Category: writing

Castle Dreams

unnamed2So Derek Murphy, otherwise known as Creativindie, is running yet another contest. A last-minute giveaway of a stay in one of two writing retreats, either a two-week stay in Portrush, Northern Ireland, or a couple of weeks in his NaNoWriMo Castle in Saint-Sylvestre-sur-Lot, France (in Aquitaine, apparently, which is the South of France – I had to google it).

Oh. My. Goodness. The way to enter this contest/giveaway is to post about it on your blog. Here. Doing it. And then you’re supposed to say which of the two you want to go to. Umm, YES. Yes please. Uh, you want me to choose? Sorry… just sorry, Derek, I can’t. Just pick me for either one, and I’ll be there with bells on. Because (and that’s condition #2, to say why you want to come), well, d’uh. Castle. Or Ireland. Ocean shore. British Isles. Europe. History. Stories woven into the very fabric of your surroundings. Wherever you look, there’s stories, tales just for the picking. You walk through a doorway, and your mind goes “I wonder who lived here a hundred years ago…”, and you see a lady with a tight corset crossing the hallway in front of you, her big hoop skirt swinging. And then you turn a corner and look out a window, and your mind skips on to “Did some noble lady ever sit on this window sill the way I do now, looking out for her knight to come back for her?” Or you get off the train (because, of course, you take the train to where you’re going – this is Europe, after all) and you think, “I wonder how it felt for a soldier in 1916 to come home to his family in this little town…” and “How long might this bakery have stood at that corner already, and did children sixty years ago have their noses pressed to the window just the way this little girl is doing now?”

Like I said, stories in every brick and stone, the very air you breathe suffused with inspiration. So of course I want to go on one of those retreats. Just looking at those websites had me spiralling off into dreams; I almost had my itinerary for how to get there all planned out…

Now, the third condition of entering this writing contest is to post a sample or outline of what you would be working on. Hmm. I don’t really like posting outlines or summaries in public before I’ve written the thing. My stories need to hatch in peace and quiet, not be dragged into the spotlight before they’re even able to open their eyes.

However, let’s just say I’d win the castle retreat [crosses fingers and toes, going “Please, please, please!”] [Yes, I can cross my toes. Can’t you?]. Of all the story ideas knocking about in my brain, I think it would be one of the fairy tale retellings that would take shape then, because, castle. That Château de Cadrès is the quintessential fairy tale castle, judging by the pictures. Sit back, close your eyes for a minute, open them again, and you don’t even have to bother imagining – you just describe what you see, people it with some characters, and bingo – story.

Now, as to what kind of story… As I said, a fairy tale. And like every good story, it always starts with a “What if…” In a fairy tale, the plot, the “what”, is already a given. So to turn a fairy tale into a full-length novel, what you want is a “what if…” of a different kind. Sometimes a “How come…” For example, have you ever wondered why the princess in the Grimms'”The Goose Girl” doesn’t try to defend herself when the wicked maid forces her to change places with her? How come she’s like that? Maybe she’s constitutionally shy or has a stammer which makes her afraid to speak up. Or, maybe, when she was growing up, her father and older brother were abusive bullies, and in consequence she’s terrified of men. So when she loses the handkerchief with her mother’s protective magic and the maid bullies her into trading places, she’s helpless, because she would never dare to actually tell the king that she is the real princess – even though she meets the prince in the stables where she’s been sent to sleep in the hay, and it turns out he’s really shy and stammer-y, too, and terrified of this “princess” he’s supposed to marry (because he can tell she’s a bully, and not very refined and ladylike to boot). Now the two of them, the princess and prince, have become really good friends (aka fallen in love), but she can’t say anything about her predicament because the wicked maid has put a spell on her. And then of course there’s Curdie, the gooseherd boy, who wants to pull out her hair because it’s so pretty and golden, and it’s the princess’ friendship with the prince (who, maybe, she doesn’t know is the prince, and just thinks is a nobleman?) which gives her the courage to stand up to Curdie and learn to not let herself be bullied. So when the king finally goes and hears her talking to her dead horse’s head under the bridge, which busts everything wide open, she’s actually got the courage to speak up and let the king know what really happened, and the ensuing happily-ever-after with her marrying the prince is really based on her learning to stand up for herself and have the courage to be who she really is.

