novel

Ready… Set… Write!

Okay, so this post might just have the single most corny title I’ve ever written. I hope you’ll all forgive me for it, because it’s actually reflecting what my feeling has been since this morning.

NaNoWriMo is starting tomorrow – so one minute after midnight, I am going to start writing, and hopefully get to my entire word count before going to bed. This is the second year I’m participating in NaNoWriMo,while last year I was living at home, someone else was doing my laundry, and I had very little that I needed to do besides write, this year I have so much to do that the 1667 words I need to write a day seem extremely daunting and threatening.

Unlike last year, I haven’t created an outline for my novel. I have a cast of characters, and I know, in general, what I want them to deal with. I know some of their motives, some of their histories, some of their attitudes and voices, and that’s helpful, but I don’t know where I want them all to end up, so I’m very unclear about where they’re going exactly. But that’s exciting – writing is, for me, a lot like reading in that I discover things along the way.

I’m writing literary fiction this year rather than steampunk/fantasy, so that’s going to be very different as well, since I feel that I write the genres quite differently.

It also happens to be Halloween today. I didn’t dress up as anything, and I probably won’t, since I feel like I’m storing up all my creativity for 00:01AM tonight when I start writing. I really feel like I’ve spent the past couple weeks crouching low, ready for the gunshot that will announce that the race is on. It’s strange.

Finally, let me end this extremely disorganized and badly composed post by saying that I will probably be posting to my blog less in the coming month because of NaNoWriMo. However, I succeeded in posting every single day of October! Huzzah!

Life?

I’ve been bad. I knew it would happen, and here – it has. Neglect has set in once more. And I was doing so well! I was posting every day, in the morning, even while I was in Vancouver! Oh, well. So it goes. Life happens. I know I shouldn’t beat myself up about it (but, well, it’s me, so I’m going to – but I needn’t subject my readers to my self-flagellation!)

Back on my beautiful campus, the past three weeks have been a whirlwind of activity, moodiness, and more activity.  Here’s some of what I’ve been up to:

1) Classes:

-The Nineteenth Century Novel: for all you readers out there, doesn’t this sound exciting?! It is! The professor is perhaps the oldest on campus and gets tired rather quickly, but he has amazing insight and is still passionate about what we read. So far, we’ve read Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Talk about incredible syllabus. I’ve also been reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky for the independent-study portion of this class. I’ve yet to make up my mind as to whether I like it or not.

-The Talking Cure: my very first psych-course ever, this lecture is turning out to be fantastic. There’s a lot of intricate reading, but it’s fascinating. I’ve been spending a lot of my out-of-class time discussing what I’ve been learning in this class. This is one of the things I love about college – these kinds of conversations are fun and mutual.

-Writing Workshop: I’m writing short stories for the first time in my life. I’ve been known to post some lengthier things here, in installments, but none have ever been very satisfying to me. A couple had resolutions, sure, but mostly I seem to know how to end very short pieces with a punch. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but it’s interesting to be in a class that is solely for the purpose of writing short stories: our teacher is a meticulous reader and reads every workshop submission twice which is why he won’t accept novels. The experience of writing a short story is interesting and, to me, vastly different than that of writing a novel.

2) Book club: Two friends and I have started a weekly meeting in one of the coziest spaces on our campus and we invite people to come and read with us. For fun. Because we all have lots and lots AND LOTS of reading for classes, but we all miss reading for pleasure. Our book club was started so that we would have prescribed weekly time to just read for fun. We’ve had two meetings so far, and it’s been extremely fun.

3) Drama: No, not the kind of drama you’re thinking of! Thank goodness. There is drama on campus, of course; it’s inevitable, in such a small school or, indeed, anywhere. But I’ve been making sure not to involve myself actively in any of it. No, the drama I mean is my acting-for-fun impulse. I’ve been in our weekly cabaret/sketch style show, and have also been chosen to play Frank N’ Furter in our shadowcast production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show that will be happening a couple days before Halloween. This is my dream role, and I can’t describe the absolute astonishment I felt for being picked out to play the wonderful character. Lots of fishnet tights are in my near future.

