personal babble

Poetry sale: Plunge Magazine

Published on by Sara Norja

I’m back from a wonderful trip to the UK – much silliness, laughter and shenanigans ensued in London, Elmswell and Deganwy. I swam in a glacial lake in my underwear, took lots of photos of castles and the Welsh hills, watched trolling Saruman and enjoyed myself muchly in the company of dear friends. The only downside is that my trip wasn’t long enough to produce proper homesickness for Finland, so now I’m missing the UK rather a lot. That’s what you get for having two home countries of a sort like I do, I suppose.

Anyway, now that I’m back, I can share news of the yayworthy variety: my poem ‘The Understanding’ will appear in the next issue of Plunge Magazine!

Plunge is an awesome new publication with a tagline that piqued my interest at once: “queer. women. genre.”. I’m really pleased that ‘The Understanding’ has found a home in such a lovely magazine. It’s a poem that is a marriage of my love for manuscript studies and fantasy: a lyric from an edition of “Middle Argental” poems. Mmm, fake manuscript editions. So much fun.

I’ll post a link when the new issue is up!

Whinging and worldbuilding

Published on by Sara Norja

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!

Drabble for my grandfather

Published on by Sara Norja

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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Morning pages experiment

Published on by Sara Norja

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.

Walking in snowbroth

Published on by Sara Norja

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:

* * *

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.

* * *

(Snowbroth is among some delicious words I want to start using.)

New poetry in Curio and forthcoming in Polu Texni!

Published on by Sara Norja

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!

Peppermint tea and a new moon

Published on by Sara Norja

Warning for rambling just-before-bedtime thoughts.

I’m drinking peppermint tea and eating my second slice of berry pie. I haven’t done any writing today even though I was supposed to (both academic and creative) – well, apart from my morning pages (I’ve started a trial run again; I’ll blog about it later, perhaps). Today I’ve thought about writing; I’ve read about writing; I went to an invigorating fiddle class and finished my re(re-re-re-etc.)read of Lord of the Rings. And was at work for eight hours before all that, of course.

So why do I feel like I’ve accomplished almost nothing today?

I’ve always been good at trying to take on more than I can handle, and at being dissatisfied with what I do manage to do. At the moment it feels like that again, and nevertheless/as a consequence I’ve been spending lots of time alone and too much time on the internet. Procrastinating, of course. That’s the problem when the “too much to handle” thing isn’t in the form of full-to-bursting schedules right now, but in the form of overwhelmingly big decisions and finding out things and creativity and, well, all sorts of matters requiring extensive brain activity. Which is in very short supply after work.

I get frustrated with myself if I don’t have the energy and creativity for fiction/poetry, but I suppose I should be more gentle with myself. But at the same time: the year is rushing along, and I want to get stuff done fiction-wise too. I want to get my poetry out there. I want to start a new novel, I want to finish a few short stories.

I feel like I need new energy, new motivation. Unsure where to find such things. More sleep would probably help (although I’ve been going to sleep at slightly more sensible hours – finally getting used to my 9-to-5 days?). Dunno what else would. Sheer pig-headedness and perseverance?

I’m going to try to set myself a goal of writing every day – something, anything as long as it’s creative. Should try writing exercises. Should do a poem-a-day week again. Just something to get the words flowing and get rid of this anxiety.

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But when I came back from my fiddle class this evening, I saw a sudden joy: a papercut-thin crescent moon silvering in the sky. It was one of those silhouettes that make my love for Helsinki deepen: Dark buildings on the horizon, where the sky was still a faint shade of orange from the memory of sunset. The colours sliding from orange to eggshell blue to the elven dark of early evening, and the moon a breathtaking silver sword, its crescent hanging almost horizontal in the sky.

A fall and some recs

Published on by Sara Norja

It’s been rollercoaster weather here, the sun melting the snow, temperatures rising – and then shifting back to winter, the frost snapping its fingers. Last night, 15cm of snow, snow so thick in the air that it looked like a deep fog.

I edited 6-ish pages of novelette yesterday, but apart from that it’s been quiet on the writing front, this past week. I’ve recovered from my ear infection, thank goodness. But right after, another mishap: before the snowfall yesterday, I slipped on the ice outside despite walking carefully. Nothing bad: a slightly bruised arm and thigh. But the fall jolted my body, and today all my chronic-pain muscles have been giving me hell. Grrrr.

Just a couple of recs tonight.

Poetry: I’ve been reading old issues of Stone Telling. Both of the following poems are rather grim, but beautiful: Eliza Victoria’s prose poem Sodom Gomorrah, and Sonya Taaffe’s Persephone in Hel.

(The latter poem reminds me: I wrote a poem related to Persephone earlier this year; I should submit it somewhere…)

And here’s a post by fantasy author Marie Brennan on how to write a long fantasy series. I haven’t yet tried my hand at writing a series, let alone a long series, but I’ve read plenty, so I think I can say that Brennan has several good points. 🙂 Especially relating to pacing and POV characters. Anyway, many of her points can also apply to any complex novel, so it’s useful reading!

On finishing

Published on by Sara Norja

I just finished a poem I’ve been working on for the past month – at least, I think I finished it, because you never know. I might want to tweak it. I might get brilliant comments from someone that make me want to change it.

But soon it’ll have to be ready, because I mean to submit it to Interfictions tomorrow. HA.

It was wonderful to work on it today – to write, and to have written. I’ve been writing very, very little during the past couple of weeks, because I’ve been suffering from a nasty prolonged flu that flared into an ear infection last week. I’m on antibiotics now, though, and feeling much better. Fingers crossed that the flu doesn’t sneak up on me again. I’ve had enough of being sick and not getting to go to dance class, thanks very much!

But, poetry! Words again! Feels good. And feels especially good to have pretty much finished a long poem project – possibly my longest ever so far, and with my self, my soul, my history crafted into it. No matter if I never get it published anywhere; for me, this was an important thing to write.

Sunday recs: Sf with a dash of fairytale

Published on by Sara Norja

Happy Sunday, everyone. It’s a grey, mushy one over here, with something unpleasant falling from the sky (ugh, sleet, whyyyy) and the lovely snow turning to slush. I have to go out in a moment, into that mess, but before that – here are some recs again.

First, the fairytale: Houdini’s Sister by Christine Hamm. A lovely prose poem, a praise of fairytale heroines.

Now for the science fiction.

Dysphonia in D Minor by Damien Walters Grintalis. A bittersweet love story about people who sing bridges and buildings into being. I really enjoyed this, especially the structure.

And then, oh, then. Gravity by Erzebet Yellowboy. Earth is covered in ice; a group of people set off towards the sun. This story made me ache so much by the end. Gorgeous, devastating. And such language! Of Mercury: “A dead god has scrawled its name there in a language we have forgotten.” And: “We become Ouroboros in twenty-five days, when the head of our orbit eats its tail.” Brilliant stuff.

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I edited 10 pages of an old novelette yesterday and did sundry other useful things. Today’s mostly for social activities. Which is lovely, but oh, I just wish I had more time! I have so many things I want to write – stories, poems, an academic article – but time slips through my grasping fingers and February rushes onwards.

I really need to finish one poem project soon, though, because submissions to Interfictions end on the 28th. Will have to set aside time for that.