mystics and madmen

Accomplished today:

- read part of Tehanu (I never read Earthsea as a kid)
- post about the Tragedy of me not being vegetarian
- ~350 words of a idea for a Bordertown story (because I want to write one every time ellen_kushner posts about the new anthology)
- 50 minutes or so of going through the highlighted Word document of As Large as Alone, cleaning up and clearing off the easiest things to fix.
- mathy coding: establishing structure of my first math paper for the semester, working on a presentation for Thursday pursuant to tutorial from last semester.
- read The Odyssey, books nine and ten

Left for after dinner/tomorrow:
- check out book from the library as reference for math presentation, above
- keep working on As Large as Alone and math paper; poke at the Bordertown idea some more
- read The Odyssey, books eleven and twelve, and take notes on 9-12
- meet with other group member about the presentation, finish up presentation prep
- water plant, take out garbage and recycling

We could call that a weekend.

There is no possible way I could be vegetarian. Not ever. Certainly not at college.

But I realized yesterday--(yes, it took me a while)--that I am not eating happy animals here. Which made me really sad. I am still dwelling on this, even though I know there is no way I can eat vegetarian and not be unhealthy.

See, I am okay with the idea of people eating animals. I am even okay with raising animals to be eaten. I am much less okay with raising animals inhumanely (and how weird is it that "inhumane" is our word for that concept?) to be eaten. If you are going to not care about them, not care about people, not care about the planet, it just doesn't make sense.

Gah.

Here's a theory, because I've felt inadequate a few times recently.

When most people think about writers, and the act of writing a story, we think about first-draft, putting words on the page. Outlining, just sitting and thinking, staring at that first draft and trying to see the shape of the story that's in there somewhere, chipping the story out slowly from the stone by changing one word or another... those aren't "really" writing.

So when I say I'm working on a story, most people think I mean I'm typing one paragraph after another. I think I mean I'm typing one paragraph after another. Not "I'm going through a Word document of my third draft, highlighting all the bits I want to change in the next draft, or that I need to think about, transferring notes from my paper copy like 'lifevest?'".

Surely it can't just be me who's gotten this idea? It's pernicious, because all the parts of writing are difficult, so degrading this aspect of the process is entirely unhelpful. And it sneaks in, through the inevitable cracks in your facade.


In happier news, a third of my story is now highlighted in cheerful turquoise! The parts which are not highlighted will have to wait for later drafts, because I can't see what's wrong with them right now.

I've been using an external mouse since my laptop's click-button died. It works very well, except when I want to sit on my bed and work on a story (again, the pernicious!). Then after half an hour my hand starts cramping up because the angles are weird. Oh, technology, why must you make me sad? (Anyone had experience with this problem? I have a MacBook, almost two years old now.)

On a some levels I think I am still processing what I learned at Odyssey almost two years ago--namely plot, structure, arcs of emotion and narrative and character. So much stuff got shoved into my head then, and it's taking me a while to unpack it all and realize the implications.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

--No, let me rephrase that. It is not a bad thing. In fact, hurrying the process would likely be a very bad idea.

And, in any case, this is progress. We like progress!

But this is the conscious incompetence stage, so there will probably be flailing and despair. Even if I do have a set of colorful markers to scribble all over this story with.

(I feel like everyone else probably realized this particular thing--just how deliberate you have to be, in a story--years ago. And even though I know that's because they've been writing for years or decades more than I have been, I still feel silly and slow.)

There is so much left for me to learn about writing.

It is sort of astounding just how frequently I assume that I am Doing It Wrong when it comes to writing. Regardless of how many times I am told that there is no one way, et cetera, et cetera.

Still! Lately I have not started anything new. Instead I have been poking on and off at this short story I wrote in August. I wrote the first draft with great assurance and emotion, which made it hard if not impossible to look at it objectively. I still cannot really look at it objectively, but it's easier now to look at craft and not "ooh look at this shiny thing I found!".

A lot of the pieces of the story tie together nicely already. There was one loose end, though, and this morning I had some time to sit and think about it, and whether I should excise that element completely or weave it in, and if weaving, in what way. And I figured out how it could weave in, and how it should weave in, and does.

It will take some delicate touches, and hopefully it will work. Maybe it won't, and then I will be back to the drawing board. But there you have it.

So my point to myself is that this is part of learning to write, too. Eventually maybe I will learn to work on many things at the same time, but there are clearly still things for my head to work out about this one. Which is totally legitimate.

(The reason I had time to think about it was because of a happy accident of scheduling this semester. My math class ends at ten, my next class is physics at eleven. They're in the same building complex, so even though my dorm is less than five minutes' walk away, it makes more sense to just hang out there. If all my classes were done at eleven and I had an hour before lunch, I'd probably spend it checking my email, but since I am Out and Doing Things, I can focus on writing. Win!)

