Magic bean buyer

I’ve been wasting time. Killing time, really. I got stuck on a couple of things – my desktop computer wasn’t set up, I didn’t really know how to start working on the grandiose, looming tasks that I had set for myself – and I let these things become an excuse to do a thousand tiny nothings instead of write. Sweep the floor, pet the cat, brush my hair for an hour, build 37 stories in TinyTower (OMG KILL IT WITH FIRE), read all the webomics, read everything in the Internet (or everything in BoingBoing, Salon, Jezebel, and FlipBoard News, at least), eat delicious snacks, etc.

I was hiding from something. I was avoiding the fact that I hadn’t read a book in over a year. By “read”, here, I mean I hadn’t fully finished a book in over a year. When I was young, I made it a point to always finish any book I started reading. I finished it even if the book was poorly done, or not in my taste, and even if it was not the first time I had read it. I even finished The Bluest Eye when I was in 6th grade (after mistaking it for a paranormal mystery book I had read previously, which I believe was called The Third Eye), even though I thought it was the most terrible thing ever written down (I’m not judging the quality of the book here, it was just a terrible thing for a 6th grader to read).

In any case, since high school I have not been so diligent in my reading habits. St John’s has turned me into a notorious abandoner of books; I fall in love in the moment I read the flyleaf, but I never follow through completely, moving on to the next thought, the next book, too soon. Some books lie untouched, unread save for that flyleaf, for months. Others have bookmarks – pages, chapters in – that I have forgotten placing.

My reading list is like my to-do list, these days: overly expansive, incredibly disorganized, and guilt-inducing, to the point that I dislike to put it on paper – so that I can more easily forget about the items on it that I do not wish to address. In fact, since St. John’s, I have little to no record of what I have read, which is both a curse and a blessing, of sorts. Because I have no record, I cannot see in plain numbers how little I have read over the past few years, but I feel it deeply.

In the midst of an Internet binge I found this blog post by an actual published writer, and it upset me. Not because the post was bad, or because the author was wrong, but because I was wrong, and I was not ready to admit that I was wrong. Yet. Although I continued my binge, the post came back and bit at me like a gadfly.

Then I found this book on BoingBoing. And I devoured it (in Kindle edition) in under 24 hours – though not before screeching to a halt in the middle of the last chapter to have a huge brainstorming session on The Book, wherein I finally determined the format of the story, and what sort of device I was going to use to show the reader things that the heroine does not see. It finally makes sense why my fascination has been held by the story of my world’s ancient past as much as by the time that my heroine currently lives in. Finally, I am looking forward to getting started on writing the narrative of this book.

So thank you, Tanya Chernov, again, for the well-timed kick in the pants, and thank you, Matt Ruff, for a thoroughly inspiring read. I am given to understand that there is more Ruff out there, so I am sure there will be more of that in the near future, but for the immediate present, I have two tasks for myself. The first is to compile my existing reading list, weed out the ones I no longer want to finish, and get crackin’ on those during my “work day” hours if I can’t bring myself to work on anything else. (No more tower defense games for me, the boss caught me playing ‘em on company time!)

The second is to tackle the list itself, starting with the emergent YA classic The Hunger Games, which I have put off reading for far too long. I have no business pretending I want to be a YA writer if I don’t read what’s out there, and besides, it looks awesome. I don’t know why I put it off for so long.

Now, I have some work to do.

Tags: Inspiration, Reading

I quit my job last Thursday. It was a long time in coming, but at the same time, very sudden. I am a poor chess player sometimes, and I do not see all the moves that my opponent may make. Regardless of whether or not I planned my sudden departure, the reason is still the same: I quit to write (which feels like a crazy thing to do, given the economy, and makes me feel like I am in a position of ridiculous privilege, which I am) and so, two weeks early is just two weeks early, right?

