From the National Day of Writing (Oct 20th)

Why write?

I don't know. Why read? It's amusing. It distracts. It transports. It reveals. Too many reasons and hardly any at all. There's very little in the way of logic about it. There's an embrace of abstract art, a sort of mysticism one wouldn't accept elsewhere in life.

Why write? Because it's endlessly surprising. I always shock myself with the things that pour out of my fingertips. Thoughts I didn't know I had. People I didn't realize I've met and studied. Situations that I would never have chosen to dissect or live through and yet here I am doing both.

It doesn't seem to matter much where ideas come from - be it some collective consciousness or higher power sparking inspiration. Even if it's only a product of re-hashing age old stories, nothing original, mere imitation of the basest sort... Writing always seems magical. Because with just a few words one can create worlds and people and ideas that never existed before. Because you can use it to communicate in a way speech will never let you (ink carries the promise of immortality). Because it seems to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once.

I mean, honestly. If you have to ask, it's obvious you don't do it. Or if you do, you don't get it. Even bad writers know that they HAVE to write. They get better. (If they don't, they probably end up making millions of dollars and getting movie franchises anyway because, hey, even poorly written stories tend to be universal in some way.)

I'm not concerned with literary quality - I'm concerned about the DRIVE to create. Why do we like to pen ourselves up with crazy thoughts and weird people we might not even like? Is this only a first world drive, to write? Does storytelling plague people without language? It transcends the ages of modern humanity, links us with our ancestors, passes on messages of hope against darkness, keeps people in line with other people...

Writing is a link to the past. It's a call to the future. It's a thought for the present.

Life must be so boring for those who don't write, who don't try to create, reach in and pull themselves out onto paper and screen.

In better news...

I decided to finally clean out my office. When I found this apartment on Craiglist, it was listed as a one bedroom. I was pleased and surprised to find out that there was a second almost-bedroom (only almost because the doors have glass panes in them from top to bottom. Back when I had just moved in, this is what that room looked like.

And then the boy moved in with me - and because we didn't have the wherewithal at the time to put his stuff in logical places, we piled it all in this room and shut the doors. And we left it that way all summer.

Me? I get the opposite of spring cleaning. I get autumn cleaning fever hardcore right around this time of year. I think it might be because I've spent the past six or seven years moving every August/September. So I opened the doors to the office yesterday and started moving stuff around.

Now I've got a beautiful space that feels like it could be a real writing room! Not to mention half a library. And sort of a sunroom. I'm hoping I'll have everything put away sufficiently in the next two days to put up some new glorious pictures to make everyone jealous.

Ohhh myyyy goddddd

There is TOO MUCH going on in my head these days. I keep trying to write it all day and I keep failing miserably. Someone kick me.

"Write, bitch, write!"

Progress or Lack Thereof

On Tuesday, my favorite author of all time, George R. R. Martin, released the fifth book in his fantasy series. (This would be the book A Dance With Dragons in the series A Song of Ice and Fire for those unacquainted with his work - and if you are, get thee to a library right away and get a copy of Game of Thrones.) I spent the majority of the day (I requested a vacation day from work) with a group of my closest friends reading said book. We drove to Burlington, MA to see GRRM and get him to sign our books. It was an exhausting and utterly inspiring day.

Reading George's books always puts me in the frame of mind to want to write and write and write. I say he's my favorite author of all time - not only because I enjoy the story he's created, but because he is a fantastic writer. He has a wonderful sense of words and character voices and he knows how to make a huge emotional impact on his readers without clobbering them over the head every other chapter. And he's unapologetic about his process. It took him almost six years to finish this book. And I don't begrudge him a single one of those days. How long have I been nominally working on Face the Flames now? Ten years? More? People in my life are forever urging me to finish. Telling me to just go on and find a publisher. Become famous. Retire young.

What do they know.

Writing is ridiculous. Taking it from a logical viewpoint, I don't understand why any of us chooses to do it. Taking it from my own viewpoint (often far from logical, I admit), I can't understand how any of us can ever stop. Or choose not to. Or quit.

Inspiration picture for Ariana, a very troublesome character indeed.