There, that’s my outline – or a outline, anyway. It might not be good enough for a contest entry, but now I’ll have to go and actually write that book sometime.

Meanwhile, go and hop over to Creativindie’s site and have a look around (that’s his whole purpose for putting on these contests, to get exposure for his site). I’d love to go on one of those retreats, but if I can’t, I’ll just have to imagine I’m there, dream myself into the castle. I am, after all, a storysmith, mental images come easily.

Life, the Universe, and a Writing Retreat. Here’s hoping.

 

Seventh Son on Sizzling Summer Sale (or Something)

It’s summer! You need a beach read! (Or, if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere: It’s winter! You need a book to read by the fire!) So, here’s your Sizzling Summer Sale – better yet, it’s not a sale, it’s a FREEBIE!! You can get your very own e-copy of Seventh Son for utterly, totally and completely FREE!!! All you have to do is hoof it over to your favourite ebook vendor and click the “download” button. So go ahead, what’re you waiting for?

 

seventh son

Here it is on

Amazon

Smashwords (all ebook formats)

Kobo

Nook

iBooks

Life, the Universe, and a Sale on Seventh Son. Go get it, read it, then let me know what you think!

 

How to Handle Writer Jealousy

This is such an excellent post by Kate M. Colby, I had to reblog it to share with you all. Her advice is actually good for all kinds of jealousy, not just that of one writer for another (so don’t think you have an excuse not to read & apply it). I shall now try to stop feeling jealous of Kate’s writer & blogger success, and do something about mine instead…

What I Came Home With

IMG_20160522_163421So Steve and I are back from the Writer’s Festival. We had a great time – well, I did; I think he did too (his favourite was a workshop on Bears In Poetry; he got to read one of his latest pieces). I came back with a bunch of new books, a small jar of iron gall ink (more on that below), and a ton of inspiration and encouragement.

I think the one main impression, the key idea, I took away from this conference is this: There is no one way to doing things as a writer. It came out over and over in presentations, in workshops, in discussions, in Q&A sessions. There are pantsers, there are plotters. There are people who crank out novels every few months, there are ones who take years. Some write in third person past tense, some use first person present. There’s traditionally published authors, there’s self-published ones. There’s outliners, there’s free-writers. And you’ll find any stripe of them in any category – not all plotters are trad-published, not all self-publishers are pantsers (or vice versa). In other words, do whatever works for you and for what you’re working on. As one of the presenters (the most excellent Jodi McIsaac) put it: It’s not a rule, it’s a tool.

And speaking of tool, the last workshop I took, and probably the most fun one (even though it wasn’t directly related to the kind of writing I do, with keyboard and screen and stuff), was on ink. That’s right, the black stuff (or blue) that flows from the end of your pen and makes words on paper. The presenter, Ted Bishop, has written a whole book on it: The Social Life of Ink: Culture, Wonder, and Our Relationship with the Written Word. I haven’t read it yet, but yes, of course I got a copy. And he signed it for me – in my own ink. You see, being one of those suck-up-to-the-teacher types, I brought him a jar of my walnut ink (and a walnut with the husk still on it, to show what they look like).

But what we actually did in the class was make real, honest-to-goodness, classic iron gall ink. The kind of ink that the Dead Sea Scrolls were written in, and the earliest existing copy of the Quran, and Magna Carta, and of course all of Shakespeare’s stuff and Jane Austen’s and pretty much anyone who is anyone’s and every nobody’s as well, up until the early 20th century.