Alrighty. Now I’m kind of all caught up. I need to catch up with all my bloggy-friends’ blogs. I miss reading them, and I’ve been trying not to fall too far behind on anyone, but I’m probably failing miserably. I will do my very best to begin posting regularly again and not to be a stranger to y’all.

Happy Thursday!

Meta-Weather

Loraine hated it when the weather reflected her emotions. It seemed so fake, as if she were a character in a carefully crafted novel. When she cried while it was raining, she’d try to stop and be cheerful. When it was sunny, she felt a strange obligation to be sad, or at least neutral.

The worst, though, was feeling buffeted and confused when it was windy. When she looked outside on Sunday morning and saw the branches blowing every which way, she felt immediately frustrated, which only added another unpleasant layer to her already bewildered state.

She wondered if she should just stay in. She had obligations to fulfill, people to see, things to do, but none of it was so important that it couldn’t be postponed. She could let herself sink into a good book or dance in her room while listening to music, both activities that would take her away from the world and the decisions she had to make. Then the wind wouldn’t count, because she’d be distracting herself from the thoughts that were fluttering from one end of her mind to the other like the leaves in the parking lot underneath her window.

But what if it was windy tomorrow, too? She supposed she couldn’t run away from her feelings forever. She was stronger than that. She might not know what she wanted, but she knew that much at least.

Feeling like a cliché, Loraine left her apartment and locked the door behind her, hoping that her life wasn’t actually a piece of fiction in which a writer forcibly gave her emotions the weather to match.

Finished?

I think I might have finished the first draft of my current work-in-progress. I know that it could go on forever in some ways, but I feel like my characters are saying that this is it, it’s enough, it’s the slice of life they wanted told and they don’t need me anymore to keep on living their lives.

This is extremely scary, because I’m going to be embarking on my first second draft now. I don’t even know where to begin. If anyone has any tips for me, I’d be grateful.

I’m feeling overwhelmed. I finished yesterday, but today I’m beginning to really understand the meaning of having finished the first draft. I feel a little bereft, a little lonely, but also gratified and fulfilled. The human capacity for emotion is a strange thing indeed.

A Pleasant Surprise – A Writer’s Tale

I tell people that I write. Because I do. But I have a hard time calling myself a writer. I wouldn’t dream of telling anyone I was an author, either, even though I’m working on my third novel right now.

However, I just had one of the coolest writing experiences I’ve ever had, and one which I’m eager to remember in years to come. Which is why I’m writing a second blog post today, something I rarely, if ever, do. Ready? My tale might not be exciting to anyone who isn’t me, but here goes.

My current work in progress includes some six main characters. I wrote the first ten pages of it about a year ago, in this blog in fact [if you’re interested, search for “Mr. and Mrs. Adams,” “Amanda,” and “Heather.”] During my semester at Sarah Lawrence this year, I took a writing class, and began to write this novel in earnest.

About five months ago, I wrote a scene in which Amanda, one of my characters, is drunk and having a breakdown of sorts. She has never been drunk before, is introverted, is scared of her own passions and hides behind her instincts as a caregiver much of the time. As the listener, she can remain safe and closed off while still maintaining meaningful relationships with people she cares about.

Now, this scene I wrote so many months ago was, I knew, going to fit in only towards the very end of the novel. I haven’t looked at the scene in months, waiting for the right time to go back to it and insert it where I wanted it to go. The day before yesterday, I was writing the scene that I knew would directly precede it, in which Amanda’s friend makes her a drink, and Amanda, for the first time ever, decides to be reckless and takes it.

In the scene I wrote the other day, I had her friend making her a White Russian. The next scene I wrote was about other characters. Today, I wanted to put in the scene I’d written all those months ago, and so I scrolled to the very bottom of my file to reread it and see what I was going to have to change. And here’s the kicker. I’d written there that Amanda was drunk on “milky White Russians.”

!!!

