News of yay: my poem ‘Bitter Mnemosyne’ will be appearing in the fantasy and horror magazine Niteblade.
Am very pleased that this poem has found such a good home! It’s about memory, cherries, and a journey to the underworld. Greek mythology was one of my childhood’s great inspirations, so of course such themes surface occasionally even now.
I just finished reading an amazing fantasy novella:
Martyr’s Gem by C.S.E. Cooney.
It’s a gorgeously written story with characters that jumped off the screen and will linger in my mind for a good while, I suspect. The island culture she’s created is fascinating and vibrant. Sharks and gemstones! Bantering, loving sibling relationships! A society where men and women are pretty equal! An interesting oral storytelling culture and stories-within-stories!
I love pretty much everything about this novella. Go forth and be immersed!
The pressure to come up with a brilliant post after a long time of not posting: I have it. So, I’ll just get this out, sans brilliance, but posted at least!
I haven’t been writing too much recently. In the past month, I’ve written just a couple of poems and such – oh, and my morning pages, which I’ve been diligently doing every morning since 13 March. I’m glad I’ve continued doing morning pages, but it’s not proper creative writing (despite the occasional flash of a good sentence or description).
I think I need a new Project. Something I could work on, but that I could fit into my all-too-crammed schedule. On top of my day job, I’m doing a translation gig and slowly working towards PhD applications. Pile some volunteer work and daily life on the whole thing, and… yeah. Not too much time for writing. I should just do more 15-min writing spurts and such, though. But when your brain energy is sucked up by everything else, it’s difficult to get a creative flow going in the evening. I feel bad when I’m not writing, incomplete; so why is it so hard to just do writing exercises if nothing else?
I actually have a Project ghosting about in my mind, and ideas spilling out onto paper every now and then. But it’s just a nascent world as yet, not a story I could tell. It’s still in slow, slow percolation mode.
Which is why I should get reading more inspiring stuff about worldbuilding. So, for starters, here’s some stuff by Kate Elliott (author of the awesome Spiritwalker series), who is amazing at worldbuilding.
So, there are approaches to worldbuilding that start with making a physical map, a geographical account of the world you’re creating. Kate Elliott has a slightly different approach, visualising the more intangible elements of the world before drawing a physical map. In this first, “internalized map”, she sketches out some of the cosmology and subjective worldviews of the various peoples in her world. How I understand it is that she creates the emotional world before the physical one. What do her characters think like? Why is it that they think like they do? She writes:
Every character in the story has an internal map through which they measure, comprehend, and navigate the world they live in. Their maps won’t be the same as every other character’s, and they won’t be the same as mine.
Kate E has also written another great post on the subject of worldbuilding and mapmaking here. Maps are not objective:
The point to come back to as a world builder is to always remember that you, the one who is drawing the map, are making a series of decisions about what matters enough to go in the map, and about what and how it is represented.
Look at medieval maps, for instance. This is a map of the world. So is this, the Holy Land at its centre. Maps can illuminate what their cultures consider important – this is also something to consider when making a map for a fantasy world.
Of course, map-making (of any sort) isn’t the only way to go about worldbuilding. Kate Elliott (yes, today’s an Elliott-link day) has a great post about who’s visible in your story. You have to question your world: always ask questions. That’s what I’ve been trying to do, with my nascent Project.
And naturally, there are even more ways of starting your worldbuilding. As a linguist with an interest in social history, some of the first worldbuilding questions I ask are about language and its social meanings, and the presence (or not) of multilingualism. And consider Tolkien, with his ultimate worldbuilding-from-linguistics approach. But I think that’s a subject for another post!
Long time no blog. Busy, &c &c. ad nauseam.
Last night at my writers’ group I led an exercise on description. We each brought an interesting object and then spent five minutes writing short descriptions of each. It brought out some really good stuff, I think – a nice exercise.
And one of the objects resulted in me being engulfed by memory and sadness, and the following drabble resulted (the version below is edited from the original rough write). I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandfather lately, the first loved one I lost to death. Nearly nine years ago, and I miss him. I always will.
