personal babble

Sunday recs: Issue 10 of inkscrawl

Published on by Sara Norja

Longlong time no recs. I’ve been wandering the fields of exhaustion; the novel project is still ongoing, and I’ve got far too many other things heaped on my plate as well (work, of course, is the main thing). The novel progresses; but I’m annoyed at myself for being slower with it than I expected, annoyed that I haven’t been posting about it. I promise there will be a post at some point, hopefully when I’ve sent it off to beta readers (which I’m hoping to do in around a week). I have a lot to say about what the past two months (! it has not felt like that long!) of revision have been like. But no time now, since I have to be off to bed.

But I’ve got time for a brief rec, because I just read all of the latest issue of inkscrawl and loved it: a long, multifaceted issue with an amazing collection of poems. Bogi Takács has really done wonders with this!

So, I recommend reading all of Issue 10! I especially enjoyed the first section, “shout / gnaw / skitter / thrash / fly”. But all the poems are great and this was a wonderfully well curated issue, becoming more than the sum of its parts.

Alphabet of Embers contributor copy

Published on by Sara Norja

I’ve been quiet on the blog front, but for a pretty good reason, I think: all through August, I’ve been hard at work revising my novel. I’ll post more on that later, but for now, a bit of squee!

Last week I received my contributor copy of An Alphabet of Embers. My reaction:

for aoe post

It is such a beautiful book! Likhain’s illustrations really pop out in the print version, too.

This is the first contributor copy of an actual book that I’ve ever received. Milestone! I’ve previously received a contributor copy of the Finnish magazine Spin, but a book is, well, a book! It feels special. I felt so happy seeing my name there on the back cover, in the ToC, and aaaah my story in this wonderful book – it’s a glorious thing! This project has been one of the coolest things I’ve been involved with in the SFF scene so far.

Refilling the well

Published on by Sara Norja

I thought I’d do a lot of writing during my summer holiday. But alas, I reckoned without the intensity and busyness of that holiday – and my need for physical, simple things, instead of brainwork. So yeah, it’s been wonderful, but I haven’t been writing much. I started a new short story, have some poem snippets, and have tinkered a little with my novel, but it’s much less than I planned.

I’m trying not to let my perfectionist self get the upper hand. Yes, I could’ve/should’ve written more. But the reason I wasn’t writing was that I was busy out there living. Refilling my creative well with sunshine, the faint summer starlight of the northern hemisphere, pattering rain, reading a lot, folk music, dance, sparkling wine, the laughter of friends and loved ones. I’ve experienced many of the joys of a Finnish summer in the past couple of weeks: Kaustinen Folk Music Festival, an extravaganza of music, and what a rush it is to perform dance there; a wedding, complete with dance shenanigans and a battalion of mosquitos; picnics with friends in the balmy weather; and this week, the heady joy of summer cabin life (and last night, more folk music and sauna).

It was so important for me to get to go to a lakeside cabin this year. I hold it all close: The skin-shivering heat of a wood sauna. Rereading the marvellous novel The Goblin Emperor (by Katherine Addison) on the jetty, basking in the sun. Brisk morning swims in the lake, leisurely daytime swims. The searing pleasure of plunging into the lake from the sauna at night, of floating on the still water and staring up into the breadth of the sky. The wind in the trees. Rowing on the lake towards a far-off island. I was constantly reminded of my Strange Horizons story – in which I’ve tried to capture something of what our old, now lost summer cabin means to me.

Yes. Not much writing, but so much doing. Soon I will get cracking with writing again, get more discipline back. But for now, I’ll still indulge in one more weekend of purely filling the well: Helsinki’s roleplaying convention Ropecon, more friends, and more joy.

“Water, Birch, and Blood” out in Strange Horizons!

Published on by Sara Norja

My story “Water, Birch, and Blood” is now out in Strange Horizons! It’s a portal fantasy (of sorts) with a queer female couple, set in a Finnish summer cabin. Birds, birches, quiet magic.

