Oh, but Magical Uncle, not all of us are so privileged to be able to work only on what moves us. Still, a wonderful speech about the creative life, especially the part of turning difficulty into “good art”.
There was a truth on the tip of her tongue, and she was afraid to speak lest it fall out into the open. She looked at him and would not let herself give in to the insistent pressure of those words against her lips. He was not ready. She was not ready. It hurt to keep her feelings inside, expanding the seams of her heart to a nigh-unbearable pain, but the pain of losing Raphael could only be infinitely worse.S. Jae-Jones, Untitled WIP
So she would keep her truth secret and she would keep it safe until the world returned to its senses, and she would be free to feel without fear of loss.
"Evie," he said softly.
I don’t know why I wrote this little snippet when I’ve shelved this project to focus on something else, but something about the relationship between these two characters keep coming back to me.
Okay, so I let them off my mind; back to the other project!
She was dumbfounded by what was being asked of her. It had been years since she knelt on the hard wooden pews of the Giraffe’s church, years since she had been asked to absorb, to translate, to understand the abstract. She had always been concerned with the tangible, the practical, the mundane; she had no use for God or metaphysics. She was a scholar of the corporeal, not of philosophy or, heaven forbid, POETRY.The Education of Sumire Min
I am WOEFULLY behind on my NaNoWriMo word count. Oh well.
The Education of Sumire Min
So, I know it’s already 11 days into November, but is anyone else doing NaNoWriMo? I am cheating, of course, as I’m actually NaNo-ing a project I was already about 35K into by the time November rolled around. (I’m doubly cheating because this is actually the backstory to a villain character in another novel I started writing to avoid working on it.)
Min Sumire was eighteen years old and a woman grown the day an ill wind from the West blew in and rattled the foundations of her new life. Until then she had believed herself impervious to the typhoons and tsunamis of emotional upheaval, but it only took a single blow to her heart to upend everything she held to be true.
These were the truths she held to be unquestionable: that she was smarter than everyone about her, that her beauty was a weapon to be wielded, and that her heart was as cold as ice. She would do anything to serve her own needs ahead of another’s, and she made peace with the knowledge that she was ruthless and beautiful.
But it was all a lie, and it only took was one kiss for her foundations to come crashing down about her ears.
You’ve seen me post drawings/paintings about it. God, I have so many methods of procrastination. Don’t want to write your novel? Write another one! Don’t want to write that? Draw pictures from it instead! Yeesh. I’m also really good at getting in my own way. I started writing this book to get away from relentless research and just write characters making out, but I’m about 42K into it now and THERE IS STILL NO MAKING OUT. Instead I’m writing political scene after political scene after political scene in an attempt to get to the kissing. Also I apparently can’t stop researching; it’s a terrible compulsion! An addiction! I just wanted to write makeouts, dammit!
I Have The Awesomest Friends
- JJ: Soooooooooo, if one were to come up with a fake right-wing, ultranationalistic, fascist slogan for a 19th century imperial nation, what would it be?
- MARIE: EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!
Instead of a lion rampant on the imperial crest, one could have a Dalek Victorious!
I loved you, and perhaps I love you still.Alexander Pushkin
The flame, perhaps, is not extinguished;
yet burns so quietly within my soul.
No longer should you feel distressed by it.
Silently and hopelessly I love you,
At times too jealous and at times too shy,
God grant you find another who will love you,
As tenderly and truthfully as I.
There are a few translations of this poem by Alexander Pushkin, although I love this one best. I imagine one of my characters would say this to her beloved, but not aloud.
“I write myself into existence” [said Neesha Meminger]. She was speaking of why her protagonists are South Asian girls, but I also believe she was touching at a larger truth. I, like Neesha Meminger, like many other writers out there, write to validate myself. Because my head is a poor place to contain all my thoughts and opinions. Things get lost and muddled in there, and it’s only when I set pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, that I start to make sense. Make sense, as in make myself clear, but it’s also how I make sense of my existence, of my place in the world, of the world around me. I write to contextualize myself. And it doesn’t matter if other people read it. It shouldn’t matter if others do.Me, I've Got No Advice
Today is National Day on Writing, and I was all ready to go on and on about writing as compulsion and need, just as books are as necessary to me as food and air, but then I realised I actually said it all before.
It’s True I’m a Research Junkie
- JJ: (long rambly complaint about feeling compelled to know every possible detail about her characters’ backstories, particularly one who turned out to be Welsh because of the surname she decided to give him) It’s the little details. WHY MUST I KNOW THE LITTLE DETAILS?
- WICKED COOL RILEY: You are like a drunk girl texting her ex. STEP AWAY FROM GOOGLE.
If there was any doubt I was a Ravenclaw, then this should eliminate it entirely.
Also, did you know there is a dearth of information about the Swansea accent on YouTube?
Old Writing
I was all ready to type up a post about blog fatigue (and I probably will another day), but I stumbled upon bits of my old writing that I figured I’d share, since I can’t be bothered come up with new material. I wrote this when I was 20, and it makes me laugh a little because I didn’t (and don’t) have the life experience to finish this satisfactorily.
Most people ARE likeable, or go through the world with some construct of character that they hope is likeable. That's how you get through life. [...] The key with characters is to be HONEST. If a character's actions are believable, then that character will work. Notions of like or not-like become irrelevant.Russell T. Davies, Doctor Who: A Writer's Tale
I may be peppering my blog with quotes from this book, because really and truly, there are some gems in here.
Show Me Some Love