Wrong. Instead of springing up in the morning with, “Ok! Time to sit down and start working on writing, this fine morning’s a-wasting!” (which may or may not have ever actually happened), I think, I need time to process what has happened, I sit down at the computer, and the next thing I know, I am sitting in my pajamas at 1pm reading about whether or not Christina Hendricks’ boobs are real. And getting entirely too emotionally invested in the answer.

So why do I care whether Christina Hendricks’ boobs are real? Continue Reading »

…is when this blog was last updated. I have not been dead, but life has been hectic and challenging, and I never could fully make the commitment to decide what “kinds of things” I put on this blog here – whether it’s just about my writing life, or whether I should post about cooking and singing and the politicians that make me angry and the YouTube videos that make me laugh too. So I never posted about all those things. What I now realize is this means I also didn’t write about these things, except a very little (mostly in poems which I have a tendency to write on magazine subscription cards and promptly squirrel away in books), which means I’ve been a bad (read: lazy) writer, and I need to stop making excuses.

Writing, and being a writer, is so intrinsically a part of me that no other part of me can escape it. Singing, cooking, political concern, environmental concern, and the strange and beautiful things I encounter on the Internet are all part of my life as well, but I must write about these things in order to call myself a writer. At the very least, I must hunt down and type up the poems I’ve been squirreling away so that I can keep calling myself a poet.

Coming back to the blog seemed like a no-brainer, since it could kill two birds with one stone. My poems are generally inspired by some novel confluence or juxtaposition of ideas, and I like sharing parts of what inspired my poems – even if the whole story (being in part ineffable) cannot be told. I have a year and more’s worth of poems where the story may be lost, but they are still part of my story, the one I figure I’m here to figure out how to tell. They will either reveal their stories of origin to me in time, or they will not, and will remain as echoes from a time that I cannot quite remember.

This one is quite fresh, and was caught properly in a notebook, so it was easy to find. I sing quite loudly sometimes, and had just been singing in my bathroom, for about twenty minutes, and then recalled how thin the bathroom floors and ceilings are (we have had much experience of this fact). I am generally considerate of others’ sound-space, having learned the importance of quiet in one’s life, but I have only one day each week with the house to myself, and I love to spend that time singing. I feel that I am pretty damn good at singing, but even so, generally, I wait until after 11am to start the loud stuff. I forgot this time.

There is another woman who sings in this building. She lives one floor up, on the other side of the stairwell. I hear her practicing sometimes, and it makes me so happy that there’s another human being making music in their home, near mine. I often wonder what the people who hear me think. I was thinking this in the bathroom, and was just beginning to feel guilty that this was really too early to be singing this loud, especially in the bathroom, and wrote this poem instead. And then the leafblower crew came by.

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It was a good one, regardless. I spent a lot of time soaking in the newness of being somewhere so far away from “home”, now that Home is far away from things familiar. We visited several state parks around the area and were surprised at the number of plants and animals we had never seen before. We drove around the city and got lost a few times, ended up with front-row streets for a parade down Congress completely by accident, and left new friends’ houses at early hours of the morning. I am discovering that Austin is a living, breathing organism, with such great capacity for creativity and growth that it takes my breath away.

It took my voice away with it, for a bit, but there’s so much to write about here that it’s hard not to. There are inquisitive, acrobatic birds with jubilant voices in the highway medians and parking lots. There are impossibly dazzling sunrises and sunsets, which spread over impossibly broad horizons. Strange things are happening and growing all around me, and I am swept up in it all, gladly… my voice returns.

I have a morning commute now, for the first time in my life, a regular one. It may seem unremarkable to some, being not overly long or interesting, but Texas seems intent on surprising me, and I find many things to think about – and some to write about – on my morning drive.

One morning, there was fog.
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Tags: driving, poem, Texas

And so, I have landed in Austin. Everything I have with me I have had to choose to keep, put in a box, and take out of a box – or not. I actually have boxes that I packed to take with me that I honestly don’t know when I will reopen, I just know that I will want to have what’s in them later, so I want to keep them. Preparing such boxes are hard; going through so many memories of a past in which I know I made so many mistakes, to sieve and salvage the memory items I know I will treasure always couldn’t be easy. But.