I had NO IDEA that I’d specified in that scene what she’d been drinking! I didn’t remember AT ALL that I’d already had the idea of what I wanted her to be drunk on! When I’d written the scene a couple days ago, I’d decided to go for White Russians because I thought it was the kind of yummy alcoholic drink that her friend would mix in order to lure Amanda into drinking!

But it seems that Amanda told me ages ago that she wanted her first experience with alcohol to be with this particular drink. It seems that even her friend, a relatively minor side-character, knew in February already that she was going to make Amanda a White Russian for her first alcoholic beverage. It seems that I know my characters even better than I thought, or else that they’ve been driving me to write what they feel is the truth for them.

So. Maybe not the most exciting tale for anyone who hasn’t had the experience of their writing taking on a life of its own. But let me tell you, I’m going to be grinning about this revelation all day long.

EDIT: Another thing – in this same scene, written months ago, I’d mentioned homesickness for her mother. In a scene I wrote about a week ago, Amanda was missing her father and feeling homesick. So yeah, I think Amanda is really quite alive in my mind. Which is exciting.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

I’m currently reading “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams, and finally enjoying it as it is meant to be enjoyed. For some reason, I’d started this book twice before and didn’t manage to get through it. Why this was so is mysterious to me because a) I rarely have trouble getting through books and b) it is very readable and hilarious and I have no idea why I ever set it down before.
Now, the whole bit about the Ultimate Question – to anyone who hasn’t read the book, this is a mysterious question about Life, the Universe and Everything – is brilliant, because we never actually know what the question is, although we’re told that the answer is “forty-two.” Why do I think this is brilliant? Because I think that actually both the question and the answer are absolutely useless.
I’ve never really pondered “the meaning of life,” or I haven’t phrased it in that way at least. Sure, I wonder often enough about my own life and the lives of my friends and loved ones, but ultimately, I really don’t think that we each have a single, all-consuming purpose in life, nor do we need an all-encompassing meaning.
No, I believe that life is a series of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and others, and the only meaning that really matters is that which we give it – one day, it might be the delicious taste of a square of bitter chocolate after a long shift at work, and another it might be the intensity of love that pours out of us as we watch a loved one die in the hospital.
Life is fluid, the Universe is unfathomable, and Everything is what we make of it.

Sugar-Coated

Words on paper; black words on white paper, to be exact. Words, formed of letters, each individually meaningless shape coming together with others to create forms that the eye, or maybe the brain behind it, recognizes and understands. Words, meaningless things, really, when you get right down to it. Words are used to express every trite emotion in the book, every cliche of humanity. Words are nothing more than sounds rolling off the tongue, sticking between the teeth like bits of food that weren’t brushed out properly. Words are like phlegm, coming up the inner-tubing of the body and coughed out messily, loudly, sometimes violently. Words are just like any other bodily function – they serve their purpose, but they’re not to be discussed, not to be praised, not to be loved.

Of course, it isn’t so. If words are like food, they’re like the richest dessert, the most delicious cream-filled, frosted and glazed piece of chocolate cake that ever touched your pallet. If words are like bodily functions, then they’re like the satisfaction of a wide yawn, the comfort of a stretched muscle, the lulling sound of the pulse beating softly in the ears. If words are nothing more than sounds, then they’re like the sweetest music, the most poignant, the most touching of all pieces ever composed by man.

Words are never simply anything. They’re never simply, for they’re never simple. Words are mazes, sentences are labyrinths, paragraphs are cities and pages are countries – novels are entire universes, poetry galaxies.

In the wrong hands words can be dangerous. In the right ones, they can save lives. Falling from the right pens, words can change the world. Dripping from those poisonous ones they can destroy it.

Words on paper. Simply words, or rather words, complicatedly.

Five Words

I’m currently reading Stephen Fry’s Moab is My Washpot, which is the first part of his autobiography. I have admired Mr. Fry for some years now as an actor and writer, and I fell more deeply in awe of him when I listened to the Harry Potter audiobooks that he narrates because of his incredible range of voices, accents and tones. His regular speaking voice is, in itself, impressive as well.

