I’ve Been Up To Something…

08 Apr 2013 3 Comments

by PartlyPixie in Camp NaNoWriMo, The Novel Tags: , , , , , ,

I haven't been around the blog as much as I like lately.

It's because I've been up to things… Several to be specific, but one thing in particular. And I'm excited, and a little bit frightened. And that usually is the best combination.

As I've mentioned a few times, I'm working on one of last year's novels, slated to be self-published around November/Devember (and a lot of you are getting copies thanks to your contributions to my causes).

This novel has taken a lot of research, and along the way I have been collecting snippets and ideas for back story and history of my characters, things that don't need to be in the novel, but are in my head all the same.

And so, I have launched a blog for the prequel of The Novel, and I am using the momentum of Camp NaNoWriMo to get it written (edits take a little longer).

The story is about vampires, about what we become to survive, about love that lasts through changes and separations, about friendship. And it all centers around a girl, found in Ireland, with a destiny to become one of the most feared beings the vampire world has ever known.

Here is my first entry. The rest can be found at cultofthesun.wordpress.com if you want to follow along.

Ireland, 1904

If only she had forever to live, if only she had more than seventeen years to become brave, she might have found the courage.

But she killed him anyway, the vampire.

The stake, carved for her from the rung of a baby's crib, did not go in smoothly the way she hoped. She knelt at his sleeping side, and her arms shook when she raised it above his death-still chest and plunged down at his heart.

His eyes opened, bright with shock, and he scratched at her; his nails dug long channels into the pale terrain of her flesh, across her chest and down her arm, and red bloomed, further staining the torn silk of her gown and mingling with the pooling black blood of the vampire. The scratches burned like when she backed up against her mother's oven, hot with breaking bread.

She did not scream. And she did not stop.

He clutched at her, bucking and writhing, noises coming from his blood-drenched throat. She closed her eyes and pushed harder against the stake, thinking about butchering lambs in the frost, how they made sad, small sounds and steam rose from the blood, caught in troughs for the season's offerings. She felt his ribs break and give way, like branches under heavy boots. His heart did not resist, and when she penetrated it at last, his body shivered and went limp.

She moved away from the bed slowly, wary of him rising again. Distantly, she knew that her bones ached, that her blood ran hot along her skin, that her lip was split and swelling, and worse things had happened–things she could not think on–but she couldn't feel any of it. She sat as far from the bed as she could, back against the wall, fingered the cold shackle around her ankle, and waited for morning.

 

Unstuck: What to Write When You Don’t Know What to Write – Retell a Story

11 Oct 2012 6 Comments

by PartlyPixie in NaNoWriMo, October, unsticking Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Retell a fairy tale.

When I was a little girl, we had an in-wall space heater in the basement rec room, the kind I've only seen in cheap hotels, but I am sure that the original decorators thought it was the height of interior design.

Anyway, in the winter, my dad and I would pile blankets next to that space heater and turn it on, and pretend it was a fire, and we were camping. We'd open up bags of marshmallows and cinnamon bears, and my dad would tell me stories.

I always requested some fairy tale or another.

My dad is a patient man, and he always complied. Of course, it gets old just telling the same stories over and over, (or maybe because they had me a little late and is memory was slipping… love you, Dad!) he never told me the same version of any story twice. Robin Hood had many impromptu adventures, Little Red Riding Hood was a mugger out to rob the wolf blind, and the Seven Dwarves once ran a speakeasy.

The stories were never the same. As far as I'm concerned, my father is a master story teller.

So, when our creativity is on the fritz and the stories aren't flowing, when ideas for NaNoWriMo are thin, when we just need to feel fiction happening.

Tell a fairy tale.

Tell it straight, with castles and fairy godmothers. Tell it crooked, with black magic and twisted endings. Tell it modern with no magic, where Jack climbs the corporate beanstalk, or sleeping beauty is a woman in witness protection until her boyfriend finds her.

Don't be afraid of not being original. Fairy tales are important, they are myths that bind us all together as a culture, the stories we cannot get enough of. Ask any hundred people to tell you the story of Cinderella, you will hear one hundred ways of telling it.

We are none of us original, and all of us unique.

Hell, Robin McKinley retold Beauty and the Beast twice. Twice. And the two novels might as well be written by two very different authors.

Let's be inspired by this.