I like the result: I am surrounded by things I want to take with me, things I feel overwhelmingly protective, if sometimes overly sentimental towards. Because I must keep them; they remind me of who I was before, the strange joys and sorrows, curiosities and angers I have gone through in my path to becoming the person I am today. They remind me of the joys in living in happiness with others: gifts of love and friendship, old letters and congratulations and birthday cards, all thoughtfully chosen and penned, by people who sent them with love and genuine wishes for my happiness. Curious objects I’ve collected that I think might be “useful for something”, because they inspire me to think of their creative possibilities. Useful pots and pans, plates and cups that I like. The spices that inspire me. And books. Oh, so many books, many of which I have read, and far more that I want around merely because I can’t stand the idea that I might be struck by the need to find something in one of them, and not being able to. And a few that we can’t bring ourselves to get rid of, because even if they’re trash, they’re delightful and amusing trash and there is no better escape from the chattering of one’s own mind than to be delighted and amused by a good storyteller for a while. (We have a LOT of books.)

But there was another class of things that I found myself saving: little totems, small items that I liked to have around me as a child, that I liked seeing, and setting up a certain way, or taking with me. There didn’t seem to be any pattern at first, but then I realized I was keeping the items that, when I saw them or held them in my hands, I remembered things about where they came from, and why I liked them then. And I can look at myself then, and I can feel a sense of meeting myself, and judging myself worthy; I feel absurdly proud of my younger self, for having found something that I like so much even now. I am glad to keep these things, for I am glad of the link to memory that these items give me. And they all make me want to write, to record their stories, so that I may always remember…

None of these are unpacked yet, except the largest: The Johnnie Chair.

We had a friend to dinner tonight. He was seated as the guest of honor in the Johnnie chair, and I was surpised to eloquence on its virtues (but of course the guest of honor must understand how honorable his position is, and how venerable!). When he mistook my meaning, I insisted, and led him on a journey of words, a night in one of those chairs, and surprised even myself in my intensity… I figured it was about time to write about it.

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Tags: college, memory object, poem

Pardon me, kind denizens of the internet, for being absent these few weeks. I have been sorting through all of the mountains and molehills of things I have squirreled away these last few years in this house, as well as a few that got put in boxes in the last house and followed me here. That is to say: I am moving, terrifyingly, exhilaratingly, undeniably moving, 1600-odd miles across the country, and by God I am not going to take all the nonsense that I have accumulated over the years with me. So, I have to go through it, decide what to keep, what to give away, what to get rid of, and figure out how to pack what I’m taking with me. It kind of cuts into my treasured quiet time, but it’s forced me to see some important things.

Firstly, that I keep a lot of things, because I’m never sure when I might need them. I keep a lot of paper: receipts, bills, statements, workbooks, manuals, mail, flyers, birthday cards, essays, notebooks. It’s hard for me to decide about paper, especially, because I tend to hide poems in the oddest places, and I’m afraid that I’ll miss one and throw one away by accident. I got to read through a lot of old things while deciding what to keep (“what to get rid of” consisted mostly of old statements, which I had hoarded out of a fear of disposing them improperly and having my identity stolen, and materials for colleges I hadn’t attended after all), and was pleased to discover that I had been clever and articulate, if somewhat odd, as a child, and that there shone through everything a voice that I still recognize as mine.

I have always written things down. I have always felt compelled, when faced with a feeling that I couldn’t understand, to work it out on paper. I have poetry in marginalia, essays on textbook-covers, witticisms literally secreted between the lines of worksheets – all this even aside from what I have in my actual notebooks. Whenever I had thought, in the past, that I “wasn’t writing,” it really was just that I wasn’t writing in my notebooks. I couldn’t help but write (and still can’t), but it just fled from my notebooks to the sorts of paper that was actually in front of me most of the time: schoolbooks. It’s who I am, I can’t help it.