IMG_20160523_115438_1While Ted was talking about the history of the ballpoint pen (fascinating!), we passed around a mortar and pestle with an oak gall in it, taking turns grinding it down to a fine powder. Then we ground in a chunk of gum arabic (the stuff that’s the binder in watercolour paints), mixed it in water (it was still a boring buff colour at this point), then added a teaspoon of ferrous sulfate, which is a pale green powder (I got to stir). And – voilà! – the mix  instantly turned a deep black! And then we got to try it out – and the funky thing about this particular kind of ink is that it doesn’t go on as black as it becomes later, but looks quite watery to start with. I thought the pen hadn’t been loaded correctly on my first stroke, and re-dipped it and re-drew the lines – but what happens is that it’s actually the chemical reaction with the air, aka plain old oxidation, that makes it go really black on the page. Kind of like Harry Potter’s Marauder’s Map, where the letters appear pale at first and get stronger and stronger (Ted’s description, not mine). It’s a beautiful ink, a deep blue-black (once it’s done oxidising), and completely waterproof – I soaked the sheet of paper in the picture here after I’d written it, and it didn’t smudge or run at all. And it could last for millennia…

So, that’s what I did on my weekend. And now I’m itching to get back to writing (I’ve even played with the idea of handwriting a story sometime – not with iron gall ink, of course; dip pens are far too tedious – but then I always end up back at the keyboard).

So I’ll sign off, with Life, the Universe, a Writer’s Conference and Iron Gall Ink. Talk to you later!

PS: Check out Jodie Renner (the Blue Pencil presenter who was so great), Susan Fox, and Robert J. Sawyer, as well – all their workshops were excellent, and I learned a lot.

Jaw Drop

IMG_20160520_104941I’m going to a Writer’s Conference this weekend, and as part of the conference registration you get to have a Blue Pencil (critique) session with a professional writer/editor. I sent in a short story I wrote a couple of years ago, an off-the-cuff piece about a girl who gets a marriage proposal she can’t refuse. I was feeling quite insecure about it – the blue-pencil presenter I’m having my session with judges short story competitions and is a professional editor, and, well, you know my rambling, drivelly style…

I fully expected her to tear the piece to shreds. I’d gone over it plenty of times, but couldn’t think of what else to do with it to improve it; it really was the best I could do with this story. So I just hit “send” on it, casting it on the waves – what will be, will be…

Then this morning, I get back an email from her. With fear and trembling, I open the message, and here is what it said:

“Hi Angelika, I really enjoyed your short story! In fact, it’s so good that I really don’t have a lot of advice to offer. Would you like to email me and bring the first 5-6 pages from another writing project to our consultation this weekend?”

And there I sat, with tears running down my face. Literally, that classic hand-clapped-to-open-mouth, laughing-and-sobbing-in-disbelief pose.

I carried my laptop downstairs to show the message to my Man, dried my cheeks, re-read the mail about another half a dozen times, then booted up my book files and found another piece to send to the editor. The first chapter of Star Bright – we’ll see what she has to say. At this point I’m willing to take almost anything from her.

Life, the Universe, and a Jaw Drop. Maybe I am a real writer, after all?

The Editor Pontificates: Past Perfect

Double-Stuf-OreosNo, I’m not talking about the perfect past – you know, where your grandma keeps going on about the Good Old Days in the Past, When Everything Was Perfect. What I’m talking about here is the grammatical “past perfect” tense.

Bear with me for a moment here. I keep stumbling over this matter in my work as editor (ahem – I almost feel like I should capitalise this: My Work As Editor. Spoken with a suitably declarative intonation, so that the capitals become evident and everyone is duly impressed. Anyway…). Now, most of you probably don’t give a rip about grammar. If so, just ignore me. But some of you might actually care, and for those, allow me to pontificate for a moment.

“Pontificate”, incidentally, comes from the Latin “pontifex”, which was an early word for “bishop” (the Pope is still called Pontifex Maximus today). So, to pontificate is, quite plainly, to preach. Speaking of Latin, “perfect” is, of course, also Latin, from “perficio”, “through + make”, or “finish building”. Something that’s perfect is completed, all the way. So in grammar terms, something that’s “perfect” is something that’s finished, over with.

I was in an online discussion the other day on this very topic, and one participant, who is an ESL teacher in Asia, said that when he talks to his students he calls the past perfect the “double past”. That’s a great term, because it describes exactly what it is. Like a Double Oreo cookie, where you get twice the filling (the Oreo of Oreos, as it were), the double past means you get the past of the past.