My current plan is to work on this book and ONLY this book until I'm done. I wanted to finish by year's end. We will see how far I get. I'm fixing things still. I can't just keep going without doing it because the biggest fix is a character that has always bothered me. She's one of my six point of view characters and the only one that I feel little emotional connection with. I've never known who she is, barely even who I wanted her to be. She's based on all of the female friends I've ever had - in parts caring, petty, jealous, gorgeous, and projecting an awesome self-confidence that she never feels in her heart. And up until now I've not been able to stitch all of those pieces into a coherent person.

Another inspiration picture for Ariana.

But George has inspired me. He finished his behemoth. (Kong, he called it.) And it's brilliant. More than worth the wait. So I'm going to be like him. Close my ears to my friends and family (I love you all and I appreciate the support, but sometimes it's all too much), and just write it the way I need to write.

Perhaps then it will be brilliant.

There can only be one.

I've been so frustrated with my writing lately. Too many projects with not enough focus = not enough writing. Every time I open a word document I just stare at it with this horrible exhausted feeling.

So. I'm going to set aside everything else and just work on Face the Flames. Until it's done. That's right. DONE. All 36 chapters of it. That means no super book for awhile. No Mortal Coils. No Wings of Destiny. No nothing except this, my first and most personal universe.

Bring it!

Subconscious Theater - A Hunter's Fire

The trees were simply too tall, Gabrielle decided, sitting on a rock as she craned her neck back to look up at where the sky ought to have been. She saw only an overarching pattern of leaves and branches woven into a tangled canopy high above her. She'd been in an open space not too long ago - or was it days ago? she could not recall - and the trees all around her had soared up, higher than the skyscrapers she was used to calling home. Even taller than the meandering clouds, caught in the slow streams of summer air.

Was it summer already?

She shivered and made herself get off the rock to keep moving. She'd been in the forest so long she could not remember how she'd come in, nor where she'd been before the trees had pulled her into their grasp. She thought maybe that she had once had companions with her, but if so they were long lost to the mists and branches of this place. Perhaps they'd taken a different fork in the path Gabrielle was following. Or attempting to follow. It kept petering out and sometimes when she thought she glimpsed sunlight and heard the faint sounds of people and civilization the path took a sharp turn into thorns and suddenly she stood on the edge of a sheer cliff.

Subconscious Theater

Somewhere far and beyond the other places passed by in everyday life, there is a distant sea. It is a rolling, dark thing bound above by cloud and fog and below by sorrow and need. It stretches away before the eye, going a long way after the horizon. Too long to comprehend for most of us.

To get to this sea, one must walk through a forest. The forest encompasses all of the forest of the waking world, and none of them. Within it are cool shadows, the bitter smell of rotting leaves, the soft feel of pine needles beneath the feet. The trees soar into blue sky, sometimes crowding it out so completely that walking among them is like walking through the tunnel of a cave, trusting only instinct for the surface world to get out again. The rush and roar of waterfalls echo in the background. Streams babble, talking even when no one is listening. And the narrow deer paths lacing through the trees always lead to a sudden meadow, or the top of a hill overgrown with flowers, perhaps the side of a dusty cliff with red rocks all the way down to the canyon's bottom.

The forest goes a long way too, but not as long as the sea. And when one comes out of the trees, there is a road of hard-packed earth. The road goes many places backward and forward, but the real destination is always the sea. To get there, one has to cross the road and walk beyond a barrier of shale and tumbled stone. On the other side is the shore, a gentle curve of white beach that hugs the water and stretches out into two long arms of rock and seaweed. Gulls wheel and cry overhead. Otters dive unimpeded in the greyness of the water.

At the end of one of those rocky arms is a rowboat. Tied to a long-forgotten stake, it rises and falls with the tide, old and unpainted. The rowboat has one purpose. A few hundred meters out from the bay and the jetties that form it is a lighthouse. Tall and white, its light flashing around and around in a constant unhurried circle, it stands alone. Within, it is a simple building of few rooms. Attached is a house with kitchen, cellar and bedroom. And at all times it is jammed to the gills with individuals all trying in their turn to be the center of attention.

It's amazing the light is lit at all.

