We, soldiers of a different sort -

“We, Soldiers of a different sort,
We, wasters of ink and page,
We, warriors of words,
Masters of melancholy,
Harlots of the pen,
We bleed these volumes,
and expect only absolution.”
- Jarvis Black

Writing has been going... and going. I made an executive decision to get virtual TTT sessions going. TTT, for those not in the know, is a writing group that a few of us began back when I was a junior. The acronym stands for Triumvirate of Tea and Toast as we were originally a threesome who would get together in my kitchen, drink tea, and make extravagant toasts to our own greatness. Really it was a chance for us to get together and commiserate, read, and edit each other's work. Often it devolved into the sharing of internet memes and occasionally insane giggling fits induced by too many pixie stix. (I bought a ginormous package of them for NaNo that year, and they carried through for much of the year.)

The year after its inception, TTT gained some distinction. We assigned T-words to describe our different writing styles (Terror, Tragedy, and Tra La La - guess which one is mine?). We created ourselves a banner that hung proudly in my room and living room for two years, and which caused some grief when I left Worcester and had to leave it with the other two original members.

(Preserved forever in photographic form. Our Ts are all supposed to correspond to their meaning.)

This past year, we incorporated another person (unfortunately he's still T-less, but we did say he could be the floating tea pot above my head on the poster). And last semester all four of us blazed our way through National Novel Writing Month together because we are awesome like that. So it was a little sad this year with our newest member and me both moving away from Worcester. Terror and Tra La La will fortunately be living together for their final undergraduate year. But due to this minor diaspora, we decreed that having virtual TTT sessions was a must.

I've decided to commit myself to getting through the final edits for Wings of Destiny, my 2008 NaNo of paranormal romance genre proportions. Via virtual TTT this means getting an edit from my fellow writers for a chapter each week. This also means that I have to personally edit a chapter a week. Good kick in my butt, I'd say. I'm excited about this because I think it's going to be a lot like what William Tapply's Writing the Novel and Advanced Fiction Writing classes were (minus his awesome read-aloud of our work).

So I've got that going.

Face the Flames is still forging ahead. Slowly but surely. Chapter 8 is gonna be done in the next few weeks. And then there's only one more chapter in part one! Part Two is gonna be a hellacious ride, so I'm itching to get to it. Plus Terror and Tra La La make special guest appearances beginning in chapter 9. Whee.

And then there's the short story I signed up to write for Fantasy Big Bang.


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I'm writing a prequel to Creatures of the Wind, a novel of mine that is almost as old as Face the Flames. Yow. More about that as I write it.

That's where things stand in my writing world. Now if I could just get a job...

(No real reason for this other than my thinking that every writer should have a cat. This is Callie, my grandparents' calico. She's a sweetheart and absolutely loves to walk across my keyboard whenever I'm typing. ... of course, I have a quote for this.)

"A catless writer is almost inconcievable. It's a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys."
- Barbara Holland

BTT: First Time

What is the first book you remember reading? What about the first that made you really love reading?

If I had a memory THAT good, I would have been a lot better at organic chemistry!

Some of the first books I remember reading and re-reading and re-re-reading were the Little Critter books. I recall one particular instance of showing off my read aloud skills to my cousin. I read "the cat lies in the sun" and he made fun of me by asking how the cat could possibly lie on the sun - isn't zillions of degrees?

We had a library of Scholastic books of all levels and I tore my way through all of them (several times). When I got to chapter books, I read my Judy Blume so many times that I actually corrected a babysitter who was reading them to me when she said the wrong word.


Lucky for me that love of reading runs in my family and no one ever thought this was weird. It wasn't until I got to (roughly) middle school that the other kids started being weirded out / astonished that I went through several books in the course of a week!

Booking Through Thursday

I love reading the questions and answers over at Booking Through Thursday, so I thought I'd start participating in them. (Good incentive to keep my reading list active.. Not that I need incentive, but I need new places to find more books to read.)

So today's question is: Which fictional character (or group of characters) would you like to spend a day at the beach with? Why would he/she/they make good beach buddies?

I'm tempted to answer this by nominating either the Gentlemen Bastards of The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch OR Kvothe from The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. They're the two best books I've read recently. The Gentlemen Bastards would be hilarious fun to hang out with and we'd probably get up to some ridiculous hijinks on a crowded beach (which would be a great way to pass time as I hate crowded beaches.) But if it was a pretty lonely beach, I'd rather spend it with Kvothe. He's clever and funny and a musician besides. Only thing that makes a day at the beach better is sharing it with someone who can turn it into a mystical experience....

No choices.

I feel like a child saying this, but none of this seems fair. All of the choices left to me are non-choices forced upon me by my situation.

I hate that I'm a more-than-competent worker but can't get hired because nobody knows me. Because I have no "real world" experience. Because the economy is hurting.

I hate that I have to have money to live where I want and be with my SO.

I hate that I can't do what I want for a living because it's not a "stable" job. Or a well-paying one at first. Or ever. Potentially.

I don't like that I don't get these choices.

It's bad enough that I think doing 5th year was a horrible idea for me. I wasn't ready. I don't care about it. I regret the hell out of deciding to do it. And in the end, I don't think I'm going to be worthy of the piece of paper I'll get out of it.

I just feel like anything that matters to me as a person doesn't matter to the rest of the world I live in. That you just have to bullshit your way through life and you can't ever be really happy, you just have to find happiness where people will LET you. That's pretty ridiculous, but that's how I'm feeling right now in this angry and probably immature moment.

I don't want to just exist in the system. Especially when it seems so flawed.

This Emotional Life

"For the INTP, emotions are seen as something mysterious and as uncontrollable as they are unalterable. Hence, the root of the fear of emotions is the fear that they cannot be controlled. Hence, when an INTP does finally respond emotionally to something, his emotions are indeed left uncontrolled, raw and open. However, when witnessing the emotional response of another person, the INTP intensely resists any similar emotion of his own. An example of this is when watching a 'weepy' cinema film in which some heart-wrenching scene is being shown. The INTP despises the attempt by the filmmaker to influence his emotions and is more likely to sneer than cry."

True. However -

"When an INTP female's feeling side does surface, it often does so with an intensity, an outpouring that can be frightening to both herself and others."