What strikes me most about him when reading his autobiography is his love of language. He loves words for the sheer look of them, the sound they make, the way the tongue feels as it moves to create a consonant in the mouth. Inspired by him, I spent an hour happily reading aloud the titles of books I was vacuuming dust off of – I especially enjoyed titles like The World According to Garp, Smiley’s People, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas because of “Garp,” “People,” and “Vegas,” all words that are fun to say. Go ahead, try them out.

The second thing that Mr. Fry has inspired me to do is read the dictionary. I know, aren’t I exciting? But seriously, I look up words online more often than not, and I never get to see an odd word or two that way. So, in order to kick-start myself, I’ve decided to find five new (to me, that is) words in my big copy of the OED, and use them in sentences:

1. Stephen Fry didn’t suffer from dyslalia when he was young, because there was nothing wrong with his speech organs – he eventually learned to articulate his speech properly so that others could understand him.

2. There was a point in time when I thought my eating disorder was insuperable, but I’m doing much better now.

3. Many politicians are perfidious.

4. The gems in animated films are always so exaggeratedly rutilant. I doubt that real precious stones are every quite so twinkly and red.

5. On the road to Jerusalem, there’s one clough that always reminds me of the valleys by my grandparents’ house in Los Angeles.

___

And that, boys and girls, was probably enough of that for now.

I’m Back

So. Here’s what needs to be said:

1. I’ve been writing like a fiend. I’ve completed my second novel, entitled (rather lamely,) The Empress’ Assassin. I don’t know if it’s any good.

2. I’ve missed writing on this blog more than I can say. Especially lately. Now that November is over, I’m back for good. Since I don’t have a current work-in-progress, I’m going to spend all my writing time on publishing stuff here.

3. I still – STILL! – don’t know whether or not my college will allow me back in the upcoming semester. I’m truly disappointed with the way they’ve handled the whole situation. If it weren’t for the fact that Sarah Lawrence College has incredible teachers and an amazing set of intelligent students, I would seriously consider trying to get into one of the many other schools that accepted me. Can you tell that I’m resentful? Hmph.

4. Sadly, I won’t reach my goal of reading 144 books in a year. I’m only on book #116 now, and it’s December 1st already. Still, for the first year ever I’ve kept a reading list, which I’ll publish on December 31st.

5. I’m vacuuming all the books in my house. Yes, I know, this is insane, but they’re all incredibly dusty and the shelves ought to be cleaned properly. I’ve started in my room, and have rediscovered scores of old children’s books. I found my beautiful illustrated Cinderella and Snow-White, all my lovely Patricia Polacco books, my Dr. Seuss and Charles Schulz… I could go on endlessly.

6. I just finished rereading A Little Princess, one of my favorite books ever. Strangely, I started reading Vanity Fair today and found curious similarities. Then again, as my wonderful mother pointed out, private boarding schools were the popular and proper education in England for quite a long period of time, so maybe it’s not so odd.

7. I actually have nothing further to say right now, so in lieu of actual information, this seventh item on my silly list will simply bid you all a lovely Wednesday!

NaNoWriMo Crazy

Hello blog! You look dusty, poor thing. I haven’t been taking good care of you lately, and you deserve to get more attention from me, poor thing. But please, don’t be mad, I’ve just gone a little NaNoWriMo crazy lately! Word count: 16,259, not including what I’ve written so far today.

Ahem. Yes. Sorry, everyone, for being so absent lately! I really do miss all your lovely blogs and I’ll try to check them out over the next couple of days. I’m more than meeting my daily word-count so I’m a few days ahead of schedule on my November novel, so I think I can take the time to be around more often. I’ll try, anyway!

Other than writing for two hours daily since November 1st, I haven’t got anything new to tell. I’m thrilled about my writing, because this is the first time that I’ve worked from any sort of outline and I’m enjoying it. I also am really very happy to finally be writing properly again, every day and without feeling as if it’s homework.

So yeah, I know this is a super-lame update… but at least I’m here, and I hope I’ll come back more often (during November, that is – after that things should be back to normal hopefully).