Tag: writing

NaNoWriMo is dead – Long Live NaNoWriMo!

If you’ve been around the writing circuit this year, you’ve probably heard about this: NaNoWriMo has imploded.
Back in April, NaNoWriMo.org, the worldwide organization that every year encouraged writers to spend the month of November in a mad dash towards completing a 50,000 word novel, was shut down. Gone. Kaputt.

I can’t say I’m not sad. Even just writing this brings up the sadness again. Because, you see, NaNo was such an important part of my life. Without NaNoWriMo, I would not be a writer. On November 1st, 2011, I sat down and typed “It was the blue bowl that started it all,” and on November 30th, I had written fifty thousand words and I had a novel. A novel that I didn’t know I had in me. A novel that became Seventh Son. A novel that made me able to call myself a writer.

I didn’t really engage in any of the NaNo activities that first year, but it was the organization of NaNoWriMo that kept me going, nonetheless. That year, they had little video clips on their website – I can’t remember how often they updated them; it seems that it was every day, or every weekday, although that seems like way too often. Maybe it was just once or twice a week. They started with a snappy tango tune – I can still hear it playing in the back of my head now (unfortunately I can’t find it on Youtube anywhere, or I’d inflict it on you) – and it also involved something with a dinosaur and a tacky plastic viking helmet (the helmet was plastic, not the viking). In my (admittedly somewhat hazy) memory, it seems that every day after I finished my writing, I’d log into the site and let myself get cheered up and cheered on by that bouncy tune. And then there was the hilarious Errol Elumir, a musician and writer from Toronto, who every day posted another instalment of his webcomic, Nanotoons; I think he and some friends even made a NaNoWriMo movie that year that they posted an episode of every week (if you know where to find it to watch it, let me know). So much fun, so much frenzy.

And then towards the very end of the month, I did go out for coffee with some other local Wrimos, and we celebrated our NaNo wins (or almost-wins; I think there were a few days left in the month). The next year, I was back. And I went to more of the coffee meetings, made friends with the local Wrimo crowd, and we wrote and grew together. A few years later, some of that same crowd decided to keep meeting year-round, and we started a writing critique group. It’s almost like the bulk of my writing life is due to NaNoWriMo.

And now that’s over. No more NaNoWriMo.

But then, I hadn’t actually written a “proper NaNo” in quite a few years anyway. NaNo had a system of volunteers called MLs, Municipal Liaisons (I never know how to spell that), who ran the local chapters. I was one of those people for a few years, and truth be told, I found it quite exhausting. In the years that I was an active ML, I didn’t get a single novel finished.

So by the time NaNoWriMo finally crumbled in 2024 (Happy 25th Anniversary…), I had lost steam. My love for NaNo was more nostalgia than anything else. I have half a dozen T-shirts and hoodies with the NaNo name on it and about as many posters lining my study walls, but the print on the T-shirts is flaking, and the NaNoWriMo logo on my favourite travel mug is almost entirely worn off.

I think there is something rather symbolic about that. Yes, NaNoWriMo was fantastic while it lasted. Just like my first NaNo hoodie, the big black one, that I bought myself in 2012 as a reward for finishing my novel. But the paint flaked off, and the cuffs are worn through. It’s time for something new.

And then I got to thinking. NaNoWriMo started in 1999, with a few crazy friends who decided to try to write a novel in one month. Yes, it grew from there, in leaps and bounds – soon there were thousands of participants, then hundreds of thousands; there was a fancy website, and it got fancier with every iteration; there were word count trackers and word sprinting software and forums and pep talks and badges and what-not and so on…

But, hold on, what was it really all about? It was about a few crazy friends who decided to write a novel in one month. That’s it. Chris Baty and his buddies, back in 1999, didn’t have any of that fancy stuff on that fancy website that is now defunct. They didn’t need that website, didn’t need the non-profit. Sure, it was great to have, but it wasn’t required. What mattered was DOING THE THING – writing that novel.

And that, folks, we can still do. Even if NaNoWriMo.org no longer exists, WE CAN STILL WRITE NOVELS. The whole process might even be better for being, well, simpler. More grassroots. More back-to-basics.

And you know what I just discovered, as in, ten minutes ago while I was writing this? I’m not the only one thinking this! I’m not alone in this novelling journey after all – THERE IS A NEW NANOWRIMO!!