So, I put some paper in front of me last night, and thought about moving for a while. I’m taking a lot with me. A lot of what I’m taking with me are things that remind me just how powerfully evocative things can be, and the most powerful among those are the ones of my own making. And I was thinking about this sadness about moving that I just can’t shake – no matter how excited I am about discovering and embracing someplace new, I will still love this place, and miss it and all the ways it inspires me. I had to write it all down, so I can take it with me.

I’m not showing you that. But I also thought about moving, itself, for a while, and that gave me a poem:
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Tags: poem

The Book is evolving in a very strange way. (I’m not complaining; any strangeness in this matter should be taken as a Good Thing, since familiar and comfortable ways of writing haven’t amounted to anything of great length – just poems, and small stories that read like poems.) My mind will wander over the shape of the story so far, explore its nooks and crannies, poke at bits that seem unsupported, and come up with supporting facts/events to ‘shore up’ those fancies. But then, I come to a chasm – a span of time or action that needs crossing, and I must turn back, and explore the territory already mapped again. I can build – and have built – fantastic bridges upon which my character can cross from ‘here’ to ‘there’, but their design eludes me, again and again.

And then I will have a conversation, or a dream, and the blueprints spring up unbidden in my mind, and I must lock myself in my room, in silence, until I’ve gotten it all down, and then, there is a new stretch of land to explore…

It may not seem odd to anyone who has already written a book (save in the peculiarities of my particular metaphor), but it’s a wonderfully alien experience for me. “Writer’s block”, when it hits in this area, doesn’t really have the same effect it does when I try to write poetry. When I have a poetry block, there are just no Ideas, and therefore, nothing to write about. But even when I’m “stuck” on a part of The Book, I’m not completely stuck. I can’t think about the body of ideas I’ve already had for The Book without coming up with some type of new Idea, be it a small detail or a major plot point. This means that, really, anytime I have sufficient time and energy, I can work on writing. This is fantastic.

What I haven’t done, yet, is find a good balance between poetry and prose. I have to work on both to get better at either, and it feels like I have so much catching up to do in the prosewriting category that I’ve been neglecting poetry – or that Poetry, feeling slighted, is neglecting me. The least, and the best, that I can do at this point is promise to try to listen when poetry calls – with whatever voice it chooses to use.

The last time it called, it was in the guise of a roadside blackbird, and I took the time to listen, finally.

Continue Reading »

Tags: poem, writer's block

The thing about magic beans is that you can never be quite sure when one is ready to crack open and start growing. You can set them up nicely, the way you do normal beans, and hope that after a day or two of heat and moisture, they’ll sprout.

Normal beans do this almost entirely on their own. Magic beans… not so much. I started this blog over a year ago, intending to use it to further my own germination as a writer. What I found, instead, was that I had a lot more work to do under the surface before I was ready to leaf out and show anyone – yes, even the internet – what I was working on.

I’m not sure if I’m there yet, but I’m ready to plant another magic bean, and see what happens. This time, as a fertilizer of sorts, have a story. It’s not the one mentioned in my last post, nor is it anything related to the Book (which is still growing, in its own ponderous way), but I quite like it anyway.

I give you: The Devil and Jonas James

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Tags: short story

I never gave much thought to the maps in the fantasy novels I read growing up.  I thumbed past them on the way to the first page, and enjoyed the story without giving them another thought.  I figured everyone else did the same.  I guess I assumed that the publisher had the maps drawn up so that readers could, if they wished, locate the hero (or villain) on the map.  Or something like that.  As I said, I never really gave them much thought.

Now that I’m starting to block out my own fantasy novel, I notice that the “when” and “how” of things are often inexorably tied to the “where.”  So far I have two major cities.  I need to know how far apart they are, how long it takes to travel that distance, in character-time, and how they travel that distance.  I had written in an escape by sea, so I knew that the cities would have to be separated by water, a journey no more than a few weeks long (but more than one).  One of the cities is to the north of the other.  I had intended for the story to start in the northern city, continue in the southern one (after the escape-by-sea), and then climax in the northern city after the heroine went to rediscover her past.

