~Sunday 3rd December 2023~
(this, written the above date but posted the next day. I slept on it, just to make sure. I am sure.)

It was my birthday on the 26th of November and in 2002 that was a Tuesday, I had P.E. first period and I remember being in the changing room still thinking about Super Smash Bros. Melee, which I had just unwrapped an hour or two ago along with the necessary Gamecube, and Mario Sunshine too. This was going to be the subject of a journal entry posted that day or the next, as if it had just happened. In real life, I was both busy and very sleep deprived on Sunday the 26th of November, 2023, having dowsed myself in caffeine to allow for a 1am watch of Alien (1979) with my girlfriend and her girlfriend and her girlfriend and their friends (the disc was a bit fucked and skipped regularly but it was a good time regardless, and we're aiming to watch it again with a better disc at some point, and the rest of the series). After that, I spent maybe an hour (was it?) talking with my girlfriend's girlfriend's girlfriend for the first time, us both being big big Sonic fans. After even that, I stayed up a bit more, eventually going to bed at I think 11am, having woken up at maybe 3am the previous day. 32 hours awake, give or take.

So I spent a good portion of the past week in a strange and tired mental space, paying off sleep debt. At no point did I feel like posting as Emily Heart, and it felt more like an obligation than like something I actually wanted to do at all.

In comes today, the 3rd of December, and the YouTuber hbomberguy uploads a new video, 4 hours long, about plagiarism. It's my whole afternoon. There's about 5 minutes near the end that's just his theory on the real reason why people plagiarise at all, which incorporates not just plagiarists but copycats, and, well... now I think I might have to redo this website.

At the start of this, in October, I had similar doubts and ended up saying "maybe you can use a mask to be honest in ways you can't without a mask". That didn't put the fear away, I never stopped thinking about it: what the difference is between myself and the character Emily Heart, why I needed her. Since that October journal entry I've started feeling that (despite Once There Were Words being very much like something I'd come up with,) the songs she'd write are different to the songs I'd write: more fictional, metaphorical, poetic. But... if I wouldn't write those songs, how can I say it's honest when I do write them under a different name? And if I actually would write them, why do I need a fictional persona?

I'm rereading that October entry and, seeing, in reference to my 2000s era online heroes, "I think I just want to be nestled in that music, forever, rather than really continue it", and "maybe this whole website is me mourning something that no longer exists, that I've been unable to move on from since it ended. I don't think that's ever gonna stop though, I think I'll always want more"... I think what this website might actually be is me grasping at something and becoming a two-dimensional version of it. Laying claim to a personhood that isn't mine, eschewing my own personhood. Like an irate gamer.

But here's a big obstacle: me personally, I feel like I've long run out of songs to write. I still have ideas sometimes but none that I actually want to put the effort in to do. I can still compose okay, still come up with melodies I like and musical ideas that don't feel shallow to me, but songs are lost to me. In fact, in truth, the thought of committing words to paper, as it were, at all, feels... like beating a dead horse. Over the entire time I've posted songs to the internet (which is about 13 years at time of writing), one person has ever been enthusiastic enough about my work to listen to it more than once. It's certainly won me no attention, let alone a career. I'm just tired of trying, spending all my time speaking when no one's listening.

I thought this project would be a way of sneaking songwriting back into me through some secret side door. Listen: I really don't like Once There Were Words. Not just the version - which I rushed to get out for the 19th of November, the 15th anniversary of my actual first song - I hate the song itself. Well, I dunno. "Hate" is a strong word. I feel about it the way that maybe Gentle Giant might feel about the album Giant For A Day, or maybe The Missing Piece: a partially honest but ultimately lacklustre swansong. A lot of the song describes what I feel; most specifically: "once there were words, now there is silence", and "once there was colour, now it's all dark, what once was a wildfire, no longer a spark". I think I can still write, I just don't want to anymore. As I already said two and a half years ago in a song literally called Songs' End: "whatever book or blood conspired to bear this beast has long been burned away now".

