I miss Graham Joyce

“Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear.”
          ― Graham Joyce

Wood Speedwell, Veronica (lilac colored)

 

Wood Speedwell, Veronica family, lilac

wildflower

This is one of my favorite wildflowers. I adore this bloom. The color, everything. I've seen it before in my Twitter feed. I stole it. Laughing.

Lion confronting a dragon, 1505, by Domenico Beccafumi of Siena.

 

       Lion confronting a dragon, 1505, by Domenico Beccafumi of Siena.

Revisions Part 2

 

Image is of Lewis Carroll's revisions.

It's May 12, and I have not really completed any revisions. I was ill much of April (better now) and spent the time examining content. In other words, I became my own editor and I decided I would probably end up rewriting everything I had written. Laughing. But that is how it goes sometimes. Some scenes I will keep most of what I have written in dialogue and things like that. I have made some major changes in content. I felt the book had too much plot, especially along two subplots and I wanted to focus these threads and tighten the manuscript. So my manuscript on paper looks a lot like Lewis Carroll's and became smaller, which is a good thing. My reader was so disappointed he did not get to read, but he knows me and I gave him the usual talk on "why read something that is going to be gone soon?"

Needless to say, I moved some scenes, all this happens around the last third of the book and the first third, the last third being a mess and the first third being deleted completely. 

People around me weep when this happens. But I never do. It's hard, but I do know when something needs to be rewritten. Revisions are really about rewriting. No, let me brutally honest—writing a novel is 85% rewriting, at least. And that is where I am at now. I love this part. Smiling. I do. I see the book for what it can really be now. Its potential. Its purpose. Its plot, its themes, and the characters are developing into the people they need to be. It's a beautiful moment, but it's so much work. Writing is so much work. But this is a good place to be. I am sighing. I can see the book I want. I can see my vision. We, as writers, never fully write our visions perfectly, but we try to get as close as we can to what we wanted in those early days.

And so now I just keep doing the work. I show up. I write and write. I stay in the story.

Staying in the story is the key thing here. Because it's such a messy process, I work to organize all the time. It helps. I am so tired right now. So very, very tired.

SYML - Where's My Love (Acoustic)

Attempting to add all songs from the updated playlist. As of this date, May 11, I have not updated the list on the blog, deleting songs I no longer use. I am going to talk how I use music when writing. It's plot centric, a device I used long, long ago and have decided to continue with this novel. In other words, I can look at my song list and see nearly every scene in the book. A person who does not know the plot will not be able to see it. But my lone reader can and also my friends who have followed me as I work. This allows me to stay in my story, but there are also other many benefits for me as a writer when working on such a complex story.

Happy May Day, 2024

 Ballerina rose.

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

I don't know what I am doing. This is not the book I want to write anymore. It has changed in my mind or perhaps I have changed. See Nano 2024. Because that is when I found the story.

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.)