Category Archives: Writing

Downs and Ups

Yesterday was good and bad for many reasons, most of which I will not go into. I will summarise it all by mentioning the following highlights:

~ I work with the best gang of people any woman could work with. Anyone who gives me loonies to put into a parking meter so that I can keep hanging around on my day off, simply because I slept horribly and felt cranky but didn’t want to be alone, is automatically nominated to demi-deity status in my world. Brenda, Tamu: you rock. And Dimitri, thanks for the tissues.

~ My husband finally got paid for the freelance work he did at Easter, which came right after I learned that my own little source of freelance income has indefinitely been put on hold, right on the verge of a nice new project to which I was looking forward to devoting ten to twenty hours a week. The gods taketh away, and the gods giveth.

~ I had chocolate mousse cake for dessert last night. Mmm.

~ And finally, at orchestra, I pulled off the Haydn with some sort of semi-capable style, and then proceeded to sight-read the Mozart with panache and 98% accuracy. Go me. For someone who hates Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and refuses to listen to it, I knew it pretty well. Then again, Mozart is so annoyingly perfect that I could have closed my eyes and played the cello line by prediction alone and still hit it dead on.

Looking at the writing I’ve been posting over at Owldaughter – Read, I’ve realised that I haven’t written short fiction in about eight years. As I’ll have more free time on my hands, I’ve decided to challenge myself to write one short story per week. I need to work on my ability to tell a story in 1,200 to 1,800 words alone. Besides, when I’ve finished a short story, it can be mailed off in submission somewhere, and maybe someday someone will even accept one.

At Tamu’s direction, I’ll also be working up a proposal for both my non-fiction work on alternative spirituality, as well as And By Many Other Names. I received a lecture on the necessity of selling oneself, a topic about which I’ve expressed my dismal and ineffectual flounderings before. She made it sound easier. Baby steps.

I see that I forgot to mention that I’m convinced the designs for the seagulls in Finding Nemo were lifted straight from Nick Park’s brain. Consider it done.

Phrase of the day about which to chortle: The obligation to tell long stories is more terrible than you might imagine. Even Scheherazade might stumble. And she was a far better word whore than I. From Caitlin R. Kiernan, of course.

Reviewing The Past

More articles have been posted and linked over at Owldaughter’s Read section, including the first chapter from Reconstructing the Past in the Academic Novel: The Concept of Nostalgia in Thatcher Britain. Yes, I know there are hordes of you out there who have been simply dying with impatience to read this magnum opus, and you’ve just been too shy to ask. Here’s your chance for a taste.

It’s hard to believe that I finished this just over three years ago. It’s even harder to believe that I defended it successfully and it was accepted with only three minor changes. t! and I were chatting earlier about successes and accomplishments in our lives, and I continually forget about my thesis, or value it at much less that I ought to. Damn it, I have a bound hardcover book on my shelf with publication data in it, and the title on the cover in gold. I had to sign a release form for Her Majesty the Queen (that’s Elizabeth, not my mother) granting her permission to store a copy in the National Library files. This is huge.

Plus I’ve written two novels, and have two more on the go. My writing accomplishments alone ought to reassure me that I’ve done some pretty impressive stuff in my first thirty-odd years.

Everyone has similar accomplishments under their belts – not necessarily theses or novels, but projects of significance that we would admire in anyone else except ourselves. So why don’t we feel fulfilled?

Warm Inside

While I work at the desktop computer, my reduced-mobility husband is in a chair by the window reading the last two chapters of my Great Canadian Novel. Every once in a while, he laughs out loud. Just now, he giggled for a couple of minutes straight.

He may be biased, but it still makes me feel really good.

Hello And Goodbye

My migraine is back.

Such a dubious honour to see you again. Now leave.

Why is it that when I have a headache I crave chocolate and soda? I know it’s just going to make it worse.

I’ll be in a dark room waiting for story ideas. Bye.

Hmm

I’ve been coding my articles to put up in the Read section of my new website, and you know, I don’t have a single piece of fiction that I feel comfortable posting publicly. This is not a good sign. I’ve been thinking about posting an excerpt from the half-finished Great Canadian Novel (officially 7/12 complete!), from my NaNo novel And By Many Other Names, and maybe that nameless fantasy thing I found on my laptop; but I haven’t written short fiction in years. Oh, sure, there’s that short story I wrote last week, but I realised a couple of days ago that there’s exactly one person on the face of this earth who would understand it completely. I can’t even let my husband read it, because it could ruin a role-playing game we go back to every once in a while.

So that’s frustrating. On the other hand, this morning I received an e-mail from someone whose opinion I value and who rarely compliments anyone. The message was a complete surprise and praised dedication, strength, and independence. A portion of that praise also came from a couple of other people who I’d pretty much do anything for, and it’s rather heady. That e-mail made my day; I feel as if I’m walking a few inches off the floor. (And to borrow a phrase from Skippy, “those who know will know”!)

You know, I did have a flash of a story idea as I was falling asleep last night. Maybe I’ll try doing something with that today.

Words And Music Etc

Orchestra last night was like a train wreck. We all should have just stayed home; I mean, for goodness’ sake, we played the Grieg better the very first time when we were sight-reading it. Collectively, we appear to be at the stage where we know a bit, but not enough, so it’s falling apart. The only thing more dangerous than not knowing anything about a subject is knowing a bit about it.

And, on a completely different topic, here’s an example of why I love the English language:

Verse feet in the romances are predominantly iambic, but anapests and trochees that appear should often be taken as welcome prosodic variations.
–from the introduction to Middle English Verse Romances by Donald B Sands

And this morning I found this in the writing diary of Virginia Woolf:

Writing is not in the least an easy art. Thinking what to write, it seems easy; but the thought evaporates, runs hither and thither.

And that’s it, really; when you think about it, and conceive of the finished product, it seems a piece of cake. Actually doing it, though; wrestling the language into some semblance of gawky order… now, that’s anything but cake. More like cement and traffic-light brownies or something. Or whatever you can think of that describes hard and heavy and not what you were expecting when you put it in the oven at all.

Oh, and I saw the four Animatrix shorts plus Final Flight of the Osiris last night; a colleague of my husband’s recorded them for us. I enjoyed them all for different reasons. I already had every intention to pick up the compilation DVD next week, but now I have even more motivation to do so.