Can we forget?

To want to forget something is to think of it

— French proverb

Revision and Rewriting

"During periods of frustration and hold-up you must think of yourself as Edmond Dantès during his dungeon phase."

Bernard T. Joy, Twitter

Faulkner and Modernist scholar

Revision and Rewriting the WIP

 

Katerina Sokova

Writing is hard work. It's also emotionally challenging at times. Some days are sheer joy and others are torture. Some days I cannot work at all and I feel hollow that all I can really do on those days is think about all the work ahead of me. Occasionally I read over material or make notes, look at pages I will revise or pages I will throw away. There are lots of pages to rewrite. Same story. But a different kind of beginning and a different MMC. Much of this is due to all the changes I made from last summer's idea of the story and what I envisioned when I actually began drafting in NaNo, which for me, was November and December of 2023. I wrote new pages in January, but the last two months have been dedicated to plotting the book in detail. I know, from experience, this is how agents and editors sometimes work. They outline the plot. Then look at it. They ask the important questions. I felt I needed this step right now or I would have regrets later and maybe a manuscript I did not like. There are moments when you have to seriously regard more than just your instincts or loves, but what a reader is going to see on the page and how the words will affect the reader. I also began to look at scenes that I felt needed a rewrite, in other words, I had the story on the page, I had the emotional life of it, but it needed new words. Many of my darlings died during this process. Nothing is more challenging than deciding what to throw away. I could have fixed some things with revisions, but it occurred to me that this was fixing something I should not keep. I sank under these realizations. Fortunately, I know many working writers and one of my friends told me she had cut 40,000 words from her manuscript. I am guessing (I have not counted) that I am throwing away at least 125 pages. Brutal. Part of this was due to the fact that I changed MMC in December instead of middle of November when I suspected I needed that change. Good natured people will caution you over and over not to make these changes but finish a draft. I knew not to take this advice but I kept writing and as the story developed, soon realized I had erred and should have relied on my personal experience. Do not take advice from people who are not really qualified to give that advice, no matter how well intentioned or how smart. For me, that's people who have not written or sold as many novels as I have. But occasionally writers feel great doubts, fear change, and make mistakes. 

And so I am dealing with losing much of the first part of the book. I decided to blog this, instead of just my writing notebook for several reasons. I wanted it out there, my mistakes, my feelings, so I could look at it and remind myself that I will never ever write another book without a very detailed plot, without thought on the deeper levels of emotional impact. I will deep dive. I am not one of those people who can just sit down and write by the seat of my pants. I end up changing too much. I've known this. This is not my first time facing this predicament, but it will be my last. As I was looking at plot the last two months, at story, at how to tell scenes better, I realized what I was doing, (learning) and I made a new way to plot. Not only what happens, but the emotional level and which scenes might need special attention. I could see those scenes. In some ways, this entire project has been a learning experience for me. I am writing outside my comfort zone, am writing outside my former genre, am writing outside the way in which I worked a narrative. I am trying new things, new ways of approaching a narrative, even new ways to show emotional impact in a simple, ordinary scene. Of course, no matter how much we plan, changes will appear. I am not afraid of those changes. I am afraid of fundamental structural change. That's the front of my book. Yes, I am smiling. At least I know it. I am aware I need it. That's a plus for me at this time.

There is much good in all of this. I feel satisfied with the overall vision and work. I feel especially good about the characters, which are some of the best I have ever written. Developing this plot has been challenging. I do write big stories with lots of plot. I remember reading Uprooted by Naomi Novik and smiling at how much plot she had in that book. I remember thinking what I learned from reading that book several times, how I needed more space for the characters to move but also mirroring all the action and story. Good books always inspire me. I love reading. Reading teaches me. Writers should read like editors all the time. I am smiling again. One thing that really helped me was a reader who analyzed some novels that had both fantasy and romances in them. She made this incredible chart to show how four books overlapped and how they were different. I realized that my book was definitely fantasy plotted with romance vibes. It was not romance plotted with fantasy vibes. I could see the difference. Other changes I realized was that my book could never be truly YA and that is how I saw it in the beginning. I had to age the characters accordingly and look at books like The Night Circus. All of this, everything, was whirling in my mind as I wrote pages. It was not until January that I saw the whole, and I knew when February came, I had to stop and reimagine what I was really doing.

Perhaps this is how I truly create, part of my new process, how I will work from now on? I don't know. I will prepare more for writing the next time around. I will plot not just action, but scenes and yes, the emotions. I will see character arcs, and yes, perhaps envision how to best tell a story from scene to scene, or from vignette to vignette. I don't ever want to feel that I cannot try new ways to tell a story. I want to write fiction that has a high emotional impact on the reader. I want to be a better writer.