So, when I’m talking about today, I use, of course, the present tense. “Today I waffle on about grammar matters and bore my readers to tears.” If I talk about yesterday, I use the simple past: “Yesterday, I thought of this topic.” Now, if I want to talk about something that happened before the past, I use the past perfect: “Yesterday, I thought of this topic, because the day before yesterday I had discussed it with other writers online.” When I thought of the topic yesterday, the discussing was already in the past. Double past, or past perfect.

In English, to put it simply, the past perfect is formed by “had” and the appropriate verb form: today I eat, yesterday I ate, the day before that I had eaten. (There are some convoluted verb forms where you end up with stacks of “had”, but we’ll ignore those here.)

In daily life, we rarely use the double past. But in writing, it does become relevant. Most fiction is written in the past tense (“It was the blue bowl that started it all…”), so if you describe something that happened before that moment you’re describing, you’ve got to put it in past perfect: “It was a turquoise blue, very much like the eyes of the weird guy that had stared at Cat so disturbingly in the Room of Local Antiquities.” If that “had” wasn’t there, it would mean that the guy is standing there right now, staring at Cat – but it happened earlier, before she walked into the Ceramics Room and saw the fateful blue bowl. Because the whole story is told in past tense, anything that happened prior to it requires the double past. (If you want to know what else happened with Cat and the blue bowl and just who that weird guy was, go read Seventh Son. End of advertisement.)

The most common mistake in this regard is to have your story told in past tense, but forget to use the double past when you’re telling of events prior to your “narrative present” (i.e. the time the story takes place in), which can leave the reader scratching their head as to exactly what’s happening when. But I’ve also seen stories that are told in present tense, where the author overcompensates: the “narrative present” is the present, so anything that happens before then should be in the simple past tense (single Oreo) – but then the author tries extra-hard to get the tense right and ends up putting in an excess of “had”. Nope, you don’t want that. If you’re telling it right now, a prior event goes in the simple past – single Oreo. If you’re telling everything in the past, a prior event goes in the past perfect or double past – it gets the double Oreo.

Make sense? Good. I’ll get off my editor’s pulpit then and stop boring you.

Life, the Universe, the Past Perfect and Double Oreos. Pass the milk.

Slow Writing

You know we’re in the first few days of Camp NaNoWriMo. And NaNo is all about cranking out the word count. Fast writing! The quicker, the better! NaNo has word sprints, NaNo has word wars (who gets the most words written in the shortest time, that sort of thing). There’s a Wrimo in one of the local groups who can produce something like 1000 words in ten minutes – she literally sounds like a machine gun when she’s typing (I was at a write-in once where I experienced that live. It was impressive).

Now, all of that stuff is fun. It’s all good. We’ve named our Camp NaNoWriMo cabin the Word Count Slayers (you can follow us on Twitter under that hashtag), because we’re gonna slay those word counts, dontcha know.

But… (you knew there was a “but” coming, didn’t you). Fast writing, writing in the pressure cooker, cranking out the lines, slapping together descriptions, slaying those word counts – do you hear the language? Pressure. Cranking. Slapping. Slaying. It’s all rather violent. What about growing, simmering, steeping, incubating?

I might have mentioned a time or two (hundred) that I like food. Scratch-cooked food. Homemade food. Slow food. A few months back, I was in the bookstore, and I ran across this book: The Art of Slow Writing: Reflections on Time, Craft and Creativity, by Louise DeSalvo. I don’t often buy books off the bookstore shelf sight unseen (I usually get them from the library first, and then if I like a book enough, buy a copy for keeps), but this one grabbed me. So I took it home, and (slowly) perused it. And it talks about Slow Writing on just the same principles as Slow Food. Let your work mature. Let it grow. Simmer it, steep it, let it ripen.

