell.
I suppose I could say I am happy. I feel happy.
But... what is happiness?
"Happiness is a mental or emotional state of well-being characterized by positive or pleasant emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy." Sure, I feel those things. However, there is a strong undercurrent of the exact opposite.
Brains, man. Brains are wild. Brains are weird. Brains are so complex. One day, I want to have an MRI and see exactly what my brain is doing. I want to sit with multiple brain specialists for hours on end, and just... talk. I want to talk about my brain.
Brains, man.
brightrosefox: (Default)
You guys, I amaze myself. I've been writing helter skelter all over the place: Novel, stories, novellas, blogs, facebook, notebooks with various pens, everywhere... in the middle of a postictal migraine and insanely horrific agonizing chronic pain flare-up following recovery from a panic attack. If I didn't have a computer or paper I might write on the walls. I hurt so badly I have no idea what I'm doing. I feel half fire and half water. Wild and raging, and all I want is a crackling bonfire and a rushing river.
I doctored up a photo of myself and it came out half gold light and half blue light. It looks inhuman. But part of me adores it so much. My face is two different parts. I am two entities in one. When I burn, I am cool. When I am cool, I burn. It is ying yang, dragon phoenix, up and down, left and right, I don't even know. I don't speak out loud except to my cats, I just speak through Story. So much Story inside me.
That rock. That rock that my husband gave me, the rock that he held while standing in Room 217 of the Stanley Hotel, in which Stephen King wrote "The Stand" and used as an inspiration for "The Shining". That rock is still next to my laptop. I am covered in words. I am filled up with Words. I may disappear into Story. I may not even see the world until I have to.
Is this what it is like to live in the land of the Fae and then come back to the land of humans?

jowitchzen2

Maybe it was the super moon. Maybe it is the heat from the sun now. Maybe it is anything.
brightrosefox: (Default)
"Only Glass"

It was shortly after she had woken to the sound of glass breaking that she began to investigate. It was two in the morning on a Sunday – or Saturday night, still, technically. She sat dangling her feet over the side of the bed, stretching and slowly preparing to move more fluidly. She took the metallic blue cane that was always propped against the wall next to her nightstand. She kept canes in various rooms for that sort of reason. Her wife was away on business again. People might say that a young disabled woman home alone should never go out at night. Those people were background static. She had been born like this and it had never stopped her.
Slowly, she dressed fully: socks, panties, jeans, bra, tee shirt. Hiking style pull on boots. Her arms shook a little from the spastic hypertonia. She considered at least bringing a couple of daggers. Of course, if it wasn’t a physical kind of danger, the daggers would be somewhat useless. She grabbed a charoite wand and a black tourmaline wand and put them in her back pocket. Next to the daggers.
The sounds had come from well outside the house, so she turned on the hall light, went casually downstairs, and unlocked the door.
Taking a deep breath, she said out loud and mentally, “I am armed in both manners. I am willing to face you. If you represent a threat, you must understand what I will do to you.”
In the utter silence, the sound of glass breaking came through much louder and much closer.
In her front yard.
She opened the door, hands at her sides, right palm open to the wind while her left hand kept a firm grip on the rubber head of the cane. The glass-breaker seemed to hesitate.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said verbally and mentally. “I don’t need the cane all the time. Now. You woke me up. But you haven’t disturbed my cats yet. So you may just want something. I’m willing to talk.”
The leaves on the maple tree in her yard rustled. The entity made the sound of a wine glass striking a wood table and materialized.
“Ah,” she smiled. “It’s just you again.”
brightrosefox: (Default)
Oh, those little moments, those brief windows of choice and chance...

I took the bus to the Redland Road shopping center, walked to the post office to drop off a care package for an online friend, and walked back into the shopping center to get an eyebrow wax at Karen's Salon. As I walked past Hair Cuttery, I figured it was time for a new look. I asked for a mix of Redken's Cappucino and Maple, a light and dark brown. The wonderful lady who took care of me suggested light, textured layers at the ends of my hair instead of my usual standard blunt straight trim. Biting my lip really really hard, I went for it. She flat ironed my hair, which had never been done, and then I held my breath as the scissor and comb gently fluttered through my ends. The results were stunningly astounding. I gave her a large tip.
I posted photos to Facebook and received so many compliments that my little ego flailed trying to figure out how many ways to say "thank you." People's jaws were dropping through comments like "Stunning!!" and "WOWZA" and "Rawr!" and "It really flatters you and it really brightens you! It really perks you up! Your features and gentle skin tone really stand out! Fantastic color! Layers take getting used to, but you add so much body when you add them in!!! I think you look incredible!"
And then... Naamah said this: "You look like a brilliant and tough librarian about to go on some crazy time-travel fairy-tale totally awesome journey. AWESOME look."
And it took off from there. And now the seeds of a story are planted not only in my head, but in Naamah's head. I'm going to scratch out a quick, simple outline, and someday actual flesh out a story, but it will happen.

The first photo that planted the story seed.



The next photo, which made me consider whispering, "I know all your secrets. I can see into your soul."



The last photo, which featured a voiceover by a witchy librarian.