We're reading The Odyssey in my classics course this semester. Using the Fagles translation, which is lovely--from reading the introduction, the epic-poetry form of Greek used a lot of different registers and dialects to fit hexameter, which makes it seem appropriate that he uses phrases like "scot-free".

The course is about mythology--"Gods and Mortals"--and even just reading the first few books of the Odyssey it's clear that the relationships are very (very!) different than I see these days. Athena is helping Telemachus out; they're visiting a king, and Athena's like "well, gotta go see to the ship, guys", turns into an eagle, and flies off. The king goes "oh em gee, it's Athena!" and plans a sacrifice for the next day. And, the text tells us, "Athena came as well / to attend her sacred rites."

That's right. The goddess shows up to the sacrifice they're making to her. But she's not All-Powerful All-Seeing, in front of whom everyone should bow. Even though the sacrifice is in her honor, she's at most an afterthought--"oh, and Athena was there, too."

Rock on, dudes. Rock on.

(Also? The audiobook version of this translation is read by Ian McKellen. Which might well be worth the money.)

...offered without explanation:
- The Secret of the Old Clock
- The Bungalow Mystery
- The Case of the Not-So-Nice Nurse
- Sammy Keyes and the Dead Giveaway
- The Tombs of Atuan
- Shakespeare's Bawdy
- Much Ado About Nothing
- The Princes of the Air
- The Moonbane Mage
- King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy
- Burning Bright
- Dreamships
- Dreaming Metal
- The Eyre Affair
- Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot
- Collected Poems of James Wright

What's on yours?

If I could live for the rest of my life in places like my dorm room is right now, I think that I would be very happy. High-ceilinged, airy, quiet, sunlit places, with an explosion of green life on the windowsill and a prism shivering rainbows out of the light, the wooden floor glowing with the sun, music playing softly, the pages of a story in revisions spread across my bed, my books lined up on shelves and stacked on my desk and the top of my bookcase.

I'd take more snow in the view out the window, if someone were offering, but then again I guess no one can have everything they want.

In the queer-kids'-books class I'm taking this J-term, there are a lot of things we're looking at askance. How far have we come since the publication of Annie on My Mind? Heather Has Two Mommies? Are there any good picture books with queer content, really?

In all of this uncertainty and doubt, it is good to be able to point at something and say, This is awesome. This is new. Which is How Beautiful the Ordinary, a collection of YA short stories edited by Michael Cart.

The Table of Contents reads like a who's who of queer YA fiction. The variety of types of stories is awesome: epistolary, two columns of text, graphic novel format, as well as straight-up narrative--both linear and nonlinear. The variety of ways in which the queer content is included is also awesome. Some stories, yes, are about first-love or coming out, but none of them are only that. They deal frankly with sex; with being queer in society today; with having queer parents. This is a YA anthology, but several of the stories connect to or from the past, jump generational gaps...

All this, and it's even packaged inoffensively. The title doesn't shout "queer people!". Nor does the cover. (Compare: How Beautiful the Ordinary and Am I Blue?.) Yes, in an ideal world anyone could be seen reading anthologies with rainbows and pink triangles all over them; but that world's not this one, and teens, especially questioning teens, might hesitate over picking up "Am I Blue?" for that reason. I hesitated, and--well--my family's liberal, pretty much all my friends are liberal, and for a third thing I was halfway across the country from all of those people at the time, in another liberal area. I did pick it up, and it was good; but How Beautiful the Ordinary is proof that queer YA anthologies can rock even more.

Return of the word page count meter! Word count is ~12.4k/85k. I think I need to pick one or the other metric to look at, because otherwise I get caught up in this weird obsession of having to land just around 250 words a page, which is sort of ridiculous. I might go with page count, for now.

Yeah, so I actually did get some work done today. I might do some more before dinnertime, but I thought I'd set up the meter, anyway. Figured, if I have a meter, it'll help guilt me into writing more. Not that I don't enjoy writing it, because I do; some parts of it are wholesale darlings. But I have things distracting me, so the guilt will help me remember.

The last part of my winter break was wholly unproductive--I alternated sitting around reading books and hanging out with friends. Only being back for two weeks means that I definitely failed at seeing everyone, but I got to see quite a few people, which was good. Hit most of my Twin Cities highlights, too: Como Park Conservatory, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Walker Art Center, three or four different libraries...

Kinds of cookies devoured: 4 (sugar cookie cut-outs, pumpkin with cranberries, molasses, oatmeal-raisin)
Kinds of bread devoured: 2 (Stollen, cornbread)
Candy canes devoured: 12?
Books read: a bunch
Tiny oranges devoured: too many to count

Soon I will be headed back to campus for J-term. My writing goals for the next few weeks include:
- write some more solstice stories
- keep working on the first draft of The Urban Fantasy Novel
- print out "As Large As Alone" and go over the beginning with a fine-toothed comb
- for my J-term class (GLBT content in children's and YA lit), write a final project--possibly the first chapter of a YA GLBT novel.