So, I am not only revising, I am rewriting. Bravely.

I am going to do one of these post on the WIP each month until I reach what I call, 'just editing' draft. The sum of this post is admitting to myself that in the middle of a project, I decided to write a very different kind of book than the one I once started.

The Dragon Slayer

The Dragon Slayer by Franz von Stuck, 1913

A Love Poem

“She was a beautiful dreamer. The kind of girl, who kept her head in the clouds, loved above the stars and left regret beneath the earth she walked on.”
                                               — Robert M Drake

Of Monsters and Men - Wild Roses (Official Lyric Video)

I will be the gladdest thing
    Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
    And not pick one.

I will look at cliffs and clouds
    With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind bow down the grass,
    And the grass rise.

And when lights begin to show
    Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
    And then start down!  — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love feels small in stormy weather.

“Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.”
                   

                                    ― Siri Hustvedt

Loving your work is a joy.

“Do anything, but let it produce joy."

— Walt Whitman

Love. Love. Love. Longing.

We all experience within us what the Portuguese call saudade, an inexplicable longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul, and it is this feeling that lives in the realms of imagination and inspiration, and is the breeding ground for the sad song, for the love song. Saudade is the desire to be transported from darkness into light, to be touched by the hand of that which is not of this world.

                                —  Nick Cave 

Love. Love. Love.

“It’s all messy: the hair, the bed, the words, the heart. Life” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Love. Love. Love.

Things I Love. A night sky dotted with millions of stars Writing with a fountain pen on 100% cotton paper Tea with some sugar Warm breezes The sound of a bee buzzing on my flowers Books Flowers My lost boy.

Love. Love. Love.

I believe that love is the only balance to death and the only antidote to ego. I believe that kissing a woman with your tongue, as good as it is, is better when you are also making love to her with your penis. I believe that sex and love, when they come together, become the strongest human force on the face of the earth. Directly flouted, they become violence, wars; sublimated, they become art; acknowledged and lived, they become happiness.”

— Sebastien de Saint Vallier, Dance, Judy Cuevas

Forbidden Love

"The idea of a connection so irresistible that you’ll defy everything to be together? It’s the ultimate swoon. Part of what I find so alluring about it is the idea of seeing someone, really seeing them and being seen in return, cuts through layers of bigotry, hatred, and social conditioning."

                 — Laini Taylor on Forbidden Love

Love Among the Fauna

"Some days I am yellow and warm-hearted, living in tune to place and people, eyes opened, soul stirring, skin pricked, attached to nothing and everything." — MJ

(Personal Note: Today it's Spring and I am so grateful. Winters are always unkind to me. I do not like the cold and as I have aged, I like it less and less. Mentally, I sink under the weight of a gray sky and frosty temps that chill me to my bones. I can't ever get warm, never fully relaxed, and to distract myself, I usually over read or write until I can no longer see straight. I tried not to do that this year. But there were days of failures. I also tend to get a little gloomy and worry over my work and this year I exiled myself from my writing desk around the middle of February. I just could not go on any longer and knew it was destructive. This week I began again. I did allow myself to make notes. But only by handwriting. The only writing I allowed myself was free writing that would not be used in the WIP Fantasy. This decreased the tension I was experiencing, a success story if there ever was one. I learned this from writer Laini Taylor who talks a lot about process, free writing that is not used, day dreaming, keeping notebooks, and learning to love how you work on a novel. Working on a novel for me is extremely messy. I don't simply do all these drafts people talk about. I do things as I go. I write a chapter or section of the book until I feel it is something I might keep, until I like it, then I move on. This latest project has been more complex. I changed ships (who is the hero and love interest subplot) on my novel in December and then in January, I decided I wanted to write it in a new tense and use lots of vignettes. This meant I would literally have to revise the entire novel at some point. The decision to do this was so complicated, so resisted even by me that I wrote little in January and wondered if I had lost my mind. Part of my reasoning for this is a long story and I shall explain one day, but not today. I am motivated. It's spring. The sun is shining, flowers are budding and some are about to bloom. I can't complain. I made it through another winter. I survived and I am still in love with my story.)

Love. Love. Love. Fauna.

Violet : Introverted, profoundly introspective. It doesn’t hide itself, as some would say, out of modesty. It hides in order to understand its own secret. Its scent is a glory but demands that we go in search of it: its scent says what cannot be said. A bunch of violets means, Love others as you love yourself.

                  — Clarice Lispector

                        Fauna

Love with an Owl aka A Fairy Tale about Love.

 

This drawing is by Mary Jane Begin from a character in Terri Windling's The Wood Wife. Owl Boy.

