twopoint | Entries tagged with gywo

Several things.

1. Many thanks to thrihyrne for drinking the dregs of this journal and finding/posting a snippet I wrote about the writing process.

2. Thank you Edda for whining when I placed you in that derelict farm house. You said this: It’s like there’s a deficit in spiritual currency – they’ve put us on a budget haven’t they?” he asked, gripping the rusted key and imagining the things he would have to do without or make for himself: iron-gall ink, foolscap paper, fragrant oils, dai ginjo sake. - and the two of us won Most Intriguing Sentence of the Week at getyourwordsout . Now, shut the hell up, Edda, and get on with the plot (no more kissing in the front lawn, though the honeysuckle nectar was a nice touch, go back inside, clean the place up, and be productive).

3. And for all you Schwarz fans, this art by stonecarnival is better than brilliant.

4. And sorry, Schuldig, telepathy isn't as rare a talent as you might think, according to this article in Wired. Though I am doubly freaked out by the "monkeys responding to telepathic limb control."

5. The jasmine is in crazy full bloom on the writing porch. Hold on. I'll go take a photo. (I think I startled Habibe.) It smells like Olin's skin which means it's been a great week to write about poisons.

Tags:

At least once a week

victoriawiley and I vote to decide if The Writer's Almanac poem of the day truly is a poem. Mary Oliver's "In Blackwater Woods" wins unanimously.
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment . . . read the rest here

In other news, I finished off my

getyourwordsout April word count at 114k for 2009. Most of this month's writing was utter crap but I did make some progress on the scattered original piece, posted chapter 4 of The Forgotten Tree and started at least fifteen other stories that may or may not shame me into doing something. All in all it was a very brutal month for writing. I feel edgy and foggy, absolutely uninspired. I blame it on all the pollen and tree sex. Luckily the trees are now fully green, spring has done its worse and my characters might now decide to do something better than lying around kissing all the time. Not that I blame them.

I have designated tomorrow, a horse-free Sunday (canceled all riding lessons), as a post a snippet day. Paragraphs, beginnings, abandoned text, wine-induced rants, characters studies, all the stuff that involves alphabets and words, will be organized - and anything that forms a fully coherent thought will be posted as extended pseudo-drabbles. I was a late convert to Catholicism and have found guilt to be a heady deadline.

Mostly, I blame my procrastination on Storm Constantine. I've spent the past month submerged in her Wraeththu world: two trilogies, all the fanfic I can get my greedy, sweaty, rein-gnarled hands on (why the hell have I never heard of these books before)? Unfortunately there are aren't many people at the barn that I can discuss a post-apocalyptic, hermaphroditic race with (not from lack of trying) - but her world building is exceptional. I just wish someone had told me that the first three books were completely revised and re-published before I read the old editions. However, all writer-ly fears of vanity presses aside, I admire anyone who creates a press to publish their back-list and exceptional fanfic written within the author's world: Immanion Press.

Tags:

gywo,
poetry

I'm absolutely missing a day in February. I walked around convinced that today was the 27th and that I would have an entire night to pad my word count for the year. I like contingency plans. I'm very pleased with my numbers so far this year. February: 22,396 (at least 1/8 of those are usable) which brings the total to 62,851 for the year. But I can't help but think something dreadful will happen in July, i.e. I forget how to write.

I have no idea where I misplaced that day. Or what I did that day. It's been raining like the devil, so like it or not I've been granted many days of staring at my notebooks.

I grow fat from Starbucks and wine, so I'm heading to the barn early in the morning (late morning) to clean stalls with the girls. Until then, I'm wrapping my brain around the Nirnaeth Arnoediad and sending frowning faces down the street until Nathaniel returns Chapter Two of Forgotten Tree. Nathaniel! They're just commas. (Nathaniel says: "Commas are the least of your worries, I'm more troubled by your abuse of semicolons.")

But I've been blessed with a

levadegratchets , so maybe commas aren't important after all.

Tags:

gywo

Or the simile won a prize. Good simile! (now sit). Thank you

getyourwordsout

The slow curve of his mouth, crooked like a sickle moon, a soft scythe, says he knew I could do it, he knew that I'd come back.

Tags:

gywo

Four revised opening chapters, I say, four. I suddenly found it very difficult to get the characters moving. They knew what they were supposed to do, but they refused to budge. I had some ideas for the second section and really wanted to double up my GYWO wordcount for January so I could slack off another month, so I put the first chapters aside and threw myself into the new ones. The plot opened up, the character's motivations shifted and what began as a pleasant idea for the book mutated into something byzantine, elaborate, all the threads knotted. We'll see how long this lasts.

Then I flipped through the latest issue of Poets and Writers and found this poetry exercise from Kim Addonizio. I like all six suggestions, but bought the magazine when I read about starting in the middle: "Write ten openings that begin in media res. Think about setting up trouble and expectation. After you've written them, study them to see if you make them more specific and/or create more tension. Choose the three you like best and freewrite on each one for five minutes without stopping."

I knew linear wouldn't work for me. Dedicating myself to an ungodly wordcount for the year is all the structure my scoured brain can handle, but picking the plot up in the middle really changed the shape of the story. Here are some of my favorite sentences from this week:

"It pulls him down and it's like watching an eclipse, mysterious, unsettling, unnatural but wholly beautiful like silver light on the branches."

"His skill is a dream carved from hashish and mare's milk."

Tags:

gywo

The Poisonous Tree

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Poetry, Word Count, and Wraeththu

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