short stories

Sunday recs: anagrams etc.

Published on by Sara Norja

Here’s a sundry bevy of recs:

If Poets Wrote Poems Whose Titles Were Anagrams of Their Names. Some more here and here. I especially enjoyed Eliot, Dickinson, and William Carlos Williams. The WCW parody made me giggle out loud. 😀

Here are a couple of my favourite poems from February’s Snakeskin. Fat by Beccy Pert: such luscious language. And House without Windows by Grace Andreacchi is absolutely gorgeous!

A story: Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters by Alice Sola Kim. A different kind of time travel.

ETA: And some nonfiction too: Eleanor Arnason writes about authenticity, cultural appropriation, and writing outside your own experiences in sf/f.

* * *

Also, today I sat down to write an all-new short story and actually finished the first draft in one go! First prose piece of the year, incidentally. And wonder of wonders, it’s actually short, too. My stories have the tendency to expand, but this one stayed at around 2000 words. Huzzah! It’s about an alchemist bartender, and I rather like it. Perhaps at some point it will be time to submit stories too, not just poems. 🙂

Sunday recs

Published on by Sara Norja

Here are three stories I’ve read and enjoyed recently:

Selkie Stories Are for Losers, by Sofia Samatar: a gorgeous contemporary take on selkies.

The Flying Woman, by Meghan McCarron: a delightful atmosphere, an aching and haunting story.

And Their Lips Rang with the Sun, by Amal El-Mohtar: a lovely, poetic piece, strange in a good way and with a great narrative voice.

All three of these happen to be from Strange Horizons. What can I say? – they publish brilliant stories there.

* * *

And what of my own writing? Well, I just realised that I haven’t written any prose at all yet in 2013 (although I’ve written more than 15 poem drafts), so I should work on that soonish. There is that one novelette that needs to be finished and then edited; and I should edit the snail story. Also, there’s one burgeoning short story idea that I should get out at some point.

As for what’s left of today: I should clean my flat, do the dishes and various other useful household tasks. But earlier today I started a long poem – fragmentary, linguistic and deeply personal – and to be honest, I want to work on that more than I care about my home being spotless. I always care about writing more than cleaning.

But we’ll see. I’m tired enough now that it may be that my brain’s not in the mood for poetry any more. In which case, dishes and hoovering, perhaps some fiddle practice too. But first of all: tea.

Poetry experiment

Published on by Sara Norja

Am on sick leave today because the wretched remnants of illness still lingered this morning. My New Year’s Eve was spent with a fever; I was so out of it that I was extremely content to be alone, and toasted the new year with a cup of peppermint tea. I’ve been under the weather ever since. But since I feel okay right now (finally, an appetite and less nausea!) I’m hoping that I’ll be fully well again tomorrow.

Anyway. Due to being alone on NYE, I was able to start off the year with a poem. Nice. Wasn’t a good one, but it was good to write.

Today I’ve been trying to get back into a specfic-ish story (well, novelette, really) that I started back in December 2010. It’s got potential, I think. I need to finish the actual plot and then get to editing.

But so far I’ve been too tired and headachy to get into the novelette. Bleh. Instead I decided to do a poem challenge from Joseph Harker’s delightful blog (I’ve been reading through the archives. Damn, that man is a talented poet!).

The basic premise of this particular prompt is to create a little series of “poemlets”, like charms on a bracelet. See the original post for the full instructions. I chose seven of Joseph’s themes (childhood memory/linguistic beauty/keeping a secret/romantic encounter/discovering laughter/life goal/telling the future) and started playing. Here are the extra elements (quoted from his blog post):

first poemlet: mention your birthstone
second poemlet: use a word with three or more syllables
third poemlet: mention your zodiac sign
fourth poemlet: use at least three capital letters (“I” on its own, and the beginnings of lines, do not count)
fifth poemlet: pick a color and use at least two synonyms/varieties/shades of it
sixth poemlet: use as many different kinds of punctuation mark as you can
seventh poemlet: surprise us with something fancy!