"Why yes, the bizarre and arcane and occult books are here in this section. I must warn you: Some of them are hostile toward new people in our library. That's why I'll be coming with you. Only magic practicing librarians can handle the really strong books."
Oh, my jewelry? Nothing major. That's a ring of round lepidolite stones around a silver nickel pentacle with a round clear quartz stone, and the other is a round charoite stone that I can spin. And the other necklace has an amber cabochon in a pentacle circled by an ouroboros; the pendant behind that is a vermeil lotus mandala butterfly pentacle charm. I'm a soul healer and a dimensional seer; the stones help me see things beyond the veil that most people are never aware of. That's why the other librarians call me the Moonlight Witch. Oh, don't touch that book. It's skittish and full of languages that humans were never meant to comprehend. If you tell me exactly what you're looking for, I can open it and translate for you."

Two new photos, which my Facebook friends are raving over for some reason.

Posing with paintings by my father and my husband.
librarianwitch


A less shaky version.
librarianwitch2

"Just your friendly magic practitioner librarian in a library that holds portals to various worlds, realms, dimensions, and universes. Can I help you find something? I specialize in the interdimensional metaphysical magic section. The children's room there is probably the simplest place to start."

Stories come from everywhere. Just keep looking.
brightrosefox: (Default)
The commencement speaker at my college graduation in 2001 was Mr. James Earl Jones. He didn't need the microphone. He finished his speech in a booming voice with "And may the Force be with you!" (which caused everyone to stand up and roar). I think I actually like Neil Gaiman's speech slightly better. It's probably a tie.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/127838
brightrosefox: (Default)
The commencement speaker at my college graduation in 2001 was Mr. James Earl Jones. He didn't need the microphone. He finished his speech in a booming voice with "And may the Force be with you!" (which caused everyone to stand up and roar). I think I actually like Neil Gaiman's speech slightly better. It's probably a tie.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/127838
brightrosefox: (Default)
The commencement speaker at my college graduation in 2001 was Mr. James Earl Jones. He didn't need the microphone. He finished his speech in a booming voice with "And may the Force be with you!" (which caused everyone to stand up and roar). I think I actually like Neil Gaiman's speech slightly better. It's probably a tie.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/127838
brightrosefox: (Default)
The commencement speaker at my college graduation in 2001 was Mr. James Earl Jones. He didn't need the microphone. He finished his speech in a booming voice with "And may the Force be with you!" (which caused everyone to stand up and roar). I think I actually like Neil Gaiman's speech slightly better. It's probably a tie.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/127838
brightrosefox: (Default)
http://cleolinda.livejournal.com/753596.html
I need to remember this. I really, really, really need to remember this.
brightrosefox: (Default)
http://cleolinda.livejournal.com/753596.html
I need to remember this. I really, really, really need to remember this.
brightrosefox: (Default)
http://cleolinda.livejournal.com/753596.html
I need to remember this. I really, really, really need to remember this.
brightrosefox: (Default)
I'm not sure if this is going to be a lengthy short story or a novel. It might become a novel. I'm working the kinks out, of course. I started it years ago and only just recently picked up on it again. It does need plenty work, and this is only the first draft. This is one of the few stories that were born out of my head almost full-grown. It began very quickly, thick like honey, and flowed like wine, at least for a few pages.

A powerful young witch with medical issues and an interesting family history, who has vampire friends.
***
Blood And Soul )
***
That's all so far.
brightrosefox: (Default)
I'm not sure if this is going to be a lengthy short story or a novel. It might become a novel. I'm working the kinks out, of course. I started it years ago and only just recently picked up on it again. It does need plenty work, and this is only the first draft. This is one of the few stories that were born out of my head almost full-grown. It began very quickly, thick like honey, and flowed like wine, at least for a few pages.

A powerful young witch with medical issues and an interesting family history, who has vampire friends.
***
Blood And Soul )
***
That's all so far.
brightrosefox: (Default)
I'm not sure if this is going to be a lengthy short story or a novel. It might become a novel. I'm working the kinks out, of course. I started it years ago and only just recently picked up on it again. It does need plenty work, and this is only the first draft. This is one of the few stories that were born out of my head almost full-grown. It began very quickly, thick like honey, and flowed like wine, at least for a few pages.

A powerful young witch with medical issues and an interesting family history, who has vampire friends.
***
Blood And Soul )
***
That's all so far.
brightrosefox: (Default)
The six-word story!
Thank you once again, Neil Gaiman.
Damn, some of these are just genius.
And some of them are making me laugh so hard I need to gasp.
Wonderful, just wonderful.

Hmmm, what can I come up with?

"God revealed as lesbian; universe implodes."

Give me some time, I'll think of something else.
brightrosefox: (Default)
The six-word story!
Thank you once again, Neil Gaiman.
Damn, some of these are just genius.
And some of them are making me laugh so hard I need to gasp.
Wonderful, just wonderful.

Hmmm, what can I come up with?

"God revealed as lesbian; universe implodes."

Give me some time, I'll think of something else.
brightrosefox: (Default)
The six-word story!
Thank you once again, Neil Gaiman.
Damn, some of these are just genius.
And some of them are making me laugh so hard I need to gasp.
Wonderful, just wonderful.

Hmmm, what can I come up with?

"God revealed as lesbian; universe implodes."

Give me some time, I'll think of something else.

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