And then I realized that I needed to give up and draw a freaking map already, because I was already getting things wrong about my little fantasy world, and it wasn’t even real yet.  You see, I had my heroine wandering the forests and fields around the southern city, picturing your typical medieval forest-y semiwilderness punctuated by small farming towns.  Which is great, except that generally, the further south you go, the warmer and drier it gets – so it would be just a bit strange to have the desert city (and the surrounding desert) to the north of the temperate city. (I suppose I’m a little northern-hemisphere biased, but, write what you know, right?)

So, I drew a map.  It was actually fun.  I mean, after I had stopped panicking about the fact that I was really deciding what my world looked like, I really enjoyed myself.  I worked from general to specific:  Okay, northern land mass here, southern land mass here, water in between.  Harbors for both cities.  Are the land masses connected?  Sure, but there has to be a reason everyone travels by boat instead of overland.  How about some mountains?  How about a river into the northern land mass?  How about some lighthouses?  How about a silly dragon by the “Here be Dragons” over in the white white space?

About the time that I drew the dragon, I knew I could get carried away with mapmaking pretty quickly, so I stopped.  I know I’ll need to change and add features later, as the story requires them, but I’m pretty pleased with my map as a “working model.”  Especially since my fiance, who has a steadier hand for detail than I do, has taken to adding embellishments and flourishes to make it look like a “real” map.  He even made my silly dragon come to life – and as soon as he came to life, it was clear that he had an important role to play in the story.  The lighthouses, too – I had just drawn them in as placemarkers, but soon realized that I had need of such landmarks in my story.

I guess I know why fantasy novels have maps, now, huh?

In other news, the novel hasn’t taken over my entire brain yet.  I started a short story last night that I will post on here once it’s done.  I’d say I’ve got about a quarter of it so far.  I don’t want to give too much away, though, so all I’ll say about it is that it’s been an excellent exercise in writing dialogue, and that I’m glad to finally put my childhood obsession with mythology to good use.

Tags: maps

I feel like I finally understand writer’s block. Not how to circumvent it, or how to get rid of it once I’ve got it, but rather, what it really is, and why writers as a whole have such an abhorrence for it.
Let me step back for a bit so that you can see the whole picture:

That’s the system I’m using, at the moment, to draft the outline of my book. I made a timeline of sorts, and when I came up with something that fit somewhere in the timeline, I tried to put it at the appropriate place in the timeline, and then, when I had used a small mountain of post-its, I surveyed my work and thought, wow, I really did work a lot of things out. It didn’t even really bother me when I realized that I had conceived of my main character as the wrong gender, initially, because when I figured that out, I had so much more to add that I had to start populating the wall with post-its as well.

And then I got stuck. I realized that two major plot drivers that I needed to be in the same city weren’t anymore, and furthermore, that they couldn’t be moved to the same city without causing a host of other problems. And, try as I might, I really can’t get any further along without solving this problem first, because it really is that central to the plot.

I have relatively little doubt that I’ll be able to find a solution eventually (I’ve conquered writer’s block before), but in the meantime, it’s driving me mad. I keep second-guessing myself about other plot points, and about whether I really ought to have changed the gender of my main character. It feels as if what I’ve really done is started writing two different books; one about the girl, and one about the boy. They would be very different books in their final stage, but their core would be the same, so I know I can only write one. The difficulty lies in having the confidence to choose between them, and then being able to shelve the other one, along with the ideas and offshoots and scenarios that would only work in the book I’m not going to write – possibly forever.

I guess that’s the lesson that this bout of writer’s block will teach me: that, whether I like it or not, I will write material that I can’t use in the process of coming up with material that I can use, and that I can’t agonize over it or it will stop me dead in my tracks.

Tags: writer's block