It's a haunting image to me and when I saw it, I had to post, because I too, have an Owl creature which I wrote a fairy tale about a few years ago. The Owl King is my own creation, not really inspired by Terri's work though Terri and I love transformations in fairy stories or wonder tales. Terri herself is the inspiration, because after looking at her online presence for years, I became more comfortable with the idea of people changing into other forms, a bird or a wolf or even a butterfly or moth. I saw these images in films, of course, over the years. But I had never thought of my work going the way of transformation until about 2009, the year my mother died when I thought, maybe she just changed into something I could not see as she left this world. Maybe she is still here? Birds are my biggest inspirations. I love birds. And the owl is one of my favorites. The crow is another. I made friends with a crow last year in my garden. He came nearly every day for the longest time and he seemed to talk to me. The Owl King is very different from how I find the crow transformations in my fiction. The Owl King is partly inspired from Greek myth though I don't literally use the actual myth of that time. Just partly. I have created my own myth and loosely taken from another.

Halsey - Young God (Official Audio)

Profound. Reminds me of something I'm after.......

THIS

Once I saw at Cumae a Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when boys asked ‘Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied 'I want to die'. Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent Σιβυλλα τι θελεις respondebat illa αποθανειν θελω. — Petronius

It is always in motion, this Life.

"This empire of suffering and pain. There is no end to it. There cannot be. When we are poor we wish to be rich, when we are rich we wish to be loved, when we are loved we wish for freedom from pain and endless life and unchanging happiness. It is a great, unstoppable conundrum."

— Stefan Bachmann

THIS

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”

― Toni Morrison

 

A slew of Patricia McKillip's book. McKillip was always a favorite read. The first book I read by her was Winter Rose, a sort of retelling of Tam Lin. After that, I bought her Riddle-Master books and then bought everything she wrote. I am rereading her at the moment, while I pause and relax. It was such a loss to lose McKillip in 2022. Covers are by artist, Kinuko Y. Craft.

Taking the rest of the month off.

 I made a post on Twitter/X that I am having a difficult time working right now.

In fiction, tone, mood, voice, and style interrelate, — things I am learning to improve. So at the moment, writing is hard work for me. All learning and practice is. But I crave process. That's the artist/creative/messy in me. [MJ]

I posted an image of Francesca Woodman in her studio for several reasons, but to hint that emotionally, I am exhausted. I attribute some of this fatigue to winter and illness, to what it simply is as seasonal depression, but there are other reasons, too. My process as a creative is very messy and immersive and I've been working for months, relentless. Even obsessively. I tend to neglect other aspects of living when I do this.

I have been sitting in this creative corner since last November. In December, I made strides, but they were costly. Francesca Woodman always sat in this corner, metaphorically and it destroyed her. I don't do that. I am too self-aware. I know then to pause, to rest, and yes, I should not wait to do this when I am this flat and lost in feeling. Pausing is not a failure. It's a salvation. During my pauses, I usually go to handwriting and reading, to reflection. To a sort of reinvention of the work in my mind and notebooks. These allows me spaces. I need these spaces. I need to be alone. I need to be away from social media, but it all just becomes noise to me, chatter, and I become overwhelmed as though the images and words of so many people are:

 'abnormally rapid and even auditory.'

 That's a metaphor but it fits.

  

I have to do something. I have to make a change. And I do.

Alan Garner is a rare mind.

"I live, at all times, for imaginative fiction; for ambivalence, not instruction. When language serves dogma, then literature is lost. I live also, and only, for excellence. My care is not for the cult of egalitarian mediocrity that is sweeping the world today, wherein even the critics are no longer qualified to differentiate, but for literature, which you may notice I have not defined. I would say that, because of its essential ambivalence, 'literature' is: words that provoke a response; that invite the reader or listener to partake of the creative act. There can be no one meaning for a text. Even that of the writer is a but an option. "Literature exists at every level of experience. It is inclusive, not exclusive. It embraces; it does not reduce, however simply it is expressed. The purpose of the storyteller is to relate the truth in a manner that is simple: to integrate without reduction; for it is rarely possible to declare the truth as it is, because the universe presents itself as a Mystery. We have to find parables; we have to tell stories to unriddle the world. "It is a paradox: yet one so important I must restate it. The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth; but what we feel most deeply cannot be spoken in words. At this level only images connect. And so story becomes symbol; and symbol is myth." 

                        — Alan Garner

                     The Voice That Thunders

Failure is part of a writer's daily life.

 

"If you are writing well and failing and submitting and persevering, there is no more that anyone can ask of you, even yourself."

— Stephen Marche

Berthe Moriset, Girl Writing

(Writers are always making decisions. Some of them are failures and will be cut, pasted, and moved, or even deleted. Some will stay and be published. But failures and mistakes are part of the writing process. Revisions are like purgatory. Dante's.)