Strike That, Reverse It

Strike everything I said about Stormwatch being my superbook project. My real project is going to be.... dun dun dun... Mortal Coils! I've set up a glittery new blog for it and the first post is already up. I figure this is a great way for me to develop the story further AND to get to hear from more of the characters than I had originally planned. Everyone's a winner! Drinks all around!

Blog is HERE.

Superbooks part II

So the other member of TTT (Monsieur Tra La La) jumped on the superbook bandwagon. Hallelujah! Check out his awesome sciencey, magicky, heroey project here: Mighty

Turning Into My Mother

It's true! I've spent the past two mornings of not working (curse you, weather gods, curse your miserable selves) doing things my mother has done on a regular basis for as long as I can remember.

Drinking this -

I think I've finally become an adult.

Doing this -

Captain's Inn by Little House Needleworks (one of my current stichy projects)

With this beside me on the couch -

Actually the other one is with me today but my camera isn't charged.

But it's all good. I love my mother, and can't imagine ever being upset about turning into her. If I can be half the cook/artist/wife/mother/friend that she is, then I'll count my life a success.

I probably wax poetic about my family a lot, but it's because I'm related to so many wonderful people.

Superbooks

My best writing friend and I have long-discussed writing exercises that are especially good for character development.

A few years back, I began a word document titled "Subconscious Theater" specifically for this purpose. It's the place all of my characters go when I'm not writing about them. It's a place where they can interact with each other - across genres and plot lines - and tell me things about them I might not find out otherwise. I add bits and pieces to this document all the time, but most especially when I have writer's block. It doesn't seem to matter how much I can't write in the midst of a novel or short story, I can always get someone to say something to me in the theater.

Anyway, last night, best writing friend was telling me about this man named Henry Darger who worked for years and years as a janitor - and was all the while writing and illustrating a fairly epic fantasy novel (15,145-page, single-spaced manuscript called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion). This excited best writing friend into something he's calling superbooks.

It's a writing exercise in which hundreds of characters are treated in four to five page installments in an interconnected world but without necessarily interacting. The purpose is to develop characters, concepts and scenes for later use in conventional writing.

This made me insanely excited because it sounds like a better organized version of my Subconscious Theater, or the soap opera project I've been trying to put together. So I suggested: oh, hey, blog format. And he agreed.

So, here we go. Two superbooks for you to lose yourselves in. Two very different superbooks, I might add.

Best writing friend's can be found here: Godhead of the Immortal Moth-King. He is a fantastic writer (the Terror member of TTT) so I can attest that his blog will definitely be awesome.

Mine will be the polar opposite of his in many ways. A somewhat trashy, but hopefully immersive and possibly surprising, soap opera style story. It can be found here: Stormwatch 

Life Update

Best laid plans too often go awry. For weeks now I've been trying to meet up with one of my long-lost best friends and it just never seems to work out. I'm eager to see her cause we've haven't seriously gotten together in something stupid like five years. So why, Fates, why?

In other life news, the boy is actually living with me now. Excitement and wonderfulness. He was living here pretty much all the time anyway, but it's much nicer to know we actually have a "home" together. I have so many homes now. I'm just waiting for the day that I have the one home that's truly mine. Some day. I'm not in a huge hurry. But it will be nice to have a mortgage payment and a garage and a garden that I can plant whatever I want in.

Work has been sucking a lot lately - but only because the crews I work with have been stuck in a series of horrible wood lots. I'm talking about seas of one and two inch birches and poplar that have to be marked and noted in the computer, as well as surveyed. And they're all on hills that are covered in poison ivy and ticks and are impossible to flag with any kind of normal lines. Basically this means work is annoying all of us and I hate coming home in a bad mood. Hopefully we'll get through it soon and move back into residential work for awhile. In the meantime, they keep finding more and more positive trees. We've had to extend the survey zone into Auburn. This beetle is going to wreak havoc until the city gives in a cuts down all the trees.

But anyway. Soon I get to go stay with my parents for a few days in Cape Cod. I've never been there so it will be nice to have a mini vacation and see something new! I miss the weekends my mother used to wake me and my brother up and get us into the car to take us somewhere we'd never been before. I can't wait to do the same thing to my own kids.

Mwahahaha.

Mortal Coils

I'm starting a series of posts about my various novels and writing projects. And since I've been recently rereading it, we'll start with Mortal Coils, a novel I came up with for 2010's NaNoWriMo and which I failed utterly to finish.

