In an attempt to have some pictures on my blog, I will endeavor to take shots of what I took out of the library this week. We’ll see how long I can keep this up.
Books:
I read the following books:
Best book: The Bean Trees. A friend lent this to me for reading material while I was waiting around. I have to send it back to her in the mail with a note on how much I really needed to read a book like this.
I watched:
I wrote: I finished a short story called BFF. I finished the big first proof-read of Come From Away. Geoff read it and declared it A-OK, best thing I’ve written. I’m head-working (i.e. having written anything down yet) on a story about going to a laundromat. I spent hours submitting stories to journals, contests, websites, etc.
And, big news, I got into the September 2013 start of Humber College’s Creative Writing by Correspondence Course, whose goal is to work on a book-length manuscript. I have my mentor assigned and everything. So, starting in September, I’ll be talking a lot about that.
The previous owners dug up a patch of grass in the backyard for a garden, then let it go to seed. Last Autumn, we dug it all up, then let it go to seed again. So now we are digging it up a second time and, as we clear spaces, planting in the newly revealed dirt. Currently we have planted green onions (are coming up), carrots (are coming up), lettuce (only planted today), cucumbers (I think this one is a failure because nothing), peppers (bought a plant which hasn’t died yet), and raspberries (ditto).
I have a callus on my palm from the little shovel to dig up the tall grass growing there. It hurts when I type and rest my hand on the ergonomic bit on the bottom of my ergonomic keyboard they don’t make anymore.
Last week I read Tenth of December and after all the great reviews (The Best Book You’ll Read This Year), I expected to be blown away. I expected that I would be buying this book for all my reading friends and talking about how much I loved it. I expected magnificientness. And is the book good: yes. Is it great? Maybe. Was it the best book I read this year? No (that’s probably a tie so far between HHhH and The Bean Trees, neither of which was published in 2013).
You know what short story book blew me away? What Boys Like by Amy Jones. After I finished Tenth of December, I sat thinking why don’t more people know What Boys Like? Those short stories are amazing. Then, amusingly, Salty Ink the next day talked about how amazing What Boys Like is. I follow Amy Jones on twitter. Her twitter personality was not what I expected, but that’s okay too.
So go read Tenth of December. Then go read What Boys Like, which is better.
I typed novella into a thesaurus and one of the synonyms was potboiler, which I like. Mmm, boiling a pot!
The sun is still too cold here for true laziness.
Another piece rejected, but this time with a nice, personalized rejection letter stating that my story made it through to the final round of editorial deliberations, but didn’t win the prize. This is better than two weeks ago’s generic rejection, but rejection still.
So, for April two yeses, and so far for May, two nos. In fiction land, batting 0% is actually a very positive score, but you know what would be far more awesome than 0%, that’s right, 100%. A girl’s got to dream.
And now I return to proof-reading.
I have wondered lately if I am living in a very quiet Scandinavian, possibly north German, film with very little dialogue and very little noise. In my backyard, I can listen for wind on grass and here each blade bend as it rushes through. Like an art-house movie walking from empty room to empty room, trailing my fingers behind on the wall as I go. I read a book on the back porch in the sunshine with no one around.
Lately, everything has been quieter.
In high school, I took a Writer’s Craft course in Grade Eleven. For each assignment, we had to submit massive amounts of pre-work, like detailed planning of plot points, character charts, at least three prior drafts, etc. The teacher maintained that one could not write a good story without doing all these things. Dutifully, because if there is one thing I am good at, it is following mindless rules, I did all her pre-work. A friend in the course did none. Said friend did better on every single assignment than me, even though that should have been impossible under the teacher’s rules.
So yes, high school is dumb.
But also, I jumped through all these hoops about How To Write A Story that felt unnatural to me and didn’t do well. I vowed not to do it again.
I mean, character sheets? That is not how I work. I usually only know as much about a character as is necessary and do not know things like what their favourite song was in high school, how many movies they watch a month, what colour socks they wear, unless it is somehow relevant. Planning out plot points? Here is how I write a story. I get an idea. Sometimes it is a large thought-out idea (the novella was the initial thought of comparing the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War to the Muhajideen of the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, plus pregnancy, yeah, don’t ask, and trust me, it isn’t working out so well), sometimes it is a few words (I really love the words Happy Valley-Goose Bay, and later found some things that fit into a story that I could call that). Then I write some scenes, usually dialogue, in my head when I can’t sleep. Then maybe a week or two later, I sit down and write start to finish in a notebook over a few days/weeks/months depending on the length. How I write from start to finish having not planned much out, I do not know. It just happens.
Last week, I found out I didn’t place in a writing contest. So, I never place in writing contests, so I should at least be used to it. But for this writing contest, there were all these helpful How To Write A Story hoops to jump through and I jumped through them and now I’m annoyed because I clearly did not learn my lesson the high school time and did it all again for no reward. So, yes, Einstein (literally), Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, this is me.
It would be nice to win a contest though.
So I have a lot of anger lately at a lot of people. Basically, that Killer’s song when they say don’t you put me on the backburner, that’s the anger I have. People not replying to emails, probably for valid reasons, but when I get an email from someone in which she complains about how much she hates it when no one replies to her emails, yet hasn’t replied in two weeks to the email I sent her, these are aspects of life that make me angry.
In my head, unable to sleep last night/this morning, I started writing about this. Of course, I’ll consolidate a bunch of people and make a lot of things up, but the story is worthless. What a passive-aggressive way to deal with being sad – I’ll write a nasty story about people I know to make myself feel better. I can’t do anything with a story like that. I’ll probably still write it though.