Category Archives: Writing

Drat Those Celts

From an e-mail conversation:

Me: (in response to a request for an authentic source for some Celtic information) What, if anything, is verifiably authentic when it comes to the Celts? Pesky Celts, doing stuff and not writing it down.

Ceri: And having different names for everything, damn them. They’re worse than people on the internet, misspelling everything.

And if you’ve ever tried to do any sort of Celtic research (and in so doing sought to avoid Llewellyn authors such as Edain McCoy like the plague), you too know this pain…

Real Authors, Real People

Take a look at Laurell K Hamilton’s writing room-slash-office, and know that you are not alone with your sticky notes, stuffed animals, bookcases, and empty cups:

LKH @ Home Gallery

She even has a Gate to Hot Tea.

The Post-It notes wouldn’t last long in a humid area like Montreal, though. No way, nohow. This is why many of us use gigantic bulletin boards instead. (How humid is it in St. Louis, Missouri, anyway, Dear Readers? Anyone?)

Short-Lived

I’m trying to bash out another book proposal, and I’m stalling. (No, not work-avoiding; stalling of the “engine stalling, abort mission, failure, failure” sort). Now I’m no longer convinced that I can write.

Yes, this goes in cycles. It’s probably healthy. Not enjoyable, but healthy. (Calvin, go do something you hate! Being miserable builds character!)

The GCN, Revived

I sat down today and decided to get back into writing. Not the book-type stuff (although I think I’ve just promised to come up with an outline and proposal for a book collection of spells, and they offered me the option to write yet another book last Friday too — don’t go nuts, I’m not sure I want to do this one as it’s not my forte), but writing for myself.

So I woke up the laptop, thanked it for all its hard work writing the Spellcraft book, and asked it to think back to when we were writing the Great Canadian Novel. Upon rereading the last chapter I remembered why I’d been reluctant to return to this project: I accidentally ended the book when I wrote this chapter back in 2003. Even an attempt to rewrite it to avoid the ending in January 2004 didn’t rescue it in my mind. Today, then, was my day to eradicate the “finished/story-all-told” association the project had in my mind, and to open it to new vistas of writing-tude.

So, ninety minutes and 2,960 words later, the Great Canadian Novel is back into the swing of things, and in regular project rotation once again.

I’ve missed Poppy.

Accomplished

After a day or so of doing things but not really getting much done, I sat down and wrote two new book reviews today. I also uploaded four or five reviews that I’d written for Wyntergreene but hadn’t added to the Read page of my site yet. (Those would be Progressive Witchcraft (thumbs up), Witch’s Familiar (thumbs down), Order of the Phoenix (thumbs up, of course — a year late, but finally uploaded!), Voices From the Pagan Census (undecided), Philosophy of Wicca (thumbs down), and Rites of Worship (thumbs up).)

So I’ve finished the reviews of Healing Magic and Advanced Witchcraft, and voila, simply because I’ve gotten writing down on paper (in pixels?) I feel satisfied. This is a problem with defining yourself as a writer: if you don’t write, you feel like a failure. Even rationalising reading as research doesn’t completely cut it. Deep inside, you still feel like you’re making excuses for the fact that you didn’t write.

However, all that has been swept away! I am a writer once more, with eight hundred new words to my name. (Not a stellar harvest today, but it’s eight hundred more than I had this morning.)