It’s different, it’s not the same, it’s not even an actual organization. But it’s spearheaded by Chris Baty himself, with a whole team of veteran NaNo volunteers, and there is a website with resources, and a blog where people post cool stuff, and even a place where you can download web badges to splash around your social media sites. It’s called NaNo 2.0 (https://nano2.org/), and it looks amazing. Exactly what I was wishing for: a place to get back to the spirit of NaNoWriMo, the way it started out. Not one central “organization”, but a grassroots movement of people all over the world doing writerly things, in November, and supporting each other through it.

I’m so excited – I started this post feeling sad, mourning for the loss of NaNoWriMo. But NaNoWriMo isn’t gone, after all! It just looks different now. And, dare I say – maybe even better? NaNoWriMo is dead – long live NaNoWriMo!

I don’t know what I’ll do this November, if I’ll write a novel or not. But whatever it is, I’m looking forward to getting back into the novelling spirit.

Life, the Universe, and a NewNoWriMo. What about you – will you join the fun?

I Cooked a Simple Breakfast

“I cooked a simple breakfast of omelet and toast,” says the main character of a historic novel I recently read, in a throwaway half sentence. A simple breakfast. Of omelet and toast. In a cottage in the backwoods of Ireland, in 1911. Wait, simple?

Let’s break this down, shall we.

In order to make an omelet (or omelette, depending on where you live), you need to, of course, crack eggs, and… Hold on, back up.

I, too, had a simple breakfast this morning of eggs and fresh-baked bread (yes, I know! Just bear with me). At 8am, my breadmaker beeped, whereupon I dumped the loaf out of the bread pan and set it to cool on a rack. At around 8:30, I cracked an egg into a bowl, bunged a frying pan onto the stove, turned the knob to medium, melted a bit of butter in the pan, poured the egg into the pan, pushed it around with a spatula, then put it on a plate with the buttered end of the warm loaf of bread. I poured myself another cup of coffee from the coffeemaker, and voilà, my simple breakfast!

But with the MC of our story, oh dear me, no.

Yes, she also cracks eggs and slices bread. But before she does any of that, she has to make a fire. Probably on an open hearth, as this is a rural cottage in the woods—but we’ll be charitable and give her a closed stove (more on that in a minute).

So, making a fire. Probably raking out the ashes of last night’s fire, getting some kindling, hauling in (hopefully already chopped) wood, stacking the fire, setting it alight, waiting however long it takes for it to catch, then to sort of die down to something less than an enthusiastic flame… Truth be told, I’ve never actually cooked on a wood or coal stove, let alone an open fire, aside from roasting wieners or marshmallows on a stick (it’s on the things-to-learn list). But I’m pretty sure you can’t cook on a fire when you first set it alight, you have to let it establish itself. Especially when you want a sort of middling flame for your medium-hot pan, which you absolutely need for an omelet (the pan can’t be too hot—you don’t want to know how I know).

Okay, so now she’s waiting for the fire to get to cookable dimensions, which gives her time to work on her omelet. That’s not much different from what we do today—crack the eggs, beat them up with a fork, then… Is it a plain omelet? Or does it have cheese, and chopped onion, and maybe some chopped bell peppers or tomatoes or herbs…? All of which would need dicing, grating, otherwise preparing… Well, we’ll just go with a plain omelet, it’s easiest. So, beaten eggs are in a bowl, the fire is at a cookable state, you heat the pan to medium, melt the butter, pour egg into pan.

But then we get to the toast. Not just a slice of bread, toast. Which, in case you don’t know, is a slice of bread that’s toasted (you’re welcome). How does one make toast? Hang on, I can show you, I did a drawing (it was for a class):

That’s how you make toast, right? Every one of my classmates drew something almost exactly like this.

But our intrepid MC, she doesn’t have a toaster. No simply sticking your bread slice into an electric machine and pushing down a lever, to have a crispy golden brown slice pop up a few minutes later, steaming, for your delectation. So, again, I haven’t really made toast on an open fire myself, but I’ve burned marshmallows, so I know that they don’t work terribly well for toasting on an open flame. They want glowing coals. Which requires letting the fire burn down. And then you’re sitting there, patiently, with your item-to-be-toasted skewered on your toasting fork, and you carefully hold it to the heat source trying not to burn it (Whoosh! Marshmallow torch! Oops, sorry, that’s your modern Canadian campfire. Back to the topic—toasting bread on a breakfast fire). Which is not something you can do at the same time as carefully cooking an omelet, in an open pan, over that same fire, as you only have two hands.