Water, Birch, and Blood

"Full Moon" by O Horvath
“Full Moon” by O Horvath

Featuring beautiful art by O Horvath!

“Water, Birch, and Blood” is also available in podcast form here, read by the lovely Anaea Lay.

***

Story notes: I started this story in summer 2014, trying to finish it for an anthology call which I didn’t submit to in the end (I can’t remember if I self-rejected or ran out of time). I wrote the first draft in a few days and it’s actually surprisingly similar to the final version. Then the story sat abandoned for a year and a half – I had actually forgotten I’d written it, and definitely didn’t remember I’d managed to complete it. But the call for Our Queer Planet nudged my memory, and I was pleased to discover that the story didn’t need a complete overhaul. The main difference is that it used to be in third person; but first person ended up suiting the intimate, introspective tone much better.

I used bits of Finnish bird mythology for inspiration. Corvids are basically seen as kind of evil (or a bad omen at least) in Finnish mythology, so far as I’ve been able to find out. Of course, the corvids in this story aren’t quite that black and white (except for the magpies hehehe :D). Crows were sometimes seen as messengers. Birds in general are very important in Finnish mythology and folklore.

I spent many of my happiest childhood moments in a cabin very similar to the one I’ve set “Water, Birch, and Blood” in. I miss that place a lot, and always feel a strange joy when I can include bits and pieces of it in my fiction.

I am very fond of this story, and I hope you enjoy it! I’m thrilled to be part of Our Queer Planet.

Recharging

Published on by Sara Norja

Long time no post. It’s been a ridiculously busy year so far, and sadly, due to the mountain of work, I haven’t been writing nearly as much as I’d like. I joined Camp Nanowrimo with the intent to get lots of my novel revised, but alas, I’ve had to conserve energy for self-care and such. I think Camp Nano would have worked if I’d been producing a zero draft, but revision requires a whole other level of abstract thought and above all, decisions.

But I have been doing a little bit of revision – so the project of revising the novel I (re)wrote last November has been started, at least. I’ve imported the draft into Scrivener, made notes and pondered things quite a lot even if I haven’t got very far. I mostly have questions instead of answers at this point! But it’s a start. I’m trying to think positive instead of feeling horribly disappointed in myself. But really, April has been ridic. I’m trying to think more along the lines of “I deserve a medal for not utterly collapsing so far in 2016”, so I shouldn’t beat myself up for not managing to do epic amounts of novel revision at the same time as a trillion other things.

Luckily, many of the busy things that have eaten up my time and energy this semester have now wound down. And now, I’m taking a four-day holiday before plunging into funded PhD work (yay!). I really need a break, even if it’s short!

I spent this morning reading some of Becky Chambers’ A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (around 80 pages in, it has utterly charmed me! I hope the rest is as good!). My main plan for today (and the rest of the holiday, really) is to write. Actual writing! Yaaay! I just did a writing exercise – five hand-written pages describing a fictional wine – and now for novel revision, because hey, every little helps. I also have a few short stories I could work on. And perhaps could jog my brain into poem mode too?

So my idea of the best thing to do on a holiday is to write. 😀 It’s (mostly) not like work, I swear! Having had so little energy to write has sucked. Lack of writing has been gnawing at me like it always does: I feel bad when I don’t write, I feel like something’s missing. But now, four days to basically just write fiction is making me feel so excited! Writing is one of my favourite things to do even though I am gearing up more towards the pro side of it so it’s less of a simple hobby than it used to be. So this totally counts as relaxing as long as I’m having fun, right? Other plans: lots of sleep, some fun socialising, and a lot of reading. I hope this tiny holiday manages to get my brain out of stress mode for a bit!

2015 in review

Published on by Sara Norja

Last day of the year; I’m still going to do some writing (on an ooold tale that I just can’t bear to abandon yet); then off to a New Year’s thing if I have the energy.