Anyway, this is an experiment that I’m unlikely to end up submitting to be published, so I thought I’d share it with my readers. 🙂

[I would’ve wanted the roman numerals to be on the same level as the first line of each charmlet, with the rest of the stanza indented, but apparently that’s beyond my html skills and I’m too tired to figure it out now. So have this version, with the numerals above. /end perfectionism]

* * *

Charmlets

i.
sticky summer, eating watermelon
by the bucketful, the richness
of it, like gobbling down
soft tourmalines

ii.
peeling back the centuries
to Caedmon’s hymn
I shiver
at the reconstructed sounds,
the stark vowels
humming down in my throat

iii.
Scorpios keep secrets well, they say.
Perhaps I do, although I toss
horoscopes down the drain.
After all, some secrets I kept
for years.

iv.
when I first met you,
and You, and YOu, and YOU,
my heart didn’t know
what wonders were ahead
on this winding road
leading downriver

v.
That summer I learnt to laugh again.
The grass seemed greener
than heaven, as I sank down
onto the malachite bed
prepared for me
by nature –
that moss-fingered mother.

vi.
Oh – to struggle for it
and grasp it too! No fear
(no fear); just the blossoming woods
of my work: beauty written
down onto each petal…
dare I? dare I?

vii.
If
I could
reach down into my soul,
grasp a surety beyond the shoal
of slippery wishes, and see
my future before me –
if I could,
would
I?

* * *

Poetry in Chantarelle’s Notebook

Published on by Sara Norja

My poem ‘October’s End’ is now online in issue 29 of Chantarelle’s Notebook: you can read it here.

On the topic of poems online, a note on my poems in Snakeskin: the website went down for a while, and they’re still updating the archives. Hence the old links to my poems there don’t work. I’ll add the new links when they’re available!

I notice I haven’t posted at all so far in December. Life has been keeping me busy. I haven’t been writing as intensely after the end of Nanowrimo, but I have been writing. Not every day, but still: writing. I’ve started editing the snail story. I’ve written a couple of poems. And I’ve been working on a short story in Finnish for a competition (deadline 31st Dec).

The Finnish short story is a new and exciting thing. Despite having done Nanowrimo in Finnish once, I’m much more unsure of any writing skills I may have when writing in Finnish. I wrote in Finnish as well as English when I was younger, but after my teenage years, I let my creative-writing Finnish get rusty. But I’m trying to relearn writing in my other native language too. There are some things that I think I could write better about in Finnish, if only I could be comfortable in the words, if only I could sink into the flow of it again. Like the story I’m trying to write now: oh, it’d be a very different story if I wrote it in English. It wouldn’t carry with it any of the personal meaning I attach to the setting and certain words.

It’s like relearning to play an instrument you haven’t touched for years. Which reminds me, I should do some fiddle practise. It’s a matter of months, not years, with my fiddle; but still, I need to find the old ways again, so that I can learn new tunes.

November

Published on by Sara Norja

Two things on this dark, dreary November Monday:

1) Nanowrimo is still trudging along. I don’t really have too much mental energy to spend on my story, sadly, so it isn’t sparkling, and meanders too much, etc. But with much editing, this year’s Nano might perhaps have the potential for a novelette or similar shorter longfic. I rather like the premise, and if pared down, it could make for a poetic, language-oriented story. And I’m keeping up with the word count (I’m at around 19K at the moment – must get a-writing today’s portion!), which is nice for my word count -obsessive soul.

2) While getting rejections is never super awesome, it’s wonderful when getting a rejection letter makes you smile. I really appreciate editors taking the time to tell writers that they enjoyed reading the submission, and mentioning which pieces they liked in particular. And being encouraged to submit more stuff is nice. So, hooray for lovely editors!

After Nanowrimo is done, I hope to get down to some more poetry-editing and submitting stuff again. I’ve got quite a few pending submissions, but should get some new stuff into the rotation too. Also, there’s a short-ish (krhm, 10K) story that I should edit and submit to places. It involves this delightful theme.

I also discovered that there’s this Finnish-language sf&f short story competition with a deadline of 31st December. I… may have to see if I could write something in Finnish and submit just for the heck of it.