Thistle and Weeds by Mumford and Sons - theme song for the story

This is one of those novels that I feel has been in the back of my mind for a long time. Because it's set in what is essentially my parents' hometown - a small but ancient (in American terms) mill town on the coast of New England. As I mentioned in my last post, I have tended over the years to write many detailed descriptions of places and people on random scraps of paper. I have a rather large collection of those scraps pertaining specifically to spending time in that town and being around the people who live and have lived there for most of their adult lives.

Here's a rundown of the story.

The Macpherson family has lived in Lamprey Falls for centuries. And for centuries the citizens of Lamprey Falls have known that there is something about the Macpherson family that is not quite normal.What they don't know is the family's long-kept secret that they are witches with demons bound to their service.

Noah Macpherson

Noah, a young scion of the Macpherson clan, has been summoned back to his family's house after finishing his college degree halfway across the country. His grandfather is dying. His sister is about to have the first baby of the new generation. His alcoholic uncle has moved back into the house after his latest divorce. And his grandmother, the clan's matriarch, is trying to choose an heir.

But Noah has his own problems that his family and even his demon can't seem to help him with. He's dreaming.

Miranda Fairchild 

Noah dreams repeatedly and with increasing frequency of a red-haired woman who is destined to fall in love with and destroy him. Not long after he returns home, he meets this woman from his dreams and is terrified to find that she is real - and working at his favorite bookstore.

Another theme song - for Noah and Miranda.

Miranda likes Noah right away. They both love art and history. They both want to visit Europe. And he makes her laugh. But there is something not quite right about him. And sometimes she catches him looking at her as though he's trying to decipher a puzzle. Then again, sometimes Miranda thinks something isn't quite right about her either. Ever since she moved to Lamprey Falls, she can't sleep at night. She wakes up from daydreams she doesn't remember having. Not to mention she can't quite explain to anyone why she wanted to move to this town in the first place.

What Miranda doesn't know about herself could not only kill her new boyfriend - but it could destroy his entire family.

There's the rundown. I'll post more in-depth about the characters later. This ought to be fun, considering I have a Macpherson family tree going back four generations (and heavily linked to two other witch clans).

Writing a Write

When I was in high school, I read something somewhere about how writers should keep a box of things to go through when they're feeling less than writerly. Being an avid scribbler at that point, I immediately took a sharpie to a shoebox I had lying around and labeled it "inspiration box." Minimalist design. I never decorated it, figuring the inside should be enough.

I can't even begin to say how glad I am that I did this. This box is now filled with tidbits and oddments of things. Bookmarks, Red Sox tickets, rocks from Alaska, a lollipop shaped like Sigmund Freud's head. Then there are the numerous small notebooks and index cards I wrote descriptions of people and rooms and feelings on. There is blank receipt tape from when I worked at Target covered in scraps of Rising and Seven Words for Madeline. There are philosophical musings on brown paper napkins from the cafe at Clark. Cuttings from newspaper articles about my high school crew team or interesting things I read in the Washington Post when I lived there in middle school. Dozens of pamphlets and maps from my family's trip to San Diego a few years ago.

I've always been a pack rat when it comes to my writing. I would be surprised if more than a bare few notebooks or scraps of paper containing my writing/scribbling have made their way to the landfill. The vast majority of it is here with me in my apartment. This means dozens of notebooks. Scores of files folders. Even more journals. The rest of it is at my parent's house - more notebooks and at least two boxes of letters.

I'm glad I've kept this stuff. It's amazing to look through. To see the insights and writing style progress in a person from age 9 to their early twenties is pretty crazy.

And I always get inspiration from it. It's nice when you can inspire yourself, ahahaha.

Anyway, I'll be sharing a bunch of stuff from my inspiration box over on my Tumblr. So if you're interested, make with the clicky.

New Directions

In the past few days, I confessed (separately) to my boyfriend and one of my best friends the method I use to put myself to sleep.

