Month: February 2014

fiction writing longer stories short stories

8859 words [or] where’s my faerie story at #2?

By on Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Today, from nine until noon, I typed up whatever was left in my notebook, all 8859 words. So End of Book One Rough Draft Number One completed.

I still don’t know what to do next or how to resolve anything. If I can find 128 pages (actually half that, I can print on both sides), maybe I’ll print it out and get some input from Geoff. He sort of said he’d look at it, but he was also really sick and would have probably agreed to anything if it meant I was going to leave him alone at that exact second. But what better way to recuperate than to read a shitty first draft of your wife’s first attempt at writing a fantasy story. That sounds like it will be great for all those involved.

My wrists, neck, and back, are aching. And I have chores to do. And my tax refund was paltry this year since I earned almost no money (I did get back the $500 I paid in taxes this year though). Waah waah waah me.

I think all March I’ll just write short stories and feel good about accomplishing things.

Continue Reading
0
fiction writing longer stories

where’s my faerie story at?

By on Monday, February 24, 2014

A: At a crossroads.

Today I finished writing (in longhand in my ideally sized Dollarama notebooks – dear G-d, what will I do if Dollarama stops stocking these sizes of notebooks? They already raised the price on them from $1.50 to $2.00; what if they become too expensive for Dollarama to produce? What if an emerging worker class in China demands better conditions in their Dollarama factories causing the whole Dollarama empire to collapse and I lose my notebooks for the good of humanity overall?) everything I had written down to do in my previous plan. It left me at what I think of in my head as the End of Book One.

Except now I am starting to realize that to have an End of Book One, one needs to have, at least, a Beginning of Book Two, followed by a Middle of Book Two, and, ideally, an End of Book Two. So now I’m wondering if instead there is some neat-o way I can spend another ten thousand words and wrap everything up instead. You know, if I could figure out a neat-o way to spend another ten thousand words and wrap everything up. My plan only got me to the End of Book One and now I’m stumped. I don’t know if I have the fantasy-world chops to go into the world of the faeries; I’ve sort of stayed near the surface but kept us here in my thinly veiled Maritime small town and put faeries there. Maybe now I have to put my thinly veiled Maritime town in the faerie world instead?

I have to type up what’s left in my notebook, probably about five thousand more words. Then I have to get an idea. Or not. I could just abandon this and go do something else and hope, left in the recesses of my mind, a Beginning of Book Two somehow presents itself to me in that hazy area between being asleep and waking up.

I also hate typing. My notebook is just sitting next to me, laughing at all the words I have to get from it and onto my computer. Maybe I’ll look into some sort of voice transcribing software. Anything to mean I don’t have to spend the next two days bribing and tricking myself into typing something up.

Continue Reading
0
books fiction writing

where are all these words coming from

By on Tuesday, February 18, 2014

A few months ago I read about the Portuguese word saudade. Wikipedia tells you the word means a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing may never return.

That’s pretty awesome, I thought to myself. Why don’t more people know that word?

Except now that in the last ten or so books I’ve read, saudade has been in five or so of them. Clearly I missed the message that saudade was the it word I was supposed to be using.

Then in Kristen Lavrandsdatter, which didn’t have the word saudade in it, although who knows, perhaps the newer translation does, I learned the word rime, which living in the horrible northern part of the world where I am confident that winter will never end this year and we will be frozen forever, is strange that I didn’t learn this word until now. Wikipedia tells you the word means a white ice that forms when the water droplets in fog freeze to the outer surfaces of objects. It is often seen on trees atop mountains and ridges in winter, when low-hanging clouds cause freezing fog. This fog freezes to the windward (wind-facing) side of tree branches, buildings, or any other solid objects, usually with high wind velocities and air temperatures between −2 and −8 °C (28.4 and 17.6 °F). Another useful word, which, since January, has appeared in four books I’ve read. So I guess I’m expanding my vocabulary.

Then it’s starting to become one of those Reader’s Digest Improve Your Wordpower or whatever that thing is called. I have a friend, for whom English is her third language, but due to spending a lot of time with a dictionary, knows a lot of more obscure or archaic words, which she often puts into conversation to the befuddlement of native English speakers, and I think of her as I am reading The Mask Game, which is not particularly appealing to most people, including myself, and it seems the same thing. The non-English author has an amazing vocabulary, possibly due to dictionary diving, and I look up a word every few pages or so. Some are scientific words, some are possibly made up because they aren’t in my kobo dictionary, some may be transliterated directly from Ukrainian or Russian. This book is long and has aliens in it and ghosts and an inability to pick a verb tense, which I am going to say is not on purpose but due to less-than-stellar copy-editing. I didn’t think this book would be this long, and the claim that it was all done with automatic writing, which Wikipedia tells you is an alleged psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without physically writing. The words are claimed to arise from a subconscious, spiritual or supernatural source, which seems grossly unfair in that if I could outsource my writing to the spirit world, I would too (and I’m writing a story about faeries right now, so any faeries are welcome to apply), but instead, I’m stuck using my own hands and my own ideas to make stories that don’t use as advanced a vocabulary and are unfinished because of Tesfa snow days and the fact that I write slowly and the fact that I spend most of my time thinking about things that are not useful for writing.

