Listened to the chattering song of birds all the way to my bus stop this morning. Spring is coming!
=]
31 Tuesday Mar 2015
Posted Uncategorized Things
inListened to the chattering song of birds all the way to my bus stop this morning. Spring is coming!
=]
26 Thursday Mar 2015
Posted Life Things
in1) A clean pair of socks
2) The smell of folded winter clothes when you take them out of cardboard-box-storage in the attic
3) Office supply stores (or the aisle of school supplies in supermarkets)
4) Pajamas fresh out of the dryer
5) Cracking eggs
6) The rattle your voice makes when you talk into a fan
7) Words that begin with “qu.” Like “quaint,” “quite,” and “quash”
8) Listening to someone type
9) The sound of water
10) Bologna
25 Wednesday Mar 2015
Posted Life Things, Writing Things
inSo, lots going on, lately. Most of it good, most of it slightly chaotic, most of it having nothing to do with writing.
Part of my soul dies a little bit when too much of my time becomes about living life rather than writing about it. That seems broken, but I’ve been like this for over a decade now, and it’s kind of a habit.
Whenever my writing-life begins to feel sort of pinched, I like to get a blank sheet of paper out and dream, listing all of the writing I want to do – all the projects and the poetry and the silly blog posts I wish I had time for every day. I plot out ambitious goals – books of short stories and novel-series – and I imagine my calendar, putting down each piece in a slot like I would an appointment.
And slowly, my planner fills up – my stories squeezed in among all the other things of life like birthday parties and game nights and work and premarital counseling and the day before my lease ends.
I’ve made some headway in understanding that writing has to, you know, actually be writing – not planning to write or wishing you were writing or hoping that someday you’ll have the time. I’ve finished a couple novels by forcing myself to keep plugging away, no matter how hard my circumstances seemed to be gunning for the energy and space I took to story-work. But sometimes planning and wishing and hoping helps to put me in a place where I can begin to envision writing as something possible, where some of my goals seem realistic – even something to look forward to.
Crazy? Living in the middle of it. But writing? It’s scheduled right there alongside. Sometimes, they make kind of awesome companions.
23 Monday Mar 2015
Posted Life Things
in1) Find your make-up
It’s been so long since you bothered with it, that you’re not entirely sure where, exactly, you’re keeping it. It’s in a bag . . . or a box . . . or . . . somewhere. Maybe?
2) Sort through your make-up
Dump everything out on the counter in an attempt to discover what is still usable and what has dried up, or been used up, or gotten mixed up with something it shouldn’t have so it’s now a freakish color.
3) Select your make-up
After realizing that you only have a couple products that are actually usable, examine them to discover which part of your face they were intended for. Because you can’t find any labels, directions, or pictures to give you a hint at what the make-up does, you have to get creative with the other four senses (touch, taste, smell, listening).
4) Begin smearing your make-up all over the face-skin of your choice
After making what you hope is a correct assessment of your make-up, go ahead and start putting it on. Be careful not to jab, poke, stab, or scrape any part of your face too roughly with whatever dangerous-looking make-up application instruments you have on hand, as blood or oozing defeats the whole purpose of make-up in the first place.
5) Accidentally probe your right eye with the sharp poky ends of what is either a mascara brush or an ancient torture device.
You knew this was going to happen. You just knew it.
6) Avoid further damage
Set all make-up applicators down, try to rub the tears out of your eyes, and inspect yourself for blood and oozing. After deciding no permanent damage has been done, shove make-up back into cupboard and determine to never bother with it again.
Until next time.
22 Sunday Mar 2015
Posted Writing Things
inTags
books, characters, females, life, male heroes, novels, stories, writing
It is my understanding that each writer has his or her own strengths and weaknesses. There are many elements in a piece of fiction or non-fiction, and while some of these elements may come easily to the author, other elements might have taken long days to refine into presentability. They told me, while I was in school, that I was good with dialogue, good with bringing characters to life in a short amount of time, good with interior monologue/stream-of-consciousness-stuff, good with poetry, and good with evoking a certain kind of atmosphere relating to peaceful country life. I was not deemed good with plot, experimenting, pushing my writing beyond its comfort zone, or using the active voice.
Can’t win ’em all, right?
But here’s another thing I’m not good at (which did not come up very often in classes, as the occasion to demonstrate my ineptitude were few and far between).
I’m really bad at male characters.
I first realized this at age twelve, when I attempted to write a rollicking dragon-hunt adventure story from the point of view of a twentyish male hero. I got a hundred pages in before giving up, tired of trying to think like someone who felt so fundamentally different from me. Now, of course Breck Moore was a person, and I was a person, so we had that in common, but I sensed, as I wrote, that my little-girl brain might not quite be capturing an account representation of a young-guy-on-a-quest. It was just a feeling I had, like the feeling that I might be using the word just too many times in this piece. I decided to try writing a little closer to my actual life experiences, albeit with magic and dragons thrown in.
I assumed that my lack of confidence writing man-characters stemmed from my lack of guy acquaintances. There was my father, of course, but the idea of sitting down and interviewing him didn’t sit right with me–I was afraid he might think I had a condition if I approached him with a list of questions:
“So, imagine you’re twenty-two and Aunt Sheila’s been kidnapped by a dragon . . . What would your thoughts be? What would you do?”
There was also my cousin David, but I couldn’t judge how he thought. I’d watch him, sailing down the flooded creek in the middle of winter, on a makeshift raft already starting to leak, while us female cousins huddled together, ready to form a life-saving chain from rapids to shore if necessary.
“Does he know how to swim?” I’d say.
“Umm . . . . maybe?”
“K.”
(Boat starting to flood.)
“If this is what he does while we’re watching,” I’d muse, “what does he do when no one’s around?”
And everyone was afraid to answer.
During my first semester of college, I made it my goal to run observations on the guys I came in contact with. Forget friend-making–I was a writer and had no time for that fluff.
I followed my cousin (who had befriended several interesting variations of young man) around, sitting in on after-dinner conversations and homework sessions, taking notes and refusing to talk to anyone. I figured this was a good way to research, but one day I looked up to discover that I’d been made-friends-with and had gotten a little behind in my note-taking.
So, you know. Lose-win?
I’ve been novel-tweaking, lately, in an attempt to fix a few problems that were just annoying enough to be, well, annoying. The men in my story are all well and good–they simply tend to appear a bit . . . boring. Not because they are boring, but because my writing about them is skittish, wary, reserved. And they don’t get to be as awesome as I first envisioned them in my head.
“Why did I do that?” they say, baffled. “I would never behave in such a–”
“Don’t criticize! You’re always criticizing! I’m trying!”
“But I’m not that stupid! How could you think I’m that–”
“Don’t call me stupid!”
“I didn’t!”
Hopefully, we will end this novel-writing process with a minimum of hurt feelings and frustration.
But, like I said, I’m really bad at male characters.
03 Tuesday Mar 2015
Posted Life Things
inTags
I was at a baby shower this weekend, for my cousin/best friend for life.
I just Googled “cousins” and have learned that the little not-yet-born boy in there is going to be my first-cousin-once-removed. Or something. I forget that Laura is not my sister, sometimes, as the difference in relationship between her and her siblings and me and my siblings has been so slim as to be almost negligible.
So, I’m not going to be an aunt, and I’m not going to have a nephew.
But, it feels like I am.
=]
Yay! For the coming Spring.