Monday, October 23, 2006

I'm eating again.

It's been years since I was like this. Nibbling on pages, scratching down unfamiliar words. Hiding notions away in little pyramids that crumple into each other over time until the result is a concrete of its elements. Hard and solid and homogenous.

Not that I like homogeneity. Just within a single idea. Ideas should be only single thoughts. There is plenty of space still, when you're done with the one, to express the extra clause you would have added, the and or but. It can stand on its own (or it's not much of an idea) so give it its due room.

Then, if you have to, tack it on to another idea, sit them together, let them bleed together. In my case, make a little world of them, a scribble on the pages of the Moleskin you bought (an involuntary shudder of revulsion there, Alex whispering reverently that it was the notebook of Darda and Van Gogh, and me thinking, please-god-don't-let-me-ever-take-myself-that-seriously-I'll-do-anything) and I let it sit. Percolate, ferment. Like mare's milk (koumiss, damn my Anthropology paper) and

I put rocks into the tumbler and what comes out isn't amethyst or crystal or iron or glass, but something that's all of those, mixed and squashed and likely misshapen in its original context, but real. Because only ideas are pure. Everything else has trace elements. Everything else is heterogeneous.

Just thoughts, I guess, because right now I'm working on an Event/Resonance chart that is both fascinating and deathly dull. It really should be a catalog of motifs repeated, but I don't know what my motifs are even going to be yet, so that seemed sort of futile. So I invented Tarot motifs that are working well, one suit per chapter (using the Major Arcana seemed sort of predictable, so I used the minor arcana, and only the suits.)

I'm sort of liking it, though. Just another kind of structure in the book, another stab at coherency (but not homogenity.)

Thursday, October 19, 2006

All We Really Do is Steal.

Or: A Writer on the Business of Writing. The Eccentric Buggers essay.

I feel like I can write on this subject with a little authority. I spend a many hours each week putting words on paper, sometimes even in an advanced fashion that qualifies as authorship. And I dedicated a semester to writing about the sticky, awkward, and revealing relationship bewteen the writer and the writing. We put ourselves in our stories, and our stories come into us. We are less ourselves for every character we invent, whose mannerisms and thought patterns we mimic --and then, often unconsciously, adopt.

And at the same time, we are more wholly ourselves for the creation. No one imagines a plot or person in a vacuum: there is always some shared desire, some caveat or tic or memory the author shares with the authored. That bond --and the self that originated it-- are reinforced with every word. It's why I would argue that even the infamous casulaties of the craft --Hemingway, Plath, Woolf, Faulkner-- were healthy in their way. Their writing utilized their flaws, was the healthiest expression available to them, and the vehicle of the only wholeness they achieved.

However tortured the act, writing is fundamentally an act of hope, of reaching out. You don't put words on paper if you don't think anyone will ever read them. You don't put words on paper if you don't believe that you can make your reader care.

Anyway: there isn't much creation to authorship. Anyone who thinks there is should read the following: The Faery Queen, The Lord of the Rings Cycle, and The Eye of the World. Do it in that order, too. Georgette Heyer, then Connie Brockway or Julia Quinn. War of the Worlds, Martian Chronicles, Red Mars. Gibbon and any work of modern history. The Iliad --just the Iliad. (Here you see my Western bias: but I assume it's the same in other cultures)

Ideas are passed from hand to hand, writer to writer. We're all in secret fellowship with one another, squirreling away little bits of others' accumulated genius to add to our own. If any profession in this world has a Hive Mind, it must be writers. Ill-disciplined, eccentric Buggers.

Read my writing and you're reading Tamora Pierce, Patricia A. McKillip, Kim Stanley Robinson, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robin McKinley, Kinuko Y. Craft, Charles de Lint, Andrew Lang, Jared Diamond, and so many others, a list that includes the Social Science Fiction of the 1950's, modern "Feminist" fantasy, Urban fantasy, fairytales of all eras, Shakespeare, and modern Anthropological theory.

More on this later, WOW raid. x.x

-L

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Fastathon. x.x

I agreed to do the Fast-a-Thon at my university for a couple of reasons.

To start, it's a good cause. For each person that participates, local grocery stores donate food to food banks throughout the St. Louis area.

Then too, one of the Nemerovs asked us if we would.

But finally, because I don't think I've been truly, involuntarily hungry, once in my life. That seems like the kind of experience that might be valuable for a writer, particularly one that wants to write about highly-stratified post-apocalyptic societies.

So I went hungry today.

I whinged about it a bit in guild. I'm going to whinge a bit about it here. Because, damnit, I am >..<

So hungry that it has to be in little "angry face" quotation marks, in fact.

I won't say I'm to the point where I'm fantasizing about food. But I am definitely to the point where I bitterly resent anyone who brings anything edible into my vicinity. I can smell the bag of white cheddar popcorn some guy at the checkout desk forty feet away is eating. I'm just about ready to flip over the library desk, grab the popcorn, and make for it like the Trix rabbit.

Seriously. I've been watching people eat all day. You don't notice it until you're not allowed, how much time we spend with our mouths wrapped around edibles. I don't know how Muslims get through a month of this.

The friend that recommended we fast warned that there might be side-effects. Dizziness, tiredness, inability to focus . . . I don't know that I notice those much worse than I have at other times, but I'm notorious for skipping meals. I have gone this long without eating before . . . but I don't think I've ever so persistently ignored food in the face of hunger.

How much worse if I simply couldn't afford to eat?

That's the reality for Altair, at least. Dinner gets scrounged. Supplies or meals, when bought, come out of hard-earned stashes of cash, and when there is no more money, it's sell something or go without.

Not sure that it helps to put this in a literary context. I am most definititely fantasizing in an inappropriate fashion about marzipan, and marzipan (in theory) will not appear in my story.

x.x

Fooooooood.

-jen

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Now, officially--

NaNoWriMo doesn't start until November. So I'm not going to actually start writing. If you bend the rules the contest isn't fun.

However, I will have to produce 1, 666 words per day to make the 50,000 word goal. So I'm thinking November's going to be a bit crazy, and it might be a good idea to start work on this blog now, rather than then. Squeezing an extra 200 words out for a blog entry is going to be chancy on any given day in November.

Plus I'm feeling chatty, and we all know how that goes.

Anyway, the next few entries will be about prepping for NaNoWriMo, and we should all be excited for that:

-stock of gourmet tea (Alinka's, but check)
-a few hundred notebooks, in case I should feel like doing "real" writing (check)
-blue gel pen stolen from the Anthropology office (they have the best pens) (check)
-very empty blog (check)
- outline of novel (working on it)

I think we're well on our way. ^.^

-jen