So here’s a short piece. For you, ukki.
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From the Woodwork
I’ve been thinking a lot about him lately. Grandad, with his steady hands and carpenter’s heart. These were his, I think as I run my fingers along the battered red handles of the pliers. His hands gripped them just like I’m doing now. They feel solid. Grandad was solid too, to the last.
I blink back tears, concentrate on the object in my hands. The pliers are flecked with paint from his past projects. The jaws, well-worn from countless hours of use, are rusty now. The shape and weight of the pliers give me strange comfort. I open and close them a few times. It feels like a heartbeat.
Like Grandad’s heart, that beat too irregularly, and then stopped beating.
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I have several things I want to blog about, but life’s been giving me little time for reflection lately, and most of those potential posts require reflection. So, we’ll just do a very modest Sunday recs tonight.
A poem: Learning My Way Around by Neile Graham, from Goblin Fruit’s autumn 2011 issue. Birds, breadcrumbs, calls.
A story: Swan-Brother by Gabriel Murray. 1700s/1800s alt world with magic, a beautiful, sad story about brothers and swan-magic.
And then for this week’s favourite: Mermaid’s Hook by Liz Argall. Wow. This story is amazing: the POV, the realisation of what the setting actually is, the wonderful ending… I really love it all. The POV is especially excellently done: such a tight, never-faltering third person. I love the language and the atmosphere. Such a joy of a story!
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I’m trying to work on a story in Finnish right now, but it’s horribly sticky going. Times like this, I lose faith in myself as a writer, especially in Finnish.
So it’s good to have reminders to be forgiving to myself.
So. I said I’d blog about morning pages, so here goes!
Definition
Morning pages. Brief definition for those who don’t feel like clicking the link above (in which Julia Cameron outlines the original concept): morning pages are three longhand pages written in the morning. They don’t have to be – shouldn’t be – amazing writing. They’re supposed to be stream-of-consciousness, writing about whatever comes to mind, such as “what I need to do today” or describing the dream you woke up from. Nothing stellar, nothing special.
The thing is, they’re supposedly great for unlocking thoughts and feelings and getting them down onto paper, and thus freeing the mind from small worries etc. The theory is that if you get the clutter out of your mind first thing in the morning, you’ll be freer and more able to do creative things afterwards.
Morning pages and me
My history with morning pages: I tried doing them for the first time a couple of years ago; I think I persisted for about two weeks before I gave up. It just felt like too much of a hassle. Now, since 13 March, I’ve been doing morning pages again. Every morning.
An important point here: I am not a morning person. Specifically, not an early-morning person. If it was up to me, I’d stay up till 1 or 2am and get up around 9 or 10am. Sadly, this isn’t possible five days a week due to work. I have to get up between 7 and 7.30am on weekdays, which I know isn’t all that early for early birds, but for me? Uuugh. Every time the alarm rings, I’m grumpy and sleepy. Yeah, so if I went to sleep early enough I might not have this problem. But my energy tends to increase towards the evening, so going to sleep early is troublesome.
When I started doing morning pages again almost two and a half weeks ago, I was incredibly dubious at first. It takes me about 15 minutes to write three pages in my current diary (a bit bigger than A5 in size). That means 15 extra minutes to incorporate into my morning routine. Now, I’m slow in the mornings. I thought morning pages would create extra pain and grumpiness.
Sometimes they do. Sometimes my only wish on weekday mornings is to crawl back into bed for 15 more minutes. But I’ve persisted so far, because you can’t really tell if a new habit is working based on a couple of weeks.
I’ve been quite successful at incorporating morning pages into my routine. It’s more pleasant on weekends of course, since I usually get to sleep as long as I like then. I’ll get up, do some short exercises to get my chronic-pain back/neck to be less cranky, and then I’ll do my morning pages. I try not to let myself wake up too much before writing them (usually not a problem!), so that they’d be as natural, as stream-of-consciousness as possible. They’re not always three pages. If I’m in a hurry, they might be two, or even just one. Mostly I’ve kept to three, though.