Other activities will include Having fun and Working at my awesome job.

These two posts say something of what I was trying to say about my solstice stories, a couple of days ago. Really they are flash fiction, I just call them something different. (And it is like a keystone, and all of those other things.)

Via the Odfellowdiscussion group: Atlas of the Universe. We are very small, the universe is very large. Happy new year (Earth-relative).

Doubtless leaving out many important and/or generally noteworthy events, here are some things that happened since I last switched out my calendar:
- got into college, decided where to go
- took five International Baccalaureate exams
- started reading slush for Ideomancer
- graduated high school
- received the IB Diploma
- turned eighteen
- wrote the rough draft of a novel and started another
- wrote some short stories
- acted in a theater piece for the first time in years
- survived my first semester of college (moving away from my parents and halfway across the country in the process)
- between two short stories and a poem, acquired 15 rejection letters (and sold nothing, but that's life)
- made a bunch of new friends, realized how many old friends I still have; the answer is "a lot"

...well. That'll do for twelve months, I think.

I, for one, welcome our new 2010 calendar pages.

Today I finished the last of the stories I told people I would write for them last year. So now I just have to write the ones requested this year, which so far number twenty-three, not counting the two people who've said they want one but not given me a prompt.

So far, these stories have been as short as a few hundred words, as long as 1500. I used to write stories this long, when I was about thirteen--then again, my "novels" weren't much longer. As I started to figure out how to show, not tell, how to develop characters and plots, the length stretched out.

My short stories tend to hover on the low end of the range even now, but they're a normal length. (My novels are now novel-length.)

And then I started this project. I don't get much in the prompts: a couple of nouns, maybe. Sometimes there's a full sentence of description, which is usually, oddly, harder to write--more restriction. At any rate, there isn't enough to write a full-length short story off the top of my head, fleshed-out characters and plot and setting. I've never been great at working off prompts.

But a quick minute of brainstorming usually brings up a scenario, a place, a person, and the point of these isn't that they are the best or the most thought-out stories in the world: the point is my friends getting a story that I wrote for them, the point is the act of writing them.

In that state of just-writing-it, maybe even purer than exists for NaNoWriMo, there have been some unexpected moments of grace. Sometimes the whole thing feels flat, but that's okay--sometimes it curls up in itself, or twists out at the last moment into something beautiful.

Because they're so short, the vast majority of their work is done in implication, in subtext. But in obvious subtext, because there isn't enough time to build up the soundless structures that hold up a full short story, or a novel.

So, since I was thirteen, I've kind of come full circle. I'm going to loop back out again as soon as I get back on campus next week and start trying to buckle down and write The Urban Fantasy Novel. Since I have 23 left to write, though, I'll probably keep writing shorter things for a while, too.

And, who knows? Maybe after I'm done with all of them, I'll start writing flash fiction. It's a fun length.

Survived the flight! I love airplanes--the takeoff especially, but also what you can see out the window. The sun had set by the time we got off the ground, and the sky was clear, so for most of the trip the little glittering galaxies of lights were strung out below us. Minnesota was overcast. We dove through layer after layer of clouds, plunging through with the winglights flashing alarmingly bright white and red. And then we were down, and through, and the Cities lay beneath us, smooth white fields of lakes and the dark shapes of trees, and the soft glow of Christmas lights under snow.

I wrote about 1400 words while in airports and en route, despite the plethora of children. ("Minute 32. They have me surrounded on all sides. I am trapped against this window. Flight attendants' offers of pretzels to placate children not stopping the screams. But who will placate me?") So that's 11.4k, and eventually I really will get a wordcount meter.

Minnesota has snow, real snow. It looks like winter here. Today I'm going out present-shopping, and hopefully will return laden with all sorts of things to hide in my wardrobe and wrap in newspapers.

If I can swing it, I also want to go by the library or a bookstore--I'm taking a J-term class on GLBT content in children's and YA literature, and they've given us the list of readings, which basically reads like a list of things I've vaguely wanted to buy for the past few years except with more picture books. (Which is why library. As cool as Heather Has Two Mommies is, I don't think I need to own it.) A couple of things might be difficult to find, but I can always order them online; I just want to get a head start.

The Urban Fantasy Novel has so, so many darlings in it. So many characters who make me happy in different ways. So many sentences I go back to and giggle at. So many things that I just think are nifty and want to be in it.