48 Days until Spring

 

The countdown begins. I survived January. Spring is coming. My late mother's Heritage Iris, surrounded by spiderwort. I am going to work both the gardens this year. Do, as they say. Get some sunshine, be with nature. Spring is coming. The spiderwort is the first to pop up after early bulb plants. Spiderwort and irises are always springtime. I didn't really make plans this winter. I am going to play it day by day this year. Have fun. This is one of the most beautiful flowers I know. I love gardening so much. I do. I do. I do.

The perfect quote to describe my main character..

“It was a fairy tale, no fooling. It was unreality becoming real. This frightened her. Because people don't care for unreality becoming real. It pricks their well-fed minds, you see, with something like a hunger pang. They prefer the logical stuffiness of expectancy." 

                                       — Richard Matheson

Genre writers I love.

Naomi Novik, Juliet Marillier, Patricia McKillip, Holly Black, Laini Taylor, Katherine Harbour, Anne Rice, Anne Bishop, Rebecca Ross. Grace Draven, Maggie Stiefvater. In no certain order. That's 11 because Anne Rice is really an out of the box fantasy and paranormal writer. These are all wordsmiths, too, exceptional prose writers. Writers who have romance in their stories. Writers who like girls and goblins.

So far, so good

My mother told me once that "disappointment" was a feeling that destroyed more dreams than failure. Genuine disappointment in people or personal expectations or predicament. Its cousins are frustration and despair. Disappointments are always cruel and sharp and cold. But she reminded me, there are worst things than disappointment and most of us, if we are lucky, only read about those things in books.

Gray 2024

 

I've got a moment, since I am working online tonight and I thought I would post a pic of me, all gray. Just gray. Laughing. It's so appropriate for January 2024, a month where I have suffered from the flu and endured, ice, snow, and brutal cold weather. I wrote on Twitter/X that January is always a year to me, and it is. I seem to fade into a gray ghost in January, but by the middle of February I am buying tulips and looking at seeds and planning a garden. I just have to get through this month and the first half of February, and my countdown to spring begins. Little writing is going on now. Just organizing files and a little revision. I opted to read a few new books and try to relax. Today was the first day of January that I really had a decent meal, I had a filet, some air fry okra, baked potatoes done in herbs and paprika and even a glass of tea. I've been drinking only water all month. I've also been living on can soup and baked potatoes, and scrambled eggs. Tomorrow I am having some sausage pinwheels for breakfast. At the end of next week, I'll go back to creating new words and moving on with the work in progress. I've been working hard since November 1 when I began NaNo. This is my NaNo project. A new version of the older book that went nowhere. I am energized. I like it. It's got the right hero now, it's got a better conflict, it's more compelling in story and voice. It's rich in folklore. It's terribly romantic at times. It's got kicker conflict. I just love it. Laughing. I am almost compelled to write it, something I haven't experienced in a few years since John's death. I miss John. Seven years now. It seems like yesterday at times, some days it seems long ago, almost foggy. It's insane at times. I think a loss like this is like a hole. It's there and most days you just walk around it, and some days you kind of fall into the hole and sink. Most days now, I walk around it. I feel okay. I sort of feel safe in myself if that is a thing. I feel moored to something again. Me. I don't care for selfies anymore. I don't really care about social media. I have this nice life going. Art. Writing. A garden to plan, books to read. A cat who annoys me. My blog is for bits and pieces. I don't even talk about writing that much. I write instead. I try to be kind to others. I made a pen pal list so I would be more than a name and photo on social media to some of my friends. I would be a real person writing snail mail and sending post cards and all that old stuff that people ignore nowadays. I have plans. I play vinyl music and dance. I like to cook. I want to exercise and be able to do cartwheels again. I have these little ambitions. They make me smile. Smiling is important. Laughing is important. Living the best me I can is extremely important. Giving back is nice. Being kind is nice. I can do all this. I can make a difference. Gray and all.

The Middle of January 2024

“Do not lose hope — what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.” — Neil Gaiman

Symbol and Metaphor

There is no language and no knowledge without symbol and metaphor. Two consequences arise from this: one is that we require imagination both to make and to interpret symbols, and the other is that symbols themselves beckon us through language to that which is beyond language. In other words, symbols are energized between the two poles (as Coleridge would say) of immanence and transcendence. 

                          — Malcolm Guite

 Malcolm Guite

Neil Gaiman on Making Mistakes

“I hope that in this year to come you make mistakes because if you are making mistakes then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before and, more importantly, you're doing something. So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make new mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art or love or work or family or life. Whatever it is you're scared of doing, do it. Make your mistakes, next year and forever.”

— Neil Gaiman