So all the things I don’t know.

Continue Reading
0
fiction writing

walking cliches

By on Wednesday, February 12, 2014

The accent in cliché is there in spirit – I still don’t know how to put accents in titles in wordpress.

Yesterday on Rebecca Rosenblum’s site (she who wrote Once which was one of the very first books I took out of the library when I moved here to New Brunswick, a book full of stories of people riding on buses and going to Vietnamese restaurants but thin and light and beautiful all at once), she wrote about character hacks, the first three, I realise now that someone else has written them out, are omnipresent in my faerie story.

I need to find someone who writes a list of all the things I am doing in my faerie story (or Come From Away or really anything that I am writing) that are awesome to counterpoint and make me feel warm and squishy inside. Plus faerie story is at a sad part now where sad things are happening. I’m going to go back to my already-typed parts where things are just odd rather than sad and go play around in there for a while instead.

Continue Reading
0
fiction writing

what I’m doing

By on Tuesday, February 11, 2014

I haven’t been that good updating here lately, but, at the same time, nothing of great fiction import is happening. I write my faerie story some days. Other days I type my faerie story. Today I worked on Come From Away and it made me sad because there is a great story there, but it’s trapped and for all my trying to get it to come out and the fiction course I’m going over it in, I have no idea how to free the great story trapped inside. I’ve been putting off submitting the next section to my mentor, where one of the protagonists starts to fracture, because I know it won’t go over well and I just can’t afford not going over well with this story any longer.

Geoff just came to ask me if it’s my story that’s a problem or my course. They are intertwined. You can’t untie them back into separate threads. For the rest of its life, my story and this course are the same thing, the feeling of wastefulness that maybe I should just quit. Sometimes I think my mentor wants to say Don’t quit your day job. Too bad. Day job already quit.

No new stories accepted for publication. Not a lot of calls out lately either that I could finesse my stories into being good fits for. I did write a short-short (1200 words) story last week as a procrastination tool about a building in Calgary, I think it was 121 14 St NW, that used to have a sign etched in glass on one of the doors saying Philosopher, which I guess meant you could make an appointment and talk to a philosopher about your problems. I can’t tell if it still says that on the door via google maps. I also don’t know if it’s the right building. There’s a slew of such buildings along that part of 14 St NW in Calgary. It might be another one of those sixties style squat brick buildings. I can’t remember.

Geoff, home because of the strike, so I have incentive to work so he doesn’t think I am lazy. I’m coming near the end of my faerie story planning, which means new faerie story planning. I tried to pay my gas bill but the internet has died. It may be hours from when I write this post to when I post it if the internet doesn’t come back. You will have to wait and see.

Continue Reading
0
fiction writing

I made a plan

By on Monday, February 3, 2014

Ten days ago, I sat down and made a plan for the rest of my faerie story since my current plan of Whenever there is an issue, I’ll just say magic and pretend it isn’t an issue at all wasn’t working as well as I had hoped. I made a plan to the next sticking point, which could also be a good stopping point for making this into more than one story (trilogy for three, I don’t know what the word is for two, doubligy? It is not very likely I can stretch this story further than two books, but I don’t know an appropriate word for a two-book series. It’s probably obvious and I’ve just gotten stupider and forgotten it).

I used to never bother with plans for stories. I am not a very good planner when it comes to writing. For short stories, this works out well. I usually have only one thing: a sentence or a thought or a picture and that’s enough to get 2500 words out and it all works it’s way out along the way. Usually, the times I do try to plan a short story, it doesn’t work and the characters all revolt and go off and do their own things, and then I get mad at myself for wasting time. But my faerie people have seemed to go along, following the master plan, so far. Maybe because I’ve been spending time with them on-and-off since April and they trust me. It lacks some spontaneity, but I’ve done work every day since making my plan, so I’ve got to give it that. Although I can hear my high school English teachers cackling in the background at me. All those years of having to hand in pre-essay outlines (that, of course I wrote up after I wrote my essay) have finally started to work.

So yay faerie story still in ascension as Come From Away descends some more. Tomorrow I’ll work on that instead and be miserable. But for today, magic wins.

Continue Reading
0