meghan rose

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

By meghan rose 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.

fiction writing longer stories

where’s my faerie story at?

By meghan rose 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.

books fiction writing

where are all these words coming from

By meghan rose 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.

fiction writing

walking cliches

By meghan rose 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.

fiction writing

what I’m doing

By meghan rose 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.

fiction writing

I made a plan

By meghan rose 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.

this month I ...

January 2014

By meghan rose on Friday, January 31, 2014

I read the following books:

Thoughts:

Bone and Bread: Ignoring the fact that I keep calling this book Bread and Bone, I feel angry about this book. Cheated. It’s so cluttered and so long that it obscures the potential for something so meaningful. It’s a beautiful two hundred page story somehow stretched out to five hundred. Uncertain, I guess. This book is uncertain as to how to shine brightly.

Kristin Lavrandatter: Discussed here.

Choose Me: Discussed here.

Night Film: Why did I read this? I didn’t particularly enjoy Special Topics in Calamity Physics and horror books/movies/etc. are almost always a letdown in the dénouement, and the italics, oh god the italics. But I read it because I couldn’t believe it wouldn’t be great and then when it wasn’t great, I felt dumb for wasting my Saturday afternoon in bed reading it.

The Hundred Foot Journey: One of those books with no conflict or antagonism, just going forward in a twee-like fashion. I don’t like books like that. Maybe it’s jealousy because nothing I write is warm or happy and the warm and happy books I do end up reading are always bestsellers being turned into a movie, whereas nothing I write will likely ever be turned into anything else.

How Should A Person Be: There is really only one thing worth taking away from this book, something I will remember to tell Tesfa when she is older (adjusted for sexual attraction if necessary), which is never be with a man who wants to teach you something. I did grow to care about the characters by the end, but basically, 90% of the time, I was just angry with this sort of shitty book.

Best book:

I still love this book. It’s a pretty odd children’s book and dated, but my love for it is endless.

Most promising book I put on my wishlist:

Is it cheating if I put on a book I’ve already read? I read this book over and over again when I was about ten or eleven years old, but forgot what it was called. I spent a morning last week thinking about it, long and hard, searching through librarything and goodreads and amazon, cross-referencing with other memories of who could have written it (for a long time I thought Judy Blume), then remembering I had a copy of A Royal Pain on my bookshelf and that I had read all the Ellen Conford I could check out of the library after that. And it is – it is an Ellen Conford novel, not Judy Blume. The book isn’t in the New Brunswick Library System, and I am anti-buying things right now, but if I find it somewhere, in the used bookstore on Bridge Street or the Frenchy’s next time we go, I’m going to buy it.

I watched:

Thoughts:

The Station Agent: Why can I tolerate, even dare I say, enjoy heartwarming movies like this one, yet when faced with a heartwarming book, often chosen for my bookclub, I get disgusted at the thought and end up having to force myself to read it? A mystery meghan puzzle I suppose. Also, I think I’m a little bit in love with Bobby Cannavale now.

Despicable Me: Watched from (Canadian) Netflix while Tesfa was sick. I don’t know what I was expecting, except to say, I was expecting more. The movie isn’t bad, but it isn’t anything other than inoffensive, and even then, can I say that? What’s with the huge NBC product placements? Like for MSNBC – kids aren’t going to watch this movie and suddenly think Maybe I should be getting my news from a left-leaning all-news station like MSNBC, adults aren’t going to be like Well, if they’re advertising in the movie I brought my kid to see, I better go home and make sure to watch MSNBC all the time now. So I don’t understand. Tesfa slept through most of it too, so I can’t get her opinion to share either.

30 Rock: There are many things I like about this show, the number one being the uptempo jazz music as Netflix subtitles call it of the opening and I like Liz Lemon has some of the laziness I recognize in myself. But I am weary of everyone constantly commenting on how unattractive and fat Liz Lemon is. There’s a scene in the last episode I watched where Tina Fey is facing the Jane Krakowski and Tina Fey actually seems far skinnier. I don’t like the constant product placement. And I don’t like how Frank is in the opening credits but not Twofer or Cerie. And I don’t like how the other female staff writer (the one with frizzy, dirty blonde hair) doesn’t even have a name. I don’t like how tokenistic the inclusions of race and feminism are, just enough that I’m supposed to feel, I guess, appeased. I don’t want to feel appeased. I want to feel intelligent and not just like Here’s the bare minimum so you don’t complain. But the upbeat jazzy music! How can I stop?

I wrote: Same as always – time split between Come From Away for my course and my faerie story for my sanity.