What goes in them? Rambling. I often wake up from a dream, so dream descriptions abound. I may write about what I need to do that day, or about what I’ve done the day before. Mundane things. I usually start with grumbling about how tired I am and how and where my body aches.
But what’s also found its way into my morning pages are ramblings about weightier stuff like
– writing: what I want to work on, how I should go about it
– my future: pondering PhD things, worrying, planning.
Stuff that’s important to think about, stuff that I don’t often have time to properly think about. So, even considering how little a time I’ve been doing them, I’d say that morning pages have the potential to bring up things from the subconscious that I might not concentrate on otherwise. And it’s good to bring those things up. It means I either a) think about them more, if they’re important things that require pondering, or b) let them go, if they’re just small things that bother me.
I don’t think morning pages will solve all my problems. Haha, if only. But I’ve been greatly surprised by how even for a night owl like me, it’s not necessarily an impossibility to do them. Even a week ago I was grumbling about doing them, but now I feel more positive. I’ll keep writing them at least till the pages run out in my current diary, then I’ll see how I feel. I’d sort of like to try another experiment with “evening pages”, written just before going to bed, which would be more of a traditional diary-type thing, with analysis of the past day and so on. We’ll see about that.
Strangely, it seems that morning pages are actually doable. I’ve yet to find any profound spiritual enlightenment, but I’ll keep doing this for the time being and see if I come up with brilliant solutions to all my problems with the help of my morning pages. Even if I don’t, this may be a routine I want to keep. We’ll see.
Slept late, read a wonderful book for two hours, went for a walk. A poem rushed out, and I thought I’d share it here:
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Crushed Ice
I can’t see my future, the coming years are hidden
but in this moment the sun’s
shining on me, the sky’s coloured
with promises. The night cold has faded,
the path’s filled with snowbroth –
I wade in spring, the ice cracks under my boots
water welling beneath. My smile
of satisfaction, my wet socks:
it’s like my first spring in Finland
when I learnt the magic
of ice to water
in our garden,
when I crushed ice into shards of the past.
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(Snowbroth is among some delicious words I want to start using.)
I edited and sent off a short story today. Exciting! I should really write more shorts. The trouble is, I often tend to go for expansive stuff rather than the knife-sharp and short stuff…
I’ve been thinking I should practise writing flash fiction to hone my short-writing skills. Was inspired by this piece in The Guardian; I love the notion of “stories in your pocket”.
Related to short stories, a while ago I read David B. Coe’s post on Magical Words comparing novels vs short fiction in terms of the writing process. I wish I could learn to do this well:
This is the essence of writing a compelling short story: taking a situation, a moment in time, and giving it narrative structure so that it becomes something greater and more meaningful, something that feels complete. It is what I strive to do with my short fiction. When writing a short piece, I know that I can’t explain everything about my world or my characters or even my magic system. So I tell my readers the bare minimum of what they need to know and I try to allow my story to exist on its own terms.
Today I also wrote a poem draft during my walk to work and did some daydreaming for a potential fantasy trilogy (shhhh), so it’s been a surprisingly good writing day, all in all.
Evening, gentle readers!
It’s been a rollercoaster weekend; I haven’t got any creative writing done, which is egregious. Ah well, at least today I had a very productive café session with a dear friend: I worked on an article I’m writing related to my MA thesis. Oh how I enjoy crafting academic text!
Anyway, links!
Before the serious discussion links, let’s go for a poem. A Glance Across the Ballroom, by Ada Hoffmann: one of the most delightful Cinderella-inspired poems I’ve ever read.
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Eleanor Arnason’s Me and Science Fiction: Hope for the Future is an interesting column on optimistic science fiction and why there should be more of it. I mostly agree with her. Yes, I think sf needs to tackle the grim, difficult stuff, too – but why should it entirely shun the brighter visions? Optimism doesn’t need to mean lack of conflict. In a setting that doesn’t paint an entirely bleak future for our planet, you can still have interesting stories.