Anyway, time for my now-traditional writing-related year in review thing.

My writing goals for 2015 (from this post):

  1. Get more stories published.
  2. Get more poems published.
  3. Revise the ms and submit poetry collection for publication.
  4. Start gathering poems together for a speculative poetry collection.
  5. Increase writing output – get back into the groove of writing, preferably every day, even if it’s just a short poem or writing exercise.
  6. Continue to write more in Finnish. It’s been so great to tap into that part of my writing brain this year, so I want to continue experimenting in my other native language too.
  7. Rewrite Dim Vanities entirely. Do this with the help of a proper outline.
  8. Improve my plotting skills.
  9. Finish more stuff and edit previous work to a submittable point.
  10. Submit more stuff, both prose and poetry! Try to submit something at least once a month.

Uh, that’s quite a lot of goals. No wonder I didn’t complete all of them. 😀 Well, that was mostly because of PhD/work-related stress and lack of energy/time. Especially the past autumn has been, quite frankly, rather horrendous because I’ve been juggling so many things and only just managed to keep from bursting apart with stress. But so, how did I do with these goals?

1) I totally got more stories published! Yay! Not in pro magazines, perhaps, but nonetheless I got four stories published. I’m especially proud of “Moss”.

2) I got more poems published too, although less than I’d have wanted, alas. But I’m especially happy with my sales to inkscrawl. And with the cute origami chapbook Watching the City.

3) Wellll I failed at revising my poetry collection and submitting it. Sigh. I’ve been putting it off because of busyness for ages – and I was going to work on it now in December, at latest – but nope. Too much stress –> it’s really hard to revise such a thing.

4) I actually forgot I even had this goal of gathering poems for a spec collection, probably because I wasn’t making headway with my other collection either. Anyway, um, this is totally a good goal and I should pursue it next year.

5) I don’t think I’ve actually increased my writing output – 2014 was pretty good for writing lots. This year has been so busyyyy that I haven’t written as much as I’d have wanted. However, I have finished more short stories than in 2014, so that’s something. (Haven’t sold too many of them, but still.) Definitely didn’t manage to write every day except during Nanowrimo. This is defo something to work on – the routines of writing.

6) I wrote more in Finnish! Yaassss! Poetry as well as some prose. This is a big deal for me and I’m very pleased that one of my Finnish stories (first draft written in late 2014, though) got published.

7) I REWROTE DIM VANITIES (now with a different working title: The Beast of Briarwood Hall). This is one of my biggest writing achievements of 2015. During Camp Nanowrimo and then Nanowrimo proper, I rewrote the novel that keeps haunting me – and the version I have now feels like it could actually work. Like I only have to revise instead of majorly rewrite. And I did it with more outlining than I’ve ever used before. I feel so happy about this. I’m planning on starting the revision in January and am really looking forward to it!

8) Improving plotting skills – hmmmm such a vague goal. I have written more short stories, and thought extensively about plot wrt the novel rewrite, though, so I suppose I have improved a bit?

9) I finished some short stories – and finished the zero draft of the novel. So yeahhh. And I’ve been working on finishing some previous stories that I’ve left to languish on my harddrive.

10) I submitted stuff, yes, but not nearly as often as once a month, alas. The silliest was submitting so little poetry – I have oodles of the stuff lying around, but didn’t submit much. Work-busyness can mostly be blamed for this. It’s hard to muster energy for submitting stuff when you’re tired. However! I have submitted more short stories than ever this year. Lots of rejections, naturally. But I have compared to previous years, I’ve submitted so many short stories. Yay for that.

***

To remind myself that I did indeed publish stuff, here’s all my publications in 2015:

POEMS (7 + the 6 in the origami chapbook):
03/2015 “Palimpsest” in Issue 216 of Snakeskin.
04/2015 “Pomeranian”, “Lauttasaari Bridge”, and “Human Nature” in Issue 217 (April Short Poems) of Snakeskin.
04/2015 “The World in Springtime” in The Stare’s Nest.
06/2015 “Betweening” in Issue 8 of inkscrawl.
07/2015 Watching the City, a micro-collection of six poems from the Origami Poetry Project. Print it out and fold it into a tiny book!
12/2015 “Storm-yarn” in Issue 9 of inkscrawl.

