Berthe Moriset, Girl Writing
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.
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.
“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
‘I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.’
— Mary Oliver
Detail from Simone Martini's Annunciation with St. Margaret and St. Ansanus "He is my household's guardian soul; He judges, he presides, inspires All matters in his royal realm; Might he be fairy? or a god?" — Charles Baudelaire
I always knew that if I ever wrote stories, they would be fairy tale stories and purely fantastical fiction or really Romances. The Goblin Market and the Pre-Raphaelites, Coleridge, Victorian novels and yes, Victorian fantasy influenced me. A. S. Byatt's fairy tales and novels. Angela Carter's fairy tales, especially The Erl-King. Even Gothics would play a part. The Bronte family, who really wrote brutal novels about love, almost horror, certainly fairy tale-ish. I remember China Mieville talking about Jane Eyre and how brutal a novel it was. Jane was practically starving her entire life and few people had been kind to her. She ended up marrying a brutish, spoiled man who had committed all sorts of offenses and their love could only completed after he was fully punished. Blind, the first wife dead. And then there was Heathcliff and the two Catherines, and all those other unpleasant or awkward offspring. Dickens was full of murder and brutal people. Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White haunted me in more ways than I can write here. Hawthorne, Melville, Hardy. What can I say. All these stories have, though not officially fairy tales, "fairy tale things," really. It would always be fairy tales for me. It would be about people, love, superstitions, maybe magic, and death. It would be about the weight of history. Because I understood the importance of geography and history. Ordinary girls would have to wage wars against extraordinary things to survive. And because I was southern, family would always play a part. Rambling thoughts this morning. I am almost finished with Nano. I have almost written 50,000 words in November. Good words. I never write really bad first drafts. I don't like them. I never use them. But this book is far from over. And of course, revisions will be done. I had to ask myself why now and not before? It was pretty easy to answer. This is very hard work and I just could never commit to this kind of life while my parents and Johnny were alive. They took up too much of my emotional capital. It's just that simple. And it's not even deeply psychological or frustrating, because I chose them over writing all the time. Writing a novel is a selfish act, it's not democratic, and sometimes it's not even sane. People who write for money do it better. I know this personally. Writing for a living makes sense. A job. I just pretended I was writing for money again, and I had a deadline and it was a job. And I will continue to do this job until the day I can no longer do it. Smiling.
My NANO word count today is 46,311 words at present. Because I am working and it will change.
It's time to consider most data, journalism, magazines, and politics to be exploitive. EVERYTHING that works to exploit for money or power, etc. rather than solve challenges and problems, rather than open discussions without shouting messages and preaching, for the common good of all people, is not productive, no matter which side of an issue it takes. We have come to a crisis point in history and social exchange where even good people are exploiting any issue, trivial or serious, as an expression of their momentary feelings or power plays in order to diminish one side or another, one view or another, and it's all an exercise of polarization. Fragmentation. Demoralizing and impotent. Because true change is problem solving and you can see it. It's not theory. While theory was once valid, it is now a serious handicap in polarization and diminishing "the other." Mistakes are always made in history, people. Mistakes are made now. Our brains are story telling processors, they are not always logical. Most days I cannot discern the lines between those seeking justice and those seeking revenge. Righteousness and sanctimonious posts, essays, and literature fill our lives in every single arena. We know a fascist when we see it. That's an easy one, because a fascist is working against democracy and often expresses his/her way as the only way. But everything else is kind of nuanced. When your way is the only way, pause.
I don't do culture wars or identity struggles anymore. This is probably the one and only time I will ever mention any of this. My timelines and blog, outside this one post, is free of any exploitation and sanctimonious messages. I am not silent in life just because I am silent here. I am committed to change and problem solving, but I do it in my community where it really happens in people's lives, through charities and hard work. I posted this because I have seen data used in magazines I once respected as exploitation. I have read interesting nonfiction full of the same, and I can hardly pick up a novel now that is not preaching at me. Book bans have come to mean more in the news than the fact that third graders are failing all across the country. They can't read well. They comprehend less. Discussions of mass killings catch the headlines when every single city is full of people facing death by gun violence from people in their own neighborhoods. We are a people living in fear and off fear. Gloom and Doom. Well, despite all this messiness, there is a whole lot of good in the world, a lot of beauty, and a reason to hope.