And then—I did say we’d come back to the “closed stove” topic—our MC, after having consumed her simple breakfast, takes the leftovers and “tucks them in the oven” for her still-sleeping friends. That’s why she has to have a closed stove available to her. But woodfired ovens even in a woodstove are notoriously difficult to handle, from what I’ve read. They aren’t just on with a nice even heat like our electrical thingamagigs, they require fiddling with and knowing exactly what you’re doing, so you’re not burning one side of whatever-is-in-there and having the other side go cold.

Conversely, if our MC’s cottage-in-the-backwoods didn’t have a closed stove but an open fire and a separate oven, which is more likely for that time and place, that oven would be one of those stone or brick recesses in the wall with a door in front, like the one in Hansel and Gretel. That kind of oven you heat by building a big fire inside of it (that’s what the witch had Gretel do, intending to cook her), then when it’s at the right temperature, you rake out all the hot coals and quickly shove your bread (or witch) inside, clapping the door shut, to bake things in the residual heat being held by the thick stonework around it. All extremely time-consuming, not to mention highly skilled work.

In other words, very, very far from simple.

Okay, you’re probably tired of my ranting here. But you get the point: if you’re writing a historic novel, please think through what life “back then” was actually like. What’s “simple” now was actually very complex in times past. It took a huge amount of labour. Labour that, in most cases, was done by servants, or by your wife. And if you didn’t have servants or a wife, as is the case for the MC in this novel, you just didn’t have the things that took work. You made toast for a treat for Sunday afternoon tea, not for a quick, simple breakfast. You didn’t “tuck things in the oven”, you maybe put them “to simmer on the back of the hob” (which I’m not entirely sure of what that means, either, but have read about lots of times), and reserved the oven for baking once a week or so.

Today, I can have fresh-baked or toasted bread, scrambled eggs, and hot coffee for my breakfast, because I have an electric breadmaker, and a toaster, and an electric stove, and a coffee machine. I have electric servants. So for me, that kind of breakfast is simple. But in 1911, the terms “cooked” and “simple breakfast” did not belong in the same sentence.

It annoys me when today’s writers or readers completely disregard the amount of sheer labour that goes into having everyday creature comforts in the absence of the convenience that today’s electric and electronic machinery can give you. We disregard the work that people had to do in the past to get what we totally take for granted. We disregard the value of labour, and that means we disregard the value of the people who did that labour. “Simple” things actually take a lot of work. Let’s honour the people who did that work, shall we?

So next time you give your servantless MC in her historic-cottage-in-the-woods a “simple breakfast”, make it a (cold) slice of bread and hardboiled egg (cooked last night when she made dinner). I promise I won’t jump on you for it.

Life, the Universe, and Cooking a Simple Breakfast. I do like my electric servants.

PS: If you want to read more on this topic, check out my post on my visit to the Charles Dickens museum: “Dahl’s Chickens, or: Why They Needed Servants in Those Days”

PPS: I won’t tell you the title or author of the novel that I’m talking about here, because my rant only pertains to that one, tiny half-sentence. In all other respects it’s quite a good book, and I don’t want to spoil anyone’s enjoyment of it.

PPPS: I said I’d stop ranting, but, don’t even get me started on the labour of producing textile work and the authors that sneer at “homespun”… I know, I know, that’s a post for another day.

Happy SEVENTH SON Day!

Happy Tenth Birthday, Seventh Son! That’s right, it’s the tenth anniversary of the day I published my first book child. Ten years since I became a published author!

Hard to believe it’s been that long. But it must be, as the book got a number of younger siblings in the meantime – three more in the Septimus series, one fairy tale retelling (Martin Millerson), and two Christmas novellas. And there are others in the offing.

So, Seventh Son. Here’s what it’s about:

Cat was ordinary—until the day a blue bowl whirled her off to a magical medieval world…

Catriona, ex-librarian, dumped by her boyfriend, is just trying to restart her life when she gets sucked into and carried off by a blue pottery bowl. Suddenly thrown into a world where she can’t move for mysteries, how is this modern town girl going to cope alone in the woods with a comatose man and a muddy baby? And there’s that hint of something sinister…

That’s the book as it stands right now, and it’s still available as FREE EBOOK on Amazon and all your other favourite ebook sites! (At least it’d better be. On Amazon the book price sometimes snaps back to asking for money. If that’s the case, let me know and I’ll get them to fix it; but you can also go to Smashwords and download the free copy for your ereader – .mobi for Kindle, .epub for pretty much all other readers. Or contact me and I’ll send you a copy!)