What about just writing songs as a hobby? No good. As I've outlined: it's psychological. I see myself has having failed, either for my own skill or for, I don't know, the world not listening, or my inability to market myself, whatever it might be. For whatever reason, nobody else, not even friends, values my songs. Maybe they're actually bad songs. They're certainly not good recordings, I've never recorded a good vocal take. It won't just be that though. Almost no one's even heard them.

So... yeah. That's the end of this project. Maybe this feels premature, like, it's literally been two months and I've only done five tracks. But, look: I know it would get to me, the disconnect. I know that if I made Emily Heart songs, I wouldn't be able to listen to them without thinking "this is fake", "this is a performance and isn't honest". I've tried writing performative songs before, never finished any of them because it was all fake. I just want to be honest. And I think the honest thing to do right now is to not write any songs.

I don't know what I'm gonna do with this website, if anything.

~Tuesday 19th November 2002~
Feelin': bad, but also accomplished
Listenin': Once There Were Words - myself, just to make sure it sounds right before uploading (I hate my voice)

Okay. It took a couple more days but I finally finished my first song! And... I don't like it! Well the song's okay (but VERY depressing, I'm sorry!!), but I hate my voice so much.

I tried to write a lot of different songs, but I thought my first one should matter, so I made it emotional. I must have written three or four songs' worth of chord sequences! Including this 5 or 6 minute thing that I think sounds kind of like a Final Fantasy song. I think I want to finish that one next.

But it'll probably turn out bad because my voice is so bad! >:(
Oh well. Nothing to do but keep trying I suppose.

In other news, Kieran flicked glue onto my shirt and called it bird poo. It was pretty good though 'cos I got to say "it's not bird poo, taste it, it's glue!". My brain is really good. Better than my voice. I guess I'll probably at least write some good songs, even if I can't sing them. And I might call Scott an antelope tomorrow. See what he says. Yeah. >:D

~Wednesday 13th November 2002~
Feelin': tired...
Listenin': my unfinished song I'm trying to write.

I'M SORRY I HAVEN'T WRITTEN ANYTHING HERE IN TWO WEEKS!!!

I've been so busy with homework (even worse than it's EVER been now I'm in Year 11), and I've been trying to write lyrics I don't hate! I think I'm getting there though. The last few days it hasn't been as bad as when I started.

I asked Claire for more advice about writing songs and she said this (I'll just copy it over. I've done enough "writing things in my own words" lately):

"There's several approaches people take to writing songs:
1. Music first, lyrics second
2. Lyrics first, music second
3. Both at the same time

I've done all three. I can't remember which one I preferred though, it's been a while since I last wrote songs regularly. So I can't help you there."

Well I'm starting to not hate my lyrics, so that helps.

You know what? I'm going to say it. By the end of this week I will have written a song!!! My first song.


~Monday 13th November 2023~
Feelin': tired
Listenin': dreamy songs
Me myself I have been rushed off my feet.

I downloaded a new soundfont that supposedly sounds like an old Yamaha FM soundchip like you'd get in a PC-98 or something of that ilk, and it sounds great, and I made the stupid stupid decision to promise on Patreon that I'd give them a WIP version of a pretend cyberpunk adventure soundtrack later this month.

Based loosely on the classic Kojima game Snatcher, I came up with a minimum tracklist of concepts that would need themes (like for example themes for different characters, and cities or districts, buildings, scenes, etc.), and so the initial total tracklist is 22 strong. In just over a week I've composed the initial ideas for 18 tracks - essentially I have at least one section of music for them, in a handful of cases two or three. The project eclipsed everything else. Once I've got all 22 initial ideas, zipped them up, and posted them to my Patreon (which I will link here probably next year when this project kicks off proper), work on this pretend soundtrack will slow down to "reasonable workrate" speed, since I won't be beholden to my own stupid promise anymore.

Along with the pretend soundtrack, I want to write a short story, which might make composition of additional tracks necessary. And uh... if I can figure out how (very possible), and do the art (this one not incredibly likely), I might actually try to make the game. But, yeah, that's a promise I will never make.

All in all, the lion's share of this diversion is done, with only the antelope's share remaining. Modifications made to the train, it is more or less ready to run again. (That is, uh: I have added a new project to my collection of projects but have now figured out how to structure the work accordingly, so as to not tire me out or remove focus from other projects. Idk if you needed me to explain that. Sometimes historically people have not understood my metaphors.)