PROSE (4 stories):
03/2015 “The Ruin” in Issue 21 of Luna Station Quarterly. Short story.
06/2015 “Moss” in Issue 26 of Silver Blade Magazine. Novelette. (TW: implied incest)
09/2015 “Memory” in The Flash Fiction Press. Flash fiction.
12/2015 “Vierain silmin” (‘With Strange Eyes’) in the Finnish speculative ezine Usva. Short story. I recommend downloading the PDF, it’s got pretty pictures and nice formatting. (in Finnish)

***

Also, I joined Twitter. 😀 It’s been a wonderful way to keep up with the writing community and I’ve met some great people! Procrastination galore, of course, but Twitter has really helped me connect with other writers.

***

Soooo what about the new year? Here are (some of) my writing goals for 2016:

  • Submit more stuff, both prose and poetry! Try to submit something at least once a month.
  • Get more stories + poems published (in pro markets if possible).
  • Revise the ms and submit poetry collection for publication.
  • Start gathering poems together for a speculative poetry collection.
  • Increase writing output – get back into the groove of writing, preferably every day, even if it’s just a short poem or writing exercise.
  • Revise The Beast of Briarwood Hall and (possibly! maybe! yikes!) submit the ms to agents.
  • Have fun with writing and remember the joy of it even amidst PhD stress.

There. Tried to make those somewhat more concrete than last year’s. You will notice a lot of stuff got carried over, too. PhD and other workstress has been making it harder to concentrate on the bigger goals. But I need to write – writing makes me happy in a way nothing else does – so I need to work on finding the mental space and energy and time to write even as I’m working on my PhD. Here’s hoping I manage, and that 2016 is less stressful than 2015!

I wish you a wonderful new year, dear readers. May the writing force be with you!

Nanowrimo epic win!

Published on by Sara Norja

No Sunday recs today – I’m too wiped out by a) finishing up a (not great) draft of an academic article in the morning, and b) writing around 5,000 words of my novel and thus WINNING NANOWRIMO YAAAY. This counts as an epic win because not only did I get over 50k, I wrapped up the whole story, too.

113 pages, 17 chapters. LibreOffice says I’ve got 51,565 words, the Nanowrimo website says 51,871. But whatever the precise wordcount – it means Nanowrimo success, and I actually finished this novel draft too, typed “the end” and all. Feeling dazed but very pleased. This is the most coherent Nanowrimo draft I’ve ever managed! A lot of that is thanks to the fact that I was using a lot of elements from the old version of the novel – but in the end, this novel is very distinctly its own thing.

I think I’m getting a bit better at plotting too, which is encouraging. I tried many different tactics for plotting before Nano, but in the end something like the “tent pole” method worked best (see this excellent post by Chuck Wendig). I figured out the most essential plot points – both external and internal – before Nano and especially after the first week, when I stopped to plan things out properly. Then, as I wrote, I figured out the stuff that needed to come in between those plot points, and by the end was outlining chapters in even more detail. This method worked for this draft, at least!

Oh yeah, how weird was it to actually divide the novel into chapters during Nano? REALLY WEIRD. But it seemed to work for this draft, surprisingly enough.

I think that with some editing (well, plenty) this might become Something. And that makes me very happy. I’m so glad I didn’t abandon this old idea – which was what I was on the verge of doing at the end of October. I’m so glad I managed to have enough energy to write every day (or very nearly every day) during a month that has mostly been horrendously busy, and dark, and stressful.

Nanowrimo saved my November.