And I’ve been put up by a journal to win the Journey Prize. I don’t anticipate getting past the first round, since this is my first time, but I’m still tickled to be considered.

books

shoutout to my favourite girl power kids website

By meghan rose on Friday, January 24, 2014

So this is totally 100% unsolicited and because I love them so much: A Mighty Girl. Whenever I can’t think of a good book to read Tesfa, I go to their website and search around. We found Rosie Revere, Engineer from them. We found Franny K. Stein. We found Geoff’s new favourite kids book Zita the Spacegirl.

Sometimes in my small town, where even the school teachers engage in blatant gender essentialism, I feel alone in trying to find exciting and engaging media for Tesfa, who as I mentioned in the previous post, is having some issues with bravery and confidence. But this website makes me feel better and I greatly having books to read that I like reading between some of the books I am less enamored with but Tesfa likes a lot (i.e. Berenstain Bears).

And I have a warm and fuzzy feeling that the acquisitions librarian here also scans A Mighty Girl. While it takes months for new Can-lit to show up in the library system, they almost always have whatever book from A Mighty Girl I’m lusting after that day. Yay library! Yay A Mighty Girl! Yay books!

fiction writing

yah!

By meghan rose on Friday, January 24, 2014

I’ve been thinking about YA a lot recently. Looking at my 2013 charts, I see that I read a few YA novels last year (although can only really remember reading one right now, Eleanor & Park, which I actually found more frustrating than enjoyable). But while my adult story is going down, my faerie story seems to be in ascension and I keep thinking that maybe that’s okay. Maybe I’ll write short stories for adults and longer stories for people who were like me when I was younger, who liked reading and didn’t really understand the rest of the world. I suppose we can adjust the tense in the last sentence: I don’t really understand the rest of the world, no matter how many studies they put out saying reading fiction helps improve interpersonal skills because I read a lot of fiction and I’m still stumped, staring at my feet at the bus stop while the other waiting mums discuss their wedding and engagement rings and I can’t think of a way to join the conversation to say that Geoff and I bought an iPod instead.

So maybe I’ll keep my YA faerie story going and let my adult longer stories just rest for a while. I don’t know. It’s winter and my fingers swell in the cold and it makes me miserable and hard to focus on being happy. We have future worries with the fact that Geoff is likely to strike soon and Tesfa is having some difficulty with trying new things and the tantrums that come with that. But escaping into fiction can be nice. In my faerie story, the main character is off to buy an extension cord, which is maybe not as fictional as I would like, but it is happening and that’s okay too.

(and I always say Why-Eh as yah! in my brain)

books fiction writing

things change

By meghan rose on Tuesday, January 21, 2014

I’d like to think that it was in high school when I read Choose Me by Evelyn Lau, in my last year of high school, but the publication date inside says 1999, so it’s possible I was organized enough and that there was a book review so I learned about it (did The Ottawa Citizen used to do book reviews? I think so) and I put it on hold at the library or maybe it was just on the shelf already, but, at the same time, my last year of high school I was so pulled in all directions that I might have read this book the next year when I was in Ottawa on a co-op term (at which point I vowed never to work for the Government of Canada again, except I broke that promise ten years later only to realize that I should have stuck with my ban on working for the feds forever). But whenever I read it, I read it and wanted to be a writer after reading it.

There’s a story in it, Suburbia, where Belinda has left graduate school, and the first time I read that story I told myself I won’t be like that. I won’t just quit graduate school for dumb reasons, and I didn’t quit graduate school for dumb reasons, even though I probably should have left because I was unhappy (although, can one imagine the angst I would have had over doing that – I have enough angst regarding quitting academia/research). But, reading the story now, I’m sort of Belinda-esque, floating unmoored. So quitting graduate school or not has nothing to do with drift. Drift just comes.

I didn’t like this book as much as I did when I was either 19 or 20, the other time I read it. What I’d been thinking was that some of my stories were, in some way, theft from Lau’s here, but now I don’t see as much of a resemblance as I’ve built up in my head (and not theft as in plagiarism, but some sort of spiritual theft of feeling and emotion). I had a story I wrote much later that I was pretty sure was reworking of a story in Choose Me and when I got to that story, mine wasn’t like that at all other than it had a professor and a student, like so many of my stories because of the years and years I spent in school. Maybe I’ll rewrite my story then. I don’t have a copy of it anywhere, but I know what happened enough to recreate it. Or maybe I’ll just let it go. Drift some more.

I’d remembered these stories so much in my head and then they were different. Things change.