~Tuesday 31st October 2023~
Feelin': idk. Average. Matter-of-fact, no particular thing
Listenin': Kokoro - Xenosaga Episode I (Yasunori Mitsuda, ft. Joanne Hogg). Not Emily's namesake, but, this is what I learned the word from, so I guess in a way it vaguely is, or at least it's not disconnected from the whole thing. I just listened to it for the first time in ages yesterday and oh my god I forgot how good it is. Also, having written all this and now going in for proofreading before posting, I realise some of the lyrics in this song are thematically relevant. That wasn't intentional I promise you, I'm just excited about how good the song is

CW: description of abusive home environment
[This is a diary entry I just wrote, only slightly changed to remove a few names and clarify things I wouldn't normally need to clarify in a diary.]

I think we can look back at the abuse again, all five of them [referring to my immediate family members], and say this: I learned to completely devalue my own sense of fun. That "sounds frivolous" and I know what they'd say, though it's been long enough I don't know the exact wording anymore: that that's such a small fucking thing.

But let me tell you what comes under the category of "fun": liking things. At all. God, maybe this is why I never figured out I was trans 'til it was right in my face. I think I always knew what I liked in the moment, but wouldn't have necessarily understood why (in cases where there was a reason beyond just pure opinion, i.e. not music taste), but outside the moment there was no importance given to it whatsoever. I could remember liking something but I couldn't necessarily feel it. This is still here to this day.

It's a cultural thing, and chief gargoyle herself ([sister]) would want for me to point to some big specific event or singular reoccurring thing, the grand weapon, like you'd find in the imagination of a writer with no experience of the subject. If I were to say "I never had control of the TV remote", she would laugh and call it stupid, and call me stupid. She would be unable to realise that that's just one example, which stands as a metaphor for the entire culture of our house: what I want doesn't matter, what I like doesn't matter, I have bad opinions and it can all, will all, should all be crushed underfoot. Everything I do is wrong. Everything I try to do is wrong. Every way I try to do things is wrong. My taste is wrong. My thoughts are wrong. My opinion is the lowest of the low. There is a hierarchy, and I am at the absolute bottom of the food chain. What I like is bad and doesn't matter.

Perhaps this finally explains why everyone else [in the world] has childhood memories of things they watched, games they played, etc., but I just don't, for the most part. I have a handful of memories of those things but I certainly don't remember "the first time I saw Mario 64", or Sonic 3, or Final Fantasy 8, or 7, or 9 (but I do know it was in that order [that we got the Final Fantasies]). Whatever I felt about those things did not matter. I don't even really remember the first time I listened to [2000s era internet musician I'm kinda partly basing this website on], for a short while I thought the first song I heard was [song from late 2004], before at some point figuring out it must have been [song from 2005], based I think on memories and the layout of the website. Whatever memories those were are gone now.

Come to think of it... I wonder what the first distinct memory I have of liking something is. Not just of what the thing itself was, or any specific part of it, but of specifically what I felt.

The closest I can come up with on such short notice is once again another memory of the same thing happening: a night when mum had decided to stop reading STC to me and instead read fucking Voyage Of The Dawntreader or some shit to [brother], still her much coddled and enmeshed golden child to this day. There was a strip (most likely a Lew Stringer one I reckon) where some sharks or general sea beasts tried to wage war on and conquer the surface world, but found in the end that they hated it there. I distinctly remember mispronouncing "surface", it was a new word to me (and if I found the issue it's from, I could pinpoint the week it happened, and how old I was, probably around 8 I think). I think this was the first STC I'd read myself, and I thought it was funny, and I tried to tell her about it and she essentially told me to be quiet because she was reading to [brother]. Cast out and then denied not just re-entry but validity. I guarantee you they do not remember this, it won't have mattered to them. It was always like this. But, yes, that's the earliest distinct memory I can find in me of liking something.