Flash fiction sale to The Flash Fiction Press

Published on by Sara Norja

My flash fiction piece “Memory” (fantasy, of sorts) will be appearing in The Flash Fiction Press on 21 September. I’ll post a link when it’s up!

After a bit of a fallow period during my all-too-busy summer, I’ve been increasing my fiction & poetry submission volume during the past couple of weeks. I’ve also got a lot of new – and some old – stories brewing, including a sequel to Moss. In fact, since I just spent the past hour and a half trawling through my notebooks and typing down ideas into a file for later consultation, I actually feel a bit overwhelmed by ideas. 😀 Always more ideas than time to write! And so many projects I’m working on/want to work on! (I really need to revise my poetry collection and actually send it out. I’ve been sitting on it for far too long…)

However, now out for a walk to brainstorm one of those story ideas.

Coming up later today: Sunday recs! I’ve been reading SO MUCH good stuff this week.

Worldcon in Helsinki in 2017!

Published on by Sara Norja

So, Helsinki won the bid for Worldcon in 2017! I’m incredibly excited about this news! It’s going to be so awesome. My hometown is a fabulous spot for Worldcon (I MIGHT be a bit biased, of course :D), and Finnish cons are really well organised so I know this one will be too. I’m just ridiculously excited that writers whose work I admire may be coming to my city in two years.

Worldcon, a bike ride away from my house! HOW COOL IS THAT.

Blast from the past: Writing advice from Sara aged 13

Published on by Sara Norja

I was randomly browsing a couple of my old diaries last night, and came across a rather interesting entry from when I was 13. In it I angst profusely about how my stories are shit: my plots are shit because I don’t plan them in advance, my sentences sound terrible, I’ll never write anything decent! But at the very end of the entry I give some surprisingly sage advice to myself: just keep writing something even if it’s shit. Yes good, 13-year-old self!

Anyway, the entry includes some more writing advice from 13-year-old Sara, so I thought I’d share it with you for the lulz! It was originally written in Finnish – I used to write my diary more in Finnish; these days it’s almost entirely in English, interestingly – so this is a translation. But I’ve kept the original capitalisation and excessive punctuation for your reading pleasure. 😉

***

SARA’S WRITING ADVICE, AGED 13:

If you don’t have a proper plot, you don’t have anything. And a proper plot won’t happen unless you have a proper main character and bad guy. The main character MUST NOT be blah and boring – but somehow special. And they DON’T NEED TO BE perfect or anything, but they have to have FLAWS AND BAD HABITS AND PREJUDICES!!!!! [drawing of three angry-looking skulls]

And the bad guy – they’re REALLY IMPORTANT. They have to be really merciless, but not stupid and PATHETIC! They have to feel REAL and sensible too!!

And the plot has to make at least some sort of sense and must be COMPLEX and above all INTERESTING!!!!! And especially the beginning needs to be good, otherwise the reader’s interest will stop right there…

AND THE TEXT HAS TO FEEL ALIVE!!!!! You have to carry the reader with you and the text has to sound GOOD…

So there’s the basic guidelines à la Sara.

***

13-year-old me definitely loved her exclamation marks times five, huh? 😀 This is very much navel-gazing, but I think it’s fascinating that even when I was that young, I was analysing my own writing (even if from an angsty “IT’LL NEVER BE GOOD WAAAAH” perspective). And from the perspective of potential reader response, too! I also note in the same entry that inspiration needs to be fed for it to keep going, which is actually surprising, considering that when I was younger I basically believed in the magical sort of “strikes you like lightning” inspiration and not so much the “bum in chair, fingers on keyboard” practical approach.

My diaries also include some rather adorably effusive descriptions of how awesome writing is. This is from the entry quoted above:

“At its best writing is like a drug… a LOVELY drug you get addicted to… when you’re writing a SUPER GOOD story, you’re dancing on the clouds and go to amazing places and drink from the chalice of the gods…”

A purple-prose way of putting it, sure, but I still agree. At its best, writing is magic.