I don't live in the past, though I know it has a weight on me, that's evolution and geography, and yes, history. But I also don't live under the weight of futures that do not exist, and may never exist. I don't live in despair, and neither did my parents who existed during the Great Depression and World War II, who had none of the privileges I do. I don't barter in misery or seek validation here. It's entertainment and where I do find information or check out friends. I am an ordinary person, really, flawed, yes, a list of life's mistakes a mile long. I don't have a perfect life or a perfect face. I'm kind of plain and chose never to dye my hair. I am odd, too. Too blunt. Catholic in my thinking though I am highly flexible. I do value logic and a sense of humor. I value mercy and forgiveness as much as I value truth. Knowledge and data is not wisdom. Facts can be manipulated. Culture and trends pass. Morality even changes. And I am finished preaching.
Creating is messy. You should see my writing desk on a regular working day. Messy. Messy. Messy. On Friday afternoons, I stop and clean it up. All my little messes. To makes messes in the creative process is to make mistakes. To be wrong. To fail. I have been making mistakes in art and writing my entire life. Some of those mistakes are in print. Laughing. As I got older and more experienced, I began to think of creating anything as "big mistake-making adventures" which will involve a lot of destruction along the way. That's why rewriting and starting over and just working regularly are so important. You are going to write so many words that you will never use or paint or draw so many things you just don't like. Some creative acts are even traumatizing. Laughing. When I was young, I used to sort of deny my mistakes or try to rationalize them or work to cover them up. Now I just relish them. Fear of making mistakes, of being wrong, of failing, IS ABSOLUTELY the "creative mind killer." My best advice is not to ignore mistakes, defend them, fear them, or leave them uncorrected in infinity. Make them. Learn from them. Use them. But creating means making mistakes.
Nano Stats: 10,923 words
(I love this story. It's one of AC's most overlooked masterpieces.)
“I promise I will repay you.”
“Oh yeah?” she asked, looking at him, with his bare feet and plain, dark clothes. “With what?”
The smile stayed on his lips. “Jewels, lies, slips of paper, dried flowers, memories of things long past, useless quotations, idle hands, beads, buttons, and mischief.”
―
The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
My mother had headaches a lot when my sister and I were growing up. Serious headaches, headaches of all kinds. Migraines. Sinus headaches, weather headaches. Headaches that took her to the hospital, BC powders, pain pills, even injections at the hospital. One day, several years ago now, my sister asked me, "Do you ever have a headache?" Laughing. I mean we are both older women. My reply was "I guess so." But she and I never say we do. We never complain of a headache out loud on any ordinary day. Perhaps this is due to our mother, our incredible mother. Because her headaches were really her war on the world, her coping, and her daughters will never say they have a headache. We don't. And I made this observation today because there is a woman in my feed who complains of a sinus headache almost every other day, and I thought why? Why is it so important to post on social media that you have a headache unless you are suffering from a serious illness, like a brain tumor or something equally important and even then, why do people share these things? Really. Why? I rarely share those things. It's like dissecting your daily life to nothing more than forensic details.
Details are not all that interesting (yes, I love dry details when reading or studying history) unless they mean something to your overall narrative.
The woman who constantly complains of sinus headaches in my feed on Facebook has them for obvious reasons. Her lifestyle, for example, the little things she does each day. I've noted that. Of course, these so-called sinus and pressure headaches, these mini migraines are not too bad, or she would alter her lifestyle. Well, one would assume that as an rational outcome.
Next book, create a character like this.
She took a deep breath, "Last chance. Are you in need of rescuing?" His expression turned very strange, almost as if she'd struck him, "Yes, " he said finally.