Personally, I’m not much a fan of grimdark. I prefer my fiction with more than just a sprinkle of goodwill and optimism. There’s a time and place for dystopia – definitely yes – but I just don’t think it needs to be the default option for sf. Human beings are capable of horrific, dark things, but we’ve also got the potential for good, for healing. Fiction – perhaps especially science fiction – is a great way of looking at the consequences of what we’re doing to the planet, for instance. But sometimes, I’d love to see a sf future-vision that ended up bright. Through darkness, perhaps, in the way of the most heart-wrenching stories; but ending in hope.
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Foz Meadows writes about grittiness and grimdark. Very good post. I really recommend taking the time to read all of it. She writes, for instance, that if
the grim in grimdark comes only from the presence of graphic violence, full-on sex, drugs, swearing, disease and character death, then it should still be possible to write grimdark stories that lack rape, domestic violence, racism and homophobia, and which feature protagonists who are neither straight, predominently white men nor the ultimate victims of same. And yet, overwhelmingly, that is what grimdark consists of: because somewhere along the line, the majority of its authors have assumed that “grittiness” as a concept is necessarily synonymous with the reinforcement of familiar inequalities.
So true; and one of the reasons grimdark doesn’t appeal to me. I want sf/f to look at issues, problematise them and deal with them, instead of just perpetuating the same cycle of misogyny/homophobia/etc.
In this post, Kate Elliott (a wonderful writer!) approaches the grimdark question from the point of view of sexual violence and its unfortunate prevalence in “gritty”, “realistic” fantasy. She counters this with a discussion of consensual sex in fantasy, and why it’s important to portray positive sexual encounters in fiction.
Rape is used way too often as an “easy” way of giving a female character a tragic backstory, for instance. In too many portrayals of rape in fiction, writers don’t pay attention to the actual effects of the act of violence, but instead rape becomes trivialised. It’s especially worrying if a story contains frequent rape scenes or dubiously consensual sex, but little to no consensual sex at all. As Kate Elliott writes:
To my mind, we lessen the story we are telling about human experience if we do not include and see as worthy all of human experience, especially including positive depictions of sex and love. What kind of world do we vision if we only tell the ugly stories about such intimate matters?
Well said. I, at least, want to challenge notions of “that’s just the way it is; women have always been mistreated, so thus it shall be in my Fantasy World”. And I want to write happy, joyful depictions of sex and love in addition to sad things. Who says a happy sex scene can’t contribute to character development?
Now for the nice stuff I mentioned yesterday! Publications!
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Two of my poems are now online in issue 11 of Curio, “a journal of poetry that explores the world at a micro-level: tiny spaces, instants, individual objects, scraps of dreams and memories, et cetera”.
‘Silver and Gold’ and ‘Man Playing Piazzolla’ can both be found here.
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Both were written last year. The first draft of ‘Silver and Gold’ happened in early February. I was still working as a research assistant for the Varieng research unit at the University of Helsinki at that point, on the top floor of the Metsätalo building. Lovely views of rooftop Helsinki: the office room I worked in had a view of Helsinki Cathedral. Anyway, one evening in February I was at work late – well, no longer doing research assistant stuff, but working on my MA thesis after my paid job, as was my way. (Those were good times. Yes, seriously! Getting to write my MA thesis at an actual office at uni instead of home or in the library – brilliant.)
Anyway, early evening, I shuffled into the corridor for a break and chanced to see an enchanting view from the big glass wall: thus, a poem. It’s one of the approximately three poems I wrote during the three months I was both working and intensively writing my thesis. So I’m even more pleased that it has found a home!
‘Man Playing Piazzolla’ was written in September last year when I challenged myself with a “week of poetry” as I occasionally do. I was unemployed, wandering the city with my friend, and came across one of the most enchanting street musicians I’ve seen in Helsinki. I’ve seen him since, but that time in September was the first. Magic indeed. He was straight out of an urban fantasy story, and I may yet use him as character inspiration!
There you go. Long rambles about my poems. 🙂 Hope you enjoy them!
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And another poetry sale: my poem ‘Beauty Remembers’ is forthcoming in Polu Texni! Yay!