This realisation (or angle of approach) came from not just further thoughts on the Thought Slime video*, but an STCTP (poetically enough) I listened to the other day, where they talked about how Kitching and Elson were repackaging the stuff they loved as kids for the kids of today (the 90s), and how that's always how writers have done it, and that's what Doctor Who originally was, stuff like that. I've been figuring out what Emily's lyrical influences would be and of course it's mostly JRPG songs, at least to begin with, and certainly that's all she'll have mp3s of. Been trying to think, as a writer, not just "what do I 'need to say'", but what do I like? What kind of songs do I find fun? And it's still been hard to write, and I think this is why.



*Thought Slime is a leftist who makes good videos on YouTube. This video is titled "You'll never be a good enough artist" and is 28 minutes long. It is, at time of writing, a very recent video (only about two weeks old), but I think I want to credit it as "life changing", or at least as one vital component of an entire life changing process I'm currently going through. What I took away from it (which might not be 100% an intended takeaway, it might partly come from myself, I don't know), is this lesson: "if you're not ready for the vulnerability that comes with making bad art, you're not ready to be an artist at all".

Maybe that sounds garbage, but hear me out: art is communication. Art is speech, and I don't just mean that in a broad and highly metaphorical sense. Art is literally talking. Having a conversation and making art are two forms of the exact same thing, and if you're not ready to open up to a person in conversation, you're also not ready to show them your art or make art that they might see. If you're not ready to open up and be vulnerable to the world, in that beautiful and sometimes very terrifying and very human way that I think we're all familiar with the concept of, then you're not ready to make art for the world.

Examine yourself. I have spent decades feeling like everyone I encounter has the ability to destroy me completely, to literally end my life, doom me to the torture of perpetual ostracism, isolation, and eventual death without having done anything I want or enjoyed life at all. Everyone I encounter, regardless of how long I've known them or how consistently nice they've been. Do you feel that too? Maybe that's why making art is hard.

The lesson that vulnerability is a necessary part of all communication beyond basic need, well, that's life changing. It turns out you just do have to do it, and if it's so scary you can't: maybe you're traumatised. But the people who traumatised you are very much in the minority, I promise you that. The majority of the people in the world wouldn't be at all interested in destroying you, wouldn't find it fun. That's not a normal thing to want to do to someone, or to like doing to someone.

~Wednesday 30th October 2002~
Feelin': !!!!!!!
Listenin': my usual playlist, right now it's on Frontier Village Dali from Final Fantasy 9

I haven't finished any music yet, I've been trying to write lyrics the whole time and I HATE IT ALL!!!

~Friday 25th October 2002~
Feelin': in love with my secret music
Listenin': The Honest Heart - myself!! I just finished it today

BOYS.

Yesterday, Chris and Rob asked me what I'm most looking forward to about becoming an adult, and I said I couldn't think of anything. Then they told me they were both looking forward to having sex (not with each other, they're both straight). I didn't know what to say. Then they basically said "aren't you?" and I said "not really". They didn't understand.

EVERY boy is like this though, I swear. It goes all the way back to Class 4, when Martin and everyone kept laughing every time someone said "do it" for any reason. All the boys except me* (*I'm not a boy, but I didn't know that then) suddenly only cared about getting off with girls. Even my friends, who I thought were better than that. Every time I went round Louis's house to play games there'd be at least one female character in something, who he'd make a sex joke about. Why!? It's disgusting. I'm so sick of it.

Anyway.

I haven't had much time to make music this week, I've had Science and Maths homework, and I've been trying to get a bit further in Legend Of Dragoon. It's very good but I've never finished it. Also...

Also... I'm trying to write a song! I've tried a few times before, but I couldn't figure out how to finish the lyrics of any of them. So I asked Claire about this a few days ago and she said I should read books more, to "try to get the language in my head flowing better", and also she said I should practice writing. She recommended having a Word document just for writing whatever I feel like, even if it's bad, 'cos there's no pressure if it's a practice file. I hate everything I've written so far but I'm gonna keep trying! I swear, by the end of this year I will have written my first song!!! >:D

Also... IT'S HALF TERM NEXT WEEK!!! I'm gonna be writing SO MUCH when my homework's done. When I got home today, the first thing I did was get on the computer and finish one of the things I started last Saturday, called The Honest Heart. I swear it's the best thing I've ever written!! It's just for me though. And Claire. And you, if you exist. And anyone who hears it in the other world. I swear, all the boys obsessed with sex will never know anything as beautiful as this (if I do say so myself)!