And now for the big announcement: Seventh Son is getting a makeover! (The book, not the person – he’s fine as he is.) You see, in the ten years since I first published it – thirteen years since I wrote it – I’ve grown as a writer. And I’ve become an editor. So when I recently re-read the book with an editor’s eye, I realized that while I still really like the story, I could make it even better with a rewrite.

But don’t worry, the story itself won’t change! I’m just rewriting some of the language (giving it a stylistic edit, in editor’s terms). Sort of like those “digitally remastered” old movies – same movie, sharper image and brighter colours. And speaking of colours, I’m hoping to eventually put on a new cover, as well. While I love the covers that Steven Novak created for the series (he’s great, highly recommend), I want to change them to something that reflects the tone and genre of the books a little better. But when that happens I’ll let you know.

Meanwhile, I’m really enjoying hanging out with Cat and Guy and Bibby and all their friends again, right there at the beginning of their story. It was the blue bowl that started it all…

Life, the Universe, and Ten Years of Being an Author. Happy Birthday, Seventh Son!

Seventh Son‘s book birthday cake from its first birthday

#FridayFragment, 26.01.2024

“I’m not very good at that.”

“No,” said the expert, looking up from his close scrutiny of the issue. He raised the magnifying glass and peered through it at the spot on her chin. “No, you are not, are you.”

“On the other hand,” she said, trying not to feel like a lepidopterist’s specimen, “I’m also not very good at about a dozen other things. That ought to count for something, shouldn’t it?”

#FridayFragment, 1.12.2023

SPELLS

“Heddle,” she muttered. “Warp. Weft. Raddle. Warping board. Bobbin. Shuttle. Harness. Shed, reed, ratchet. Sett, castle, breast beam, cloth beam. Heddle, warp and weft.”

“Stop!” he shrieked. “Stop throwing curses at me! And put down that, that, that spell book!”

She glanced up at him with a mild, enquiring look, then closed the book in her lap with a finger pinched between its pages and turned it over to look at the spine.

In gold-imprinted letters it said THE BEGINNING WEAVER.

Why Story?

Reading Nook, 2022. Stoneware, 5x5x5″ (SOLD)

The world has become a bad place in the last few years. So many things are going wrong, so much strife, so much floods and fires and earthquakes and wars and rumours of wars.

But Story can set a counterpoint. Story allows us to escape the trap of perceived reality.

And that’s the key, isn’t it—perceived reality.

Story allows us to perceive a different reality. It lets us experience a different world, one in which plots resolve, problems come to a conclusion. Unlike the so-called real world, where everything is just a muddle, Story brings order to the world. As renowned folklorist Max Lüthi says*, the story world shows us not what could be, but what is.

Why do I tell Story? In order to create worlds and places for people to enter into, worlds of truth. Worlds of justice and joy. Worlds not without problems, but worlds where those problems can and will be resolved.

Story is not escapist in the sense of letting us run away from our problems. But is is escapist in the sense of setting us free from the confines of our perceived reality. It allows us to see the bigger picture, opens our eyes to what is actually there. Even when it is Story about ostensibly “unreal” things, about elves and fairies and little dwarfs under the mountain. Maybe especially then.

We need Story—the World needs Story. The world needs Story to make sense of itself, to keep from sinking into a morass of muddle and chaos.

And that is why I tell Story. Unabashedly and unapologetically, I tell stories of joy and pleasure and home and warmth and family, where tiny people live in tiny homes and big ones get whirled away into other worlds where they find belonging.

Because in entering into these worlds, entering into Story, we can step out of the bondage of perceived reality, and we can find what is really real.

The world needs Story. That is why.

[*Lüthi, The European Folktale: Form and Nature (Philadelphia: ISHI, 1982), p.89. I quoted the full piece in a post on my research blog some ten years ago, here.]

SO YOU WANT TO WRITE A BOOK? – The .pdf Download

“So You Want to Write a Book?” is now available, all six parts in one document, on the website to download as .pdf (here) – just in case you want to save it to your computer, or print it out or something, and peruse or re-peruse it at your leisure.

You’re welcome! Now go write that book.