So many things I have stolen from other urban fantasy novels, because this is definitely my response to the whole movement. (From War for the Oaks to de Lint to Holly Black to Bordertown to Faerie Wars to Artemis Fowl to, probably, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And Blood and Iron, I suspect.) As well as my response to college, although I started it before I got here.

I am not sure what all of this says about the novel in question, but I do know it's fun to write.

I now have 10k on it, which feels substantial. I know where it's going; I've outlined it; when I don't know where it's going next, I can go back to the outline and figure it out.


(Also? Despite forecasts of snow for most of the rest of the week in Minnesota, it isn't supposed to snow today, the day when I will be flying. Rock on, world.)

Finals: over with! And I am going back for winter break tomorrow. So I think it's merited to look back on my first semester of college. Verdict: pretty sweet, considered as a whole. Some things could have been different, but I'm not sure which way they would have been better.

I have printed out my boarding pass, I have started packing, I have surrounded my plant with enough water to keep it damp for months. (Hopefully. Well, hopefully at least two weeks.) On the audiobook theory of plane travel, I have downloaded Pratchett's Thief of Time and put it on my iPod.

Goals for winter break: read some books and novel excerpts and things, write bits of novels and/or stories, hang out with friends I haven't seen since I started college. Give people presents.

They say it's going to snow in Minnesota for Christmas. I can't wait.

(Also: "The Shortest Day". Happy solstice.)

Finals-o-meter: three out of four done.

Last one will be tomorrow.

I've been working on the solstice-story requests from last year. On the Any writing is good practice theory I have been avoiding thinking that I ought to be working on The Urban Fantasy Novel. I now have two left I haven't started at all; one that's half-finished; and one that wants revision. Then I can start on the currently-around-twenty requests from this year!

The first few days of writing these, the stories were all very, very short, almost all telling and no showing, just a bit of concept and we're done. Yesterday and today I've only managed to write one each day, but they were both longer--one around a thousand words, one around fifteen hundred--and I'm fairly happy with them. So that was worth it, I think.

Snow of doom did not arrive. We got about half an inch: enough to make the paths pretty and snowy, and not enough to cover up the still-green grass I can see from my window. Not cool, New England weather. Not cool.

(Still, it was enough to creak becomingly under my feet when I went to take a final this morning, which is something.)

Two finals down, two to go. I have calc III and sociology left; calculus shouldn't be too bad (we don't have to integrate things, just set up the integrals! Our professor is nice) and for sociology we get to use our notes and readings, so that won't be terrible either.

Update on the plant over winter break situation: A friend inadvertently reminded me that I in fact own large tupperware containers--my mother pressed them upon me when I was leaving, and apparently they come in handy--and so my plant, which still has no name because apparently I don't name things, is now sitting smugly in the center of its new domain, which is quite a bit larger than its last one.

Which means that all I have to do to prepare for my departure is, Figure out how to pack dinner for the plane, which may be a trial in and of itself.

It's supposed to snow tonight--lots. And possibly not melt for a while, or at least until after I leave for break. It makes me happy to think that my surroundings will finally descend into winter. There's something profoundly disconcerting in being able to see swathes of green grass halfway through December.

I should be studying for my other finals. Will I? Doubtful. I'll probably write some more solstice stories instead.

One final down! Three to go!

And now I feel all virtuous because I studied philosophy this morning and then took the final this afternoon, so I will not feel bad if I spend the rest of the day goofing off.

--
Sometimes I am sort of amazed by how many friends I have.

Last year I posted on facebook offering stories to my friends as presents for anonymous wintry holiday (or non-wintry, depending on hemisphere), if they gave me a prompt. The idea was that I would be forced to write them and therefore get back into the swing of writing.

It didn't work so well for that! I wrote precisely one of them in late January and then promptly got busy, forgot, et cetera. I remembered about them yesterday while avoiding studying philosophy, so I dug up the list of prompts again and started writing some of them. There were twelve requests all in all last year; I have five and a bit done now, with some ideas for the other ones, and I've started posting the ones that are done to their respective recipients.

One of the nice things about doing it this way is that I've lost touch with some of the people who asked for them last year. So they get a story from me, and we're both reminded of each other's existence.

So, because clearly it is not enough to only have a bad idea once, I offered the same thing again this year. Already there are twelve requests, and I know perfectly well that there are at least a few people who just haven't been on facebook in the past day or so. What have I gotten myself into?

I only have a week and a half for winter break this year, because I'm coming back to campus for our January term. It looks like I will have something to do every day while I'm home, if everything works out. Which is awesome, because I didn't see any of my friends over Thanksgiving break and then felt silly and alone, and I really do like my friends a lot.

(As a side note, if anyone who's on here wants a solstice-type-holiday story present from me, comment and give me a prompt, and I will write you one. This is not restricted to facebook friends, that's just where a lot of mine tend to live.)