~Sunday 22nd October 2023~
Feelin': idk, a bit anxious, a bit confused, or unsure, i s'pose
Listenin': Omoide Ni Dakare Te Ima Wa - Perfect Blue OST

I'm having a little trouble figuring out exactly how to feel about this project.

( this is a very long post and at one point contains SPOILERS FOR the anime film Perfect Blue )

~Sunday 20th October 2002~
Feelin': cool as blue
Listenin': Tell Me - Final Fantasy 8 (Nobuo Uematsu)

Let me tell you about Claire, my other self.
(This is more for people of my world than people of the other world.)

She's 32 years old, and she's a musician like me, except she plays guitar whereas I play keyboard. Apparently she used to play keyboard but doesn't anymore, but she won't tell me why. Actually she won't tell me a lot of stuff, but I'll get to that later.

Apparently, where she is, the year is 2023! But she won't tell me anything else about it! She said, and I QUOTE, "everything that might be worth warning the world about is either so weird no one would believe it, or something people are already saying already". And "basically, the world is a lot better in some ways and a lot scarier in other ways".

And like I said before, she's transgender, like me. I actually didn't know I was transgender until I talked to her, but it made sense. I've... felt very girly sometimes, and thought very girly things*, and I've been so scared to ever tell anyone about it. Not like my brother, who used to read girl magazines specifically because he wanted to figure out what girls like. He was never scared of girl things the way I am. And... you know that song A Thousand Miles? With the piano? I really love it. But I can't TELL ANYONE. It's scary. So finding out my future self (sort of) is transgender made a lot of sense to me. I understand it all now. I understand myself and everything I've been feeling.

She's a singer too, and she sent me her vocal warmups so I can train to be a singer too! She won't send me any of her songs though! And she won't tell me what music she listens to, unless it's something I like too. She said, and I QUOTE AGAIN, "I don't think it would be right for my timeline to assert itself over yours". But I don't care, I want to know what she listens to!! ARGHH!!!! She's so annoying. But she made me realise I'm trans, and she sent me things to practice my voice, and she's hosting my music in the other world, so I'll put up with it (for now...).

That's all! Wow, it probably sounds like I'm talking about an imaginary friend, doesn't it? Well I'm not! I might have had imaginary friends longer than most people do, but Claire's real, and I have the vocal warmups to prove it! (Which I can't tell anyone about.)

-Emily Heart

*If memory serves, and if she has the same history as me, I reckon what she's referring to here is a passing interest in ballet, and dancing, and being beautiful and moving beautifully and elegantly in general. There might be other "girly thoughts" I've forgotten, or ones she had that I didn't.

~Thursday 19th October 2023~
Feelin': pretty anxious but excited about finally starting this
Listenin': Theme Of Kokoro (Claire vers.) - myself for the grand opening finally. ;)

This is something of a foreword I suppose.

I probably won't do this very often but for some reason I feel a need to pull the curtain back (at the start of the "show") and clarify that this is of course all fiction.

The purpose of this whole thing is threefold:
1. Here is a vehicle for my music, which I will never stop wanting to do but which I've historically been unable to ever complete in album form.
2. I am nostalgic for the internet of the 2000s: a time when artists built their own websites, when the web (as we called it) was populated almost exclusively by big nerds who were genuinely passionate about things. There were more than three websites, and, at least as far as I saw, there were NO websites that ran on "engagement", that capitalist thing that, more often than not, actually means endless fighting in the name of "debate", in order to line the pockets of whatever company owns the place. No, back then, the internet was... admittedly probably dodgier, in certain ways, but broadly speaking if you were on a good website you could trust that there'd be some sense of basic etiquette. War Debate is profitable for the ones selling the weapons running the websites. But the internet didn't used to be a warzone debatezone, not like it is now at least. And there didn't used to be algorithms that force us to be aware of whoever the latest rich gen z bellend is, that force us to see their faces as they react insincerely to the latest curiosity that doesn't really affect them. The internet was full of people who had souls!
3. Uh, admittedly I'd quite like to, um, occasionally live vicariously through an idealised version of my teenage self, specifically one who gets to enjoy that earlier internet in a way I didn't. And one who reads books a bit more than I did, and is a bit more switched on and aware than I was, even if she's still sometimes kind of cringy in the ways that I was, at least to begin with.