SO YOU WANT TO WRITE A BOOK? Part 6: Living the Writer’s Life

[Cue sonorous voiceover] Previously on “So You Want to Write a Book?”: Part 1, How I got started; Part 2, Other Ways of Writing a Book; Part 3, WRITE THAT THING; Part 4, What next?; Part 5, Getting it out there. How I wrote my first book by just starting to write; how to plan a book step by step; how to actually write that book; how to edit it once it’s finished, and how to self-publish it.

an open notebook with a fountain pen and handwritten text

Part 6: What Else? – Living the Writer’s Life

So perhaps, this whole thing of writing a whole, big, fat novel is overwhelming at this point. “I’d like to,” you say, “but right now all that stuff you talked about, with outlining and writing and editing and what-not, that’s just too much.” But this “writing” thing still tugs at you…

Or you’ve gone and self-published that book of yours, the one that you’ve been dreaming of all your life. But by now the euphoria has worn off, and you don’t have another idea for another book. So you pack away your notebook and pen, you unplug your laptop, and you think, “Maybe this was a one-off…”

But hold on!

There’s so much more to being a writer than “just” writing a book.
Don’t get me wrong, writing a novel is fantastic. But it’s a big endeavour, like climbing a mountain. We don’t need to always be climbing mountains; going for a walk around the block is a perfectly valid use for our feet.

So what else could you do to live the Writer’s Life? There is lots you could do, of course, lots and lots. But let me just fish out two points, two that I’ve found valid and valuable:
1.) Small Steps, and
2.) Community.

Small Steps
I’m not going to climb a mountain anytime soon—I’m not terribly athletically inclined. But every so often I go for very short walks on my street. And by “very short” I mean, literally, ten minutes. I set the timer on my phone for five minutes, walk out the door, and when the timer goes off I turn on my heel and walk home again. Ten minutes, but I’ve walked! Outside, in the fresh air! That’s a win.
For me to do anything, it has to start with a ridiculously small step.
And it works for writing, too. Sometimes I set out to write what I call a Fragment, literally just a few lines. I’ve done it by the clock (that ten minute thing again), or by “so many lines”. I’ve set myself projects where for one month I would “do some writing” every day; as long as I put a few “writerly” words on the page, it counts (other than grocery lists, I mean). I don’t do it all the time—I go through phases with it, like with everything else. But when I do do it I enjoy it.
You might wonder what the point of that is—what’s a few lines, what’s a Fragment? You’ll never get a book out of doing that! How is that going to get you closer to your dream?
What it does is it keeps my writing muscles honed. It keeps me thinking of words to describe what I see, in real life or in my head (not infrequently one leads to the other). It keeps me in the writing groove. Most of my Fragments aren’t that spectacular, but sometimes, the little sliver of fiction that comes out of it is amusing enough that I’ve posted it here, under the tag #FridayFragment. It’s a win!

And that brings me to my other point:

Community
I enjoy sharing my #FridayFragments on this blog, because even those little slivers of fiction deserve an audience. And I love it when I get a reaction, when friends let me know they’ve responded to the little vignette I’ve drawn, when I get a (virtual) chuckle out of someone. When I’ve put my work out to my community.
The Writer’s life, like so many other creative pursuits, is a lonely life—I sit here at my computer, tapping away at the keys, all by myself… But really, I’m tied into a Writers’ Community out there. And I highly, highly recommend that. Writers’ groups, conferences, critique partners, local or regional writer’s guilds or federations or whatever they’re called, even writing events like NaNoWriMo—without them, I wouldn’t be where I am as a writer. One of the few silver linings of the Pandemic (ugh!) is that a lot of events went online, and many of them retained at least an online aspect even now. So even if you don’t have any in-person writers’ groups close to where you are, or you can’t easily leave the house, chances are there’s some online event or group you could join and make friends with other writers.
Having a community can be a tremendous boost to your writing. Knowing that my monthly Zoom group will start with a Round Robin where everyone answers the question “How’s your writing month been going?” gives me motivation to actually have “a writing month”, in other words, do at least a bit of writing work of some kind. NaNoWriMo wouldn’t be half as much fun without the community of all those other crazies who try this 50,000-words-in-a-month feat. And knowing that whatever I write, Louise Bates, my editor and critique partner extraordinaire, is waiting for it as eagerly as I am for her latest work, is a gift beyond value.
Oh, and one more thing: what I enjoy so much about some of the groups I’ve been in is that there are so many different types of writers. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, novels, experienced, brand-new—if you write anything other than grocery lists you’re welcome (and probably even those, if you do them with purpose). So don’t be shy about what “level” you’re at. If you want to write you’re a writer. Go find your tribe.

And then go write that book, or that other book, or that other other book. Or those short stories or poems or essays or fairy tales that you’ve got bubbling up inside you.

We’ll be here cheering you on.