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The Long and Short of It: A Cowardly Writer
I never started out writing short stories. Or even poems. In my mind, when I sat down to write at the ripe old age of twelve (spiral bound notebook and pen in hand) I was writing a frakking novel. It’s always been novels. Not to say that they’ve always been good novels, of course; simply, this is how my brain thinks. And that’s not surprising, really. I read more novels than anything else. I am a very choosy reader, but when a book takes hold of me I am in for the long haul. I know characters that have changed me for life; I have seen landscapes in print that…
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Rock ‘n’ Roll
At least, that’s what writing has felt like lately. A story, moving along at a good pace, surprises left and right. I’m working on Dustman (working title) right now, which is a peripheral novel in the Aldersgate Cycle; that is, it takes place in the same world, and has a few cameos from some familiar characters, but isn’t part of the main bulk. The story is much more intimate, in a way, as it has to do with three characters only, who switch POVs throughout the story. The Aldersgate had a much bigger scope–you know, kingdoms at stake and all of that. In this case, though war is raging, it’s…
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Getting Through The Writing Drought
By virtue of the holiday season, I have been doing little else but crochet and cook these last few days, leading to a whopping 0 progress in fiction. I’m starting to get twitchy. It’s not that I don’t love the holidays, my family, tradition, all those things. It’s not that taking a break might, in fact, be a pretty good idea; it is more than that. I need a break, but I’m not willing to let it go without a good share of bitching and moaning. Since the youngest of ages, wandering around the playground clutching notebooks scrawled with imaginary worlds and adventures, I have sought out fiction as therapy.…
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Renovating rooms, knocking down walls
I’m not going gung-ho with writing right now. I know it’s a bit of a fruitless endeavor, what with family and holidays and everything. As my lovely friend Jennifer said to me yesterday during coffee, “Just enjoy doing nothing for a while.” Yeah, I’m not good with doing nothing. Especially writing-wise. But hey, I’m pacing myself. Except characters just have minds of their own now, don’t they? The last three days I’ve been assaulted with bits and pieces of dialogue, scenes, sentences, and stories from The Ward of the Rose (taking a wee break from the followup to Queen of None, but still going to be writing more Arthuriana posts). For those…
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Loving Lancelot or, the Force of Character
I have to confess, I’ve never much liked Lancelot. I never got the whole thing with him, never understood why, time and again, he appears in book after book after book, film after film. And I swore, up and down I swore, that if I ever wrote Arthuriana that there would be absolutely no sign of Lancelot to speak of. No stupid Frenchman ruining everything. No pure, guiltless knight; no hunky posterboy. The only Lancelot I marginally liked was T.H. White’s… because he was terribly ugly. I can appreciate that sort of irony. (Of course, they couldn’t have kept that in Camelot. Had to go and make him all sexy…
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Arthur Re(du)x – Part One
I can’t say for sure, but I think the first time I ever saw something remotely Pre-Raphaelite was in elementary school upon visiting the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA. It very well could have been this painting, though I’m not sure when it was acquired. Regardless, I remember returning from the museum on an absolute high, my mind alive with the images I’d seen and thrilling at the prospect of such visual imagination. Throughout college, I learned a great deal more about the Pre-Raphaelites, and they and their brotherhood (and sisterhood, et al) continued to crop up during my Arthurian studies. And the more I read of Arthur, the…
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The Queen, the Knight, and Arthur
If you’ve followed either of my blogs, listened to my podcast, of likely talked to me for all of ten minutes, you’ve probably gathered that I have a thing for Arthuriana. My love of the genre is deep-seeded, having taken root somewhere in between watching The Sword in the Stone and receiving a book from my great aunt on the subject (I can’t seem to locate the book, but it had fabulous illustrations, including a brilliant one of Morgause holding up Mordred as a newborn amidst the rocky sea and churning waves). But it wasn’t until college that something really clicked with me, something started reverberating in my brain, in…
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Writing can soothe the soul…
I recently had the pleasure of reading one of Lilith Saintcrow’s amazing entries about how writing can, indeed, save our lives. Since I have been revisiting in a book that did much to soothe my own soul, I wanted to tell you a little about it. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that a little less than a year ago, my younger sister was diagnosed with cancer. Now, illness kind of runs in our family; mom’s had cancer and a series of other ailments, dad’s been fighting a mystery disease/heart disease and suffered a near-fatal staph infection the week before my wedding. And that heart surgery he had…
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November approacheth…
And that means NaNoWriMo. You know, for years I avoided NaNoWriMo. I hated the idea, mostly, because people kept telling me to do it. I mean, damnit, I could write a book at my own pace and, by gods, I did. Ooh, the snark… But last year, right after I left my job, I found myself with a healthy amount of time and decided well, what the hell? Did I have anything to lose? No, not really. I had never really ramped up the writing, personally, always just sort of let loose when I wanted, never wrote to a schedule, etc. I mean, part of that was due to my…
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“Be patient, keep writing” and other things I tell myself.
Last night I finished chapter 20 of Peter of Windbourne, and am now approaching the part in the book in which a series of Very Bad Things happen. The draft is sitting at 101,122 words at this moment, with hopefully no more than five or six chapters remaining (generally my chapters hover between 4-5K). It’s a blind rewrite, as I’ve mentioned, so I’m giving myself some extra wiggle room. I know it’ll be edited down a bit next. I’ve got until November to get it done, because I’ve promised to do NaNoWriMo again this year. This chapter has been particularly difficult, mostly due to the influx of freelance work that’s…
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A SF/F writers LGBT alliance group?
I’m not going to talk about what happened this week. But I am going to talk about what should happen, and what needs to happen. Immediately after reading the rant by said individual, I went on a search. I wanted to find a group of SF/F writers, from all walks of life, who support LGBT issues, particularly in SF/F literature, and join up. I didn’t think this would be hard to find, and assumed that there was some magic place for support, celebration and the furthering of such material within the community already. I was surprised not to find anything. And it occurred to me that if we’re actually going…
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It’s not about the destination, it’s about the… lemurs?
(Warning: a late-night caffeine-infused post-word-binge rant.) I’ve had friends tell me that their favorite part about fantasy literature is the journey. The part when the characters are tromping through the forest, drinking from waterskins, gnawing on jerky, and sitting around campfires telling stories. Yes, there is a certain amount of charm in that but, well, let me tell you something. I seriously hate writing it. At the moment, ironically, it is just where my characters are. While much of the first half of the book is, technically, a journey, this point is where the marshmallow toasting and night watches come in. It’s the build-up to the big end, the culmination,…