Now. I realise part of the premise of this fiction is "a 15 year old and a 32 year old talk to each other online". If that happened in real life it'd be no good at all. But both of them are me. I'm not out here writing a thing where two different people of those ages are talking to each other. In fact I actually tried to write a big "imagine this scenario" thing, where like, I get a friend request on Discord but the name is all just alien symbols, and for some reason instead of going "this is definitely a virus or a spam account" like a sensible person would, I accept, and it's Emily and she opens with "is this [my deadname]?", and it takes a few days of talking before we both fully believe that we're different versions of the same person connected across dimensions. I tried to write a big thing like that, specifically for the purpose of making the fictional decision to work with a teen version of myself plausible, but I wasn't actually able to make it plausible. Even beyond the necessary reality of cross-dimensional communication, there are enough roadblocks that there's no way it could happen. You and me both, we're just going to have to accept that there's no plausible origin for the fictional situation I've come up with.

Anyway, I guess if this is a foreword, let's say this: I have no idea where this is going to go. I've charted out computer game releases I would have cared about, the UK singles chart hits I have any memory of, the school terms my area likely had, a very small amount of specific events and purchases, and one or two TV shows that mattered. And Homestar Runner (vital). How much of any of those I'll actually mention in this is unknown, and beyond those things? Complete mystery. No plans. All improvisation. I reckon I'll probably invent characters and ongoing situations and drama and things, but honestly who knows! Maybe it'll end up just being a load of songs. Maybe I won't even manage it at all, maybe I'll get stuck and then abandon this after a few months, like all the albums I've tried to make.

But, hey.

We're here now.

~Saturday 19th October 2002~
Feelin': EXCITED AND A LITTLE FRUSTRATED
Listenin': Theme Of Kokoro - myself! For the Grand Opening (finally!!)

HELLO TWO WORLDS!!!!!!!!!

God I've been dying to say that for a whole month now! Or quite close to a whole month!

Claire's probably already explained it if you're reading this in the other world, but for people reading this in MY world: someone linked me to a plugin for MSN where you can talk to alternate reality versions of yourself! I won't link to it here because everyone says it's made up. Really! I told all my friends on MSN about it and they all said it was a stupid joke, or a virus. But my computer's okay! It's not doing anything slower or anything like that.

Basically what you do is you download the file, put it into the programme's folder on your computer, and then type an extra little code in after your email address when you log in. Then you can talk to your other selves! I've only been able to talk to one of my other selves though. Her name is Claire and like me she was assigned male at birth but isn't male. Cool, huh? There's something really weird though, which is that apparently she was born 4 years after I was, on the same day, just 4 years later. That probably sounds bad and adds to the possibility it's made up, it probably sounds like I'm talking to a scary person, but we sort of talked about different things and there's no doubt in my mind, she IS me, she's just a DIFFERENT me. If you're scared, you can rest assured that I haven't sent any personal information. I do know not to just say stuff to strangers willy nilly.

BUT ANYWAY. I know that she's me, and we've decided to collaborate on this new website. I've been making music and putting it on the internet for about a year now, but it was all on a different website, that my family members know about. I don't want to talk about it, but I don't want them to know about this one. I don't think I'll tell anyone else about this website either, so if you find it, congratulations! :D

At the top I said I'm a little frustrated, that's because Claire TOOK SO LONG TO MAKE HER VERSION OF THE WEBSITE!!! It was september when we first spoke, now we're more than halfway through october!! We're going to make this a cross-dimensional website, hosting my music (and my musings) in both worlds. This way I get to share what's in my heart with not just one world, but two!

Here's to a new... I don't know. A new start? A new... a new THING. Who cares. Here's to a new thing! :D

-Emily Heart, of light