When we're stuck for ideas, when we feel like frauds, when we simply can't pass through the static – no matter how many times we describe our laundry pile, when we just need a good idea to roll with through NaNo, and we simply want to write without worrying about plot, we can turn to the stories we have lived telling since childhood.

Try it; rewrite a fairy tale, or a folk tale, or a myth. Create a greater intimacy with the stories we only thought we knew.

You'll be amazed at just how original the same old songs can be.

Inspiration #24

08 Jul 2012 Leave a Comment

by PartlyPixie in Inspiration, June Tags: , , , , , , ,

Every Sunday, I choose a passage of wisdom from someone who knows better and much more than I do about writing, life, the universe and/or everything.

Share and enjoy!

There is an implied contract between the author and the reader that goes something like this: Give me your time and money, and I'll let you experience what it's like to be

  • a trapper in the North Woods
  • an explorer in the Martian desert
  • a young woman in love with an older man
  • a dying cancer patient…

You must look hard at the offer you are making: would you accept it, if you were the reader?

Most people have emotional problems of their own that hurt so much that they keep trying to push them down. Fiction can lure them into a vicarious experience that discharges these emotions. But you can't say, “Read this story, it will wring your guts.” You have to say, “Read this story, it will interest and entertain you,” and then wring their guts.

~from Creating Short Fiction, by Damon Knight

On Babies and Bathwater (so to speak)

09 May 2012 5 Comments

by PartlyPixie in May, Writing Tools Tags: , , , , , ,

Day Nine: Go here to follow this month’s project

We’ve got to be willing to throw it out.

All of it; every blessed word, every hour of blood, sweat, and misspellings. We have to be willing to put it all in the recycling bin if we have to. We have to be wiling to cut any paragraph, any idea, no matter how much you believe it would cost you.

We have to be willing to let go.

Writing, being a writer, demands that we not be greedy. Writing is often a selfish and self-contained act, but being a writer itself demands that we give our stories out to the world—that they become no longer ours, but a part of the great complexity that is the human experience. We nurture a story, grow it, keep it hidden and close as we shape it and shape ourselves into the person who can tell the tale as it must be written. It feels like a part of our body, part of our personality, our soul.

And then, if we are to give it true life and breath, we have to let it go. Into the hands of editors and publishers and then into the minds of those readers we both want and fear. Once our stories have been read, they are in some way not ours anymore. They belong to the people who live the story as they read it just as much as they belong to us, the minds that put them into words.

In one of the most beautifully honest moments of my life, I was sitting at a local diner with my best friend and her new baby. We were watching the new little life figure out fingers and what they do by dropping Cheerios into my coffee cup, and out of nowhere my friend put a hand on her stomach and said, “Sometimes, I wish she was still just mine.”

Once fiction is born, it isn’t just ours anymore. Other people have a say in what they see, they can point out typos and inconsistencies, they can offer suggestions – both good and bad. They can say they love it or hate it, and they get to have those opinions.

If we are still attached to the story, still feel like it is a part of us, we mistake the story for ourselves. And if it is rejected, then we feel rejected. We can get depressed, decide that everything we do is awful and give up.

And take up crochet, even though we hate crochet and the yarn always gets messy and tangled before we finish anything, and all we can make is scarves because really we’re writers and writing goes back and forth, not in loopy patterns like hats or sweaters. Maybe, once everyone has too many scarves, we will get back to writing. Or making everyone afghans.

Or we can remember that this story is the story we wrote, not us ourselves.

We can be willing to let it go. We can be willing to throw it out and start again.

Because every time we write, we become better writers.

Even when we write shitty first drafts. Especially when we write shitty first drafts.

We didn’t just spend an hour writing that blog post to have a post on a blog, but to learn how to blog better for next time as well. We didn’t use those ten years writing and perfecting a novel just to have a novel, we did it to learn what it is to write and perfect a novel, so we can do it again, better, no matter if the first one is ever published.

Every time we write, we become better writers. No matter if what we have done in the past is successful in the world or not. It’s not us anymore, just something we did that we can sell to sponsor the time needed to write more.

Thinking of it this way, publication is not a goal, but a means to the end of being able to write. Rejection isn’t a failure, but a way to know that more work needs to be done, and we need to keep the day job a little longer at least.