I tell myself stories. I have done this for years now. In fact, I remember some warm California sleepovers a long time ago during which my best friend and I imagined our own fantasies in virtual video cassette form and popped them into imaginary VHS players. (Oh, by the way, we were two of the founding members of the Weirdo Club. WWRTW!) In those days, our fantasies involved becoming figure skating legends or dating Nick or Brian from the Backstreet Boys. Over the years, my storytelling methods lost their literal translation from life to the screen in my head, and I focused more on the details of the stories themselves. I started seeing my novels come to life, my characters like actors in a play while a voice over described what they were doing and how they felt about it.

The past couple of months, my novels have moved off the stage (though I still retreat into their comforting embrace in daydreams), and a more sordidly detailed sort of setting has taken their place. An entire soap opera of characters and drama has gradually taken shape in my head until I can lie contented with insomnia for hours, imagining the various misdeeds and ill-begotten children of that world in my head. Having confessed this silly secret to my boyfriend, his reaction was "well, why don't you write it?"

Me? Write down all that smut and ridiculousness? I mean, I secretly adore watching General Hospital, and I can't say I haven't forgotten all of the outrageous stories my girlfriends and I used to play with our Barbie Dolls. But write it? I feel like that would be a betrayal to my other stories - stories that may involve sex and illicit relationships and murder, but have nowhere near the "watching the train wreck" feel of an actual soap opera.

However... A serial soap opera could be fun. And seeing as I have the characters and plots already formed, why the hell not? It will be entertaining, and, hey, there's a reason soap operas and thrillers and Harlequin romances sell so well. Besides, there's always the plus that this will make me post/write something every day.

The real question is - is anyone interested in reading this crazy stuff? And if not here, where could I take it?

Love is a bird..

I imagine that if Melantha made a music video, she might look like this.



For those of you who don't know who Melantha is, she's the Scerae (i.e. a goddess) of Chaos and Insanity in a fantasy story that M and I wrote together. She is known as the Black Flower, born of the Cruel Shard, and she is the best thing I have ever written.

Here's how she first appeared:

On Writing

Trying to back into the habit of writing daily. It's amazing the things that fall by the wayside when one gets even a little busy. I've finally gotten around to hanging pictures on the walls of my apartment, and the atmospheric difference is amazing.

My boyfriend and I attended a friend's salon gathering on Friday night. There were many beautiful things shared: poetry, food, some gorgeous violin/cello music, even a mostly impromptu rap. I offered to do a little reading of my own, and chose A Hunter's Fire as my subject. I read a small scene where my main character is sitting in a diner with her newly formed rock band; it's mostly internal monologue indicating the beginning of her slip from reality. And it went over pretty well. I got some questions and some compliments, and overall felt good about the whole thing.

(I am planning my own salon party. Soon, I hope. If you're around and interested, let me know and I'll send you an invitation!)

A Hunter's Fire is probably my favorite novel of those I am currently working on. Face the Flames will always be my first baby, but AHF is the story that rings truest to me. An artist's descent into madness is a story I am always interested in. Now if only I could decide what to keep of what I've written - and whether or not I should just turn the damn thing into a screenplay instead.

Face the Flames goes ever on and on. I'm stuck in Dameon's world right now. Trying to iron out his chapters in part one. I messed up the timeline awhile ago and am still in the process of trying to fix it. I have done bits and pieces of future chapters though which I am very excited about. Mostly about Tori and David's relationship which (aside from Gabrielle and James in AHF) is my favorite thing to write about.

Wings of Destiny is still in editing. As soon as I finish up with that though, it will be time to find a serious agent and get that out there for the masses to devour. I'm pretty excited; I think it has a decent shot. Despite or because of the craziness.

Other projects are ongoing... The North and my various Circle of Four stories almost never leave my head. I get scraps of them down from time to time, but nothing solid yet. I've also got an autobiographical piece I've been steadily adding to. Moreso for the past month or two. I guess getting older makes you stupidly in love with your childhood.

Oh! And in the vein of trying to resurrect my daily writing schedule, I signed up for a Science Fiction Big Bang. Four months to write 25,000 words. This is half of what NaNoWriMo requires stretched four times as long. I'm going to write a prequel of sorts to Face the Flames as my challenge. It will follow Human characters on Siphenn - and David may or may not be among them. He and General Hunter will probably be the only characters to appear in both this story (tentatively titled "Desperado") and the novel.

Excitement!