Tana, from The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
Holly Black
“He knows which of the frilled, blotched, rotted fungi are fit to eat; he understands their eldritch ways, how they spring up overnight in lightless places and thrive on dead things.” —Angela Carter, “The Erl-King”
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“Against the blue day, her image lit upon his eye, as splendidly colorful as the butterflies. It pleased Nardi to think of her in this way - her energy as swift as sailing as the swallowtails', and erratic and hypnotic as the flit-and-flutter of skippers. She was both as ordinary as orange tips and as exotically impossible as the monarchs that made their way here every year across the Atlantic. This was her spirit, a thousand butterflies of every category and variety, crossbred into one magnificent specimen. Lepidoptera Hannaeus.”
― Bliss
(Bliss and Dance, two beautiful classic Historical Romance novels written by Judy Cuevas aka Judith Ivory. These are part of my classic romance collection. Books I read over and over and have kept for many years. And not they are not for sale. Smiling)
Julius Von Klever "Forest King"
Sometimes, it's not what is on the page concerning the character you are writing, but what is in the writer's head. A history.
Today is my mother's birthday. October, 13th and a Friday, too. If she were alive, she would be very old, 104 years. That's too old, perhaps. I don't know. We all want to live forever, don't we?
I've been writing very hard on the WIP, The Ambitious Fairy Project, since July 1st, and I don't mean a crappy first draft. I don't write in drafts. I revise, rework, re-plot, rewrite, write new, etc. etc. etc. as I go, inching along toward the new while always looking at the old. I read it aloud a lot from the beginning and so forth. This is the way I work and I am way over 250 pages at this point. Much more to go. I plot so I know the big stuff, even though surprising little stuff might pop up. That's the beauty of writing, all of this. But I have also been plagued this year by one illness or event after another. October has been cruel and I've made some mistakes, being highly reactive to that cruelty, too. This is part of being a widow, always doubting decisions that are not familiar from previous experience. I always had help before with my loving and trusted companion, my husband. Almost seven years gone now and goodness, I have made some disasters for myself, live and learn. I have also made some very good decisions. I suppose life is like that. But this year, wow, what a year of illness. One thing after another. I've worked on with the book, but the garden suffered. My confidence suffered. My mental state, too. I have to get up every day, like it's a new world and talk myself into living the best life offered. That's how I roll right now. That's what I do. Talk myself into faith.
Living alone is hard. Choosing to live alone is even harder. There is a difference, because it's what you sacrifice that sometimes haunts you, that laughs at your efforts.
Being a widow sucks.
But I am determined to survive and live the best life possible.
Today I thought a lot about love. How much I loved and how I was loved and what a beautiful thing that is.
I thought about my personality some, that "just being" has always been one of my gifts, that the things I enjoy in life are so simple and easy to find. I know that I was privileged to have had a good relationship with Johnny and that I will always miss him.
I also miss my mother, that incredible force of Nature. Oh, she was. An original. Mother died right at 90 years of age, so she has been gone 14 years now. My father 16, my husband nearly 7. These are numbers I can hardly believe. And I have been alone without them in that singular and special way I remember...
There is an aloneness that I possessed even as a small child. That aloneness is different from being lonely. One can be lonely in a house filled with loved ones. No, I was alone as in separate. These three people could occasionally reach across that aloneness and touch me. I loved them deeply. Only my three sons and Haylee, Jamie, my grandchildren, my siblings touch me now. Perhaps a few friends. But not the way my parents or Johnny did. Not the way Johnny did.
Being a widow sucks.
I know much of this present sentiment is the result of illness and perhaps some depression that goes along with certain struggles. I know these feelings will change. They will pass.
It all passes. Places, People, Purpose.
But my loves are inspiration to me. Those living and those dead.
Then why do I feel crushed.
CRUSHED.
(Feeling better today)
The bee is domesticated but not tamed.
— William Longgood