But it doesn’t matter really. We’ll keep writing either way.

 

Deep Thoughts, Served Late

26 Mar 2012 4 Comments

by PartlyPixie in March Tags: , , , , , , , ,

“Honey, I love you a lot, but when we go in there, try not to be so much yourself as usual, okay?”

We were standing outside of my boyfriend’s house, poised for of all things, a funeral. I was sixteen, two years before I met irowboat, and for some reason I don’t remember anything else about that night. In fact, I’m not even positive it was a funeral gathering.

But there it was – exactly what I had always been afraid people wanted from me, for me to be less me. Even they guy I thought would one day marry me felt the need to ask me to tone it down. What could that say about me?

I chose the inspiration for this week for a reason; I am scared of who I am inside of all these words I have to share and choose from, I’m frightened of the person I am uncovering within the stories I write.

It is often said that writers put some of themselves in their writing.

But I’m coming to understand that our writing can illuminate us – who we are, what questions we are begging the world to answer for us, what we love, and, most of all, what our wounds are.

When we write from those deep places (especially when we forget that we’re doing just that) then there is an unveiling, and the truer pieces of who we are can sparkle through.

I had a chance to see some parts of myself in every novel I’ve written this year so far – each one uncovers just a little more of my deeper self. Never more so than writing a novel in a week. I met some true part of myself in the mists of last fifteen thousand words written Friday night. I dove in, nose held, and stayed right there in the heat of creating and found myself in places I never dreamed I could dream.

I took my characters on a dark and twisted ride through the deepest recesses of my soul, and all of us came out changed. Particularly me.

Reading a good book can completely change our lives. It changes us because the writer was willing to stay on the dark edge of their consciousness, they were willing to dive within their depths and find their own truths to deliver to us in the form of story, in myth. They give us something that makes us know we’re lovable and human and so much greater than the sum of our parts.

This is part of our jobs as writers, to discover what lies true within ourselves, we must face what is too much of us, what we’ve let other people tell us is not okay to be or say in a funeral, at dinner, in the car on the way home from the airport. We have to be willing to write deep enough to find out that we are nothing of the person we thought we were.

This discovery of deep truths is not comfortable.

But it is wonderful. And scary. And strange.

And if reading a great story can change us, can illuminate our souls, even the smallest corner, then what must writing great stories be but this, this diving down into the unknown, do? For one thing, we can’t go on living as quite the same person as before.

It changes us.

Between the writing, up in the real world of society and social niceties, we run the risk of being so much more ourselves after finding out more about that wild thing we thought we controlled is running free.

As we write, we wake up.

And maybe, if you’re doing it right, someone will ask you be not so much yourself some day.

And when they do, smile and say, “No, thank you.”

Because you’ve earned everything you have become.

This Never Happens to Me (well, sometimes)

02 Feb 2012 7 Comments

by PartlyPixie in February Tags: , , ,

I’ve always been a believer in quitting. If you’re going to quit, quit early and save time and effort on the wrong thing.

I think I’ve started the wrong story. It’s hard to let go of this one because the character is clear and precise, the plot is interesting and I can see the potential for different problems to come and create change for the character.

But it’s just not flowing.

It’s a little early to be stuck.

Maybe I’ve chosen the wrong story. Maybe I’ve chosen the wrong place to start in the right story. Maybe I’m too distracted by falling behind on the blog and pressures from life to think clearly about what I’m doing.

I’m contemplating starting over.

But with what?

The idea of setting aside even these meager 3,000 words spikes anxiety into my mind, a mind that just a few days ago was feeling like the zen queen of words. I was feeling so calm, so ready and confident, so sure that I could make even a wrong idea right.

It has occurred to me that even though this is leap year and I have 29 days in February, I still have only 29 days.  I’m also likely to fall behind because of increased responsibility in my real-world life this week. I need a story that practically writes itself this month.

Can I afford to keep writing a story that isn’t flowing even at the beginning, when I’m usually singing and dancing along while the worlds happily fall from my fingertips like crochet from a crafter’s hook?

Can I afford to put aside a good character with a strong back story, maybe to never be picked up again?

Most of all, can I afford the time I’m spending trying to decide? That, I can answer: No. No I cannot.

I guess tonight, despite my misgivings, I start again.

Better to quit early than regret hanging on to the wrong thing.

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