I loved it. I want to work on those principles. Not rush, not feel pressurised. And just now, in the rabbit trails of Internetland, I ran across this excellent little video that makes the point very, umm, pointedly. They did a little experiment with kids: they gave them the beginnings of a simple drawing and asked them to complete the picture in ten seconds. Then they did it again, but this time they gave the kids ten minutes to finish the drawing. The results are well worth looking at.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPbjSnZnWP0]

Don’t rush the creative process. Give yourself the time to turn those clock hands into something more, maybe even something entirely different. My favourite of those drawings in the video is the one that turns the rudimentary clock into a cat. Forget the ticking timekeeper, get a kitty instead!

Now, I still love NaNo, and I’ll remain a die-hard Wrimo. You’ll note that when the kids in the video had ten seconds to do something, they did produce – they all had a drawing in the end. Time-pressured projects like NaNo are great for getting your butt moving, getting something down on paper (or screen, as it were), doing your first draft – and some of us (ahem, Yours Truly) need that motivation to get anything done. But when the kids had ten minutes, they drew something better. And so I want to learn to draw slowly, to let my stories simmer, let them grow and solidify, and not subscribe to the rush job that, it seems, everything and everyone wants to push us into. I want to subscribe to the Art of Slow Writing.

And just as a little side note, right at the moment that I’m writing this, I have a meatloaf in the slow cooker upstairs that’s been simmering away since 9 o’clock this morning. The kitchen smells delicious.

Life, the Universe, and the Art of Slow Writing. What project have you got simmering away in your creative slow cooker?

Zootopia and The Power of Story

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWM0ct-OLsM]
I’ve been thinking about the importance of Story again. My friend E. L. Bates recently posted the transcript of a talk she gave at her local library on that topic (read the full thing here, it’s well worth it). “This is what stories do,” she says, “they sink into our hearts and give us the tools we need to live more fully, more richly, in the everyday world around us.” Yes, exactly.

Last weekend, we went to see the new Disney movie, Zootopia. I’d heard that it was good, so while I wasn’t expecting any great profundity of the flick (it’s a Disney talking-animal movie, after all), I went into it hoping to be amused for a couple of hours and not have too many groaner moments. And those hopes weren’t disappointed.

But what bowled me over was the message of the film. That’s right, a Disney talking-animal flick with a message that I actually found really meaningful. And not the standard follow-your-heart-you-can-be-anything-you-want-to-be one, either (which nowadays just causes an eye-roll reflex in me, but that’s a rant for another day). Now, I don’t want to give any spoilers, the movie still being as new as it is. But what I found astounding is that the makers of Zootopia, who have been working on this movie for, I dunno, years, put out a film that hits right smack-dab at the bull’s eye of the current social issues. It’s as if they’d had a premonition of what the political and social climate of March of 2016 was going to be like, and they set out to tell a story that makes its point far more effectively than any sermon or political rant could do.

And that’s something I found profoundly encouraging. Because, you see, young children aren’t going to go to political rallies. And, let’s face it, most of their parents and grandparents won’t, either. But they’ll go to this movie, because it’s Junior’s birthday and you’ve got to do something with that horde of little hoodlums he’s insisted on inviting. So you take them to the movies to see the story of a perky little bunny rabbit from the country who wants to be a big-city cop, and hope that her and her sly-fox sidekick’s adventure will keep the kids quiet for a couple of hours. And in the process, Junior, his friends, and Mommy, Daddy and Grandma, without even noticing it, are being taught some lessons that couldn’t be more important in this moment in history, lessons about the insidiousness of fear and prejudice and of the power of acceptance.

But let me quote E. L. Bates again: “But [the stories] are not instruction manuals thinly disguised as entertainment! Perish the thought! If you set out, in writing a story, to point a moral or teach people something, you have failed before you’ve even begun.” In the case of Zootopia, Disney most certainly did not fail. It’s a well-told story in its own right, full of endearing characters that will enter the Disney canon, with great animation and jokes (including quite a few that will zip right over Junior’s head, but provide Mom & Dad with a good chuckle – including the teensy little Mafioso shrew with his nasal Godfather drawl). We’ll keep watching this film for decades to come for its story, because it’s a good movie – and in the process, its profound message is going to be absorbed into our collective psyche.

The pen (or in this case, film camera) is mightier than the sword – and that is something that can give us all hope.

Life, the Universe, and Zootopia. Story wins again.