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Story Transform!
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Jul. 8th, 2008 @ 04:53 pm
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Okay, my story transform is like my recipe transforms, where you substitute a new ingredient for almost every ingredient on the list.
Family: Funny, this doesn't taste like spaghetti and meatballs
Me: Yeah, we didn't have any meat, so instead of meatballs I thought we could have potato croquettes, and we didn't have any pasta, so I thought I'd use zucchini cut up in matchsticks, and we were low on canned tomatoes, so I thought I'd use black-bean salsa for the sauce instead, and there's no basil or oregano, so I used cilantro and chives. This is nonsense, though, because I always have pasta and I always have tomatoes, and I almost never have black-bean salsa
Family: D:
The story transform for "The Kappa and the Water Koto" is going to be just like that. Is it possible to like zucchini in black-bean salsa, with potato croquettes? *fingers crossed*
Setting: Warring States period Heian Period
Main characters:
Yuko, kick-ass undercover daughter of a daimyo a minor noble
Tadahiro, right-hand man to Yuko's dad biwa instructor!!
Blind troubadour ( or biwa hôshi, if you want the Japanese term, but now the point is moot) Suspicious temple monk
a kappa
Objectives of characters
Best the enemy in negotiations; report home Find a treasure
Avoid being killed by the kappa
I think this version of the story will be lighter. In both versions, the kappa gets to enjoy music. Yay!I feel...:  amused I hear...: Cascada: Bad Boy |
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blood, sweat, and tears
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Jun. 16th, 2008 @ 01:04 am
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short story snippet:
“Blood, sweat, and tears, that’s your recipe,” said the dog. “The sweat’s in the kneading, as well you know. The tears--you’ve shed plenty already, and they’ve dried out and lie in the dust under your bed, so you must knead them in. As for blood, just a little will do. Your own. Can you manage it, or do you need my help?”I feel...:  sleepy I hear...: Anonymous 4: Wayfaring Stranger |
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my eyes are blind yet I can see
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Jun. 4th, 2008 @ 05:13 pm
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Blind writers, anyone? Homer? Milton?
I was actually thinking of Borges. I was thinking of him because I wanted to know what zahir meant, and he had written a short story called "The Zahir," and I got fascinated, reading about it. I now must read the story. (I've read its companion piece, "The Aleph.")
The Wikipedia entry on his story does also tell what zahir means; it says:
In Arabic, zahir ( ظاهر ) is an active participle with meanings denoting apparent, visible, obvious, manifest, surface, exoteric, exterior, literal, superficial, etc. Al-Zahir is a name of God, the Manifest, paired with al-Batin, the Concealed.
But in Borges's story,
A Zahir is an object that traps everyone who so much as takes a look at it, even from afar, into an obsession that finally erases the rest of reality.
In another story ("Deutsches Requiem"), published in the same year as "The Zahir" (1949), Borges wrote,
I had come to understand many years before that there is nothing on earth that does not contain the seed of a possible Hell; a face, a word, a compass, a cigarette advertisement, are capable of driving a person mad if he is unable to forget them.
It's like an evil mantra, a mantra infected with the power to snare your mind rather than free it.
I see the truth of what Borges says very clearly. In the past, I've stood on the edge of obsessions a number of times but fortunately never crossed the event horizon--I've always gotten away, gone off and chased butterflies, not fallen into that maelstrom. Thank God.
Incidentally, Zahir is also the name of an interesting-seeming journal of speculative fiction that has published the likes of ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sovay.I feel...:  fascinated but not obsessed I hear...: The Dukhs: Death Came a Knockin' |
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One way to enter the Other World
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May. 26th, 2008 @ 08:11 pm
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This morning I may have heard a hermit thrush. A hermit thrush is what a wood thrush would sound like if you heard it in the fairy world, which I think I'll call the Other World for a bit. (Here is a recording of a hermit thrush)
Except of course, you can hear the hermit thrush in this world.
Or maybe when people hear it, it's because they've crossed over? (Or, the Other World's come rolling in, which is how it often seems to me.)
I've been thinking about the ways of getting there, and one way is those pools of light you can see when most everything else has subsided into sunset or twilight. You'll see one golden patch of light left, some spot that's still lit up. If you go there, you're in. Last week I sat to read in one of those, out in the woods while I was waiting for the healing angel. Then I looked up and it was dark. In that case, I missed my chance; by the time I looked up, the Other World had receded.
I was thinking about it again yesterday evening as I was driving toward a patch of sunlight along a high road--then into that patch of light I went, and it was so blinding I had to stop the car. This made me think: A car will probably not be welcome in the Other World.
I may note other methods of entry and other facts, as I perceive them, about the Other World, as I believe it will figure largely in the next long thing I write.
But I have a short thing on my mind, too, a something that comes from reading watermelontail and thinking about jmeadows's spinning.I feel...:  contemplative I hear...: laughter |
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round three
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May. 13th, 2008 @ 11:20 pm
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I am at work on the third draft, now, of "The Oracle." Very many apologies to jmeadows, who got stuck with the first draft. You can trash that! It has changed....
How many things and people, real, almost real, and more than real, can I be in love with at once? So many, so very many. And that's "in love"--doesn't even take into account the things I just plain love. This intoxication!I feel...:  intoxicated I hear...: Mari Fujiwara: The Wind Forest |
| » The Oracle |
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Thanks to sartorias, I have some wonderful ideas for how to improve this story. Now if I can just live through my hours of work, and try to *concentrate* on that work, and not on what I'm going to do to the story's most unpleasant character or how I'm going to improve the fortunes of the POV character, I'll be all set.
Thanks again, sartorias!
May. 12th, 2008 @ 01:07 pm
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| » maddening honey |
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I'm definitely going to use this, or something based on it, in a story one day:
(From Wikipedia's entry "Rhododendron")
Some species are poisonous to grazing animals. These Rhododendrons have a toxin called grayanotoxin in their pollen and nectar. People have been known to become ill from eating honey made by bees feeding on rhododendron and azalea flowers. Xenophon described the odd behavior of Greek soldiers after having consumed honey in a village surrounded by rhododendrons. Later, it was recognized that honey resulting from these plants have a slightly hallucinogenic and laxative effect.
Traveling through the links (God bless the Internet), I come to this, from Pliny the Elder, on "Maddening Honey":
In the country of the Sanni, in the same part of Pontus, there is another kind of honey, which, from the madness it produces, has received the name of "mænomenon." This evil effect is generally attributed to the flowers of the rhododendron, with which the woods there abound; and that people, though it pays a tribute to the Romans in wax, derives no profit whatever from its honey, in consequence of these dangerous properties ... What can we suppose to have possibly been the intention of Nature in thus laying these traps in our way, giving us honey that is poisonous in some years and good in others, poisonous in some parts of the combs and not in others, and that, too, the produce in all cases of the self-same bees? It was not enough, forsooth, to have produced a substance in which poison might be administered without the slightest difficulty, but must she herself administer it as well in the honey, to fall in the way of so many animated beings?
May. 11th, 2008 @ 11:01 am
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| » the inestimable watermelontail |
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is quite a storyteller. Unfortunately his entries are mainly locked, and a writer needs privacy, anyway, when writing, but perhaps he wouldn't mind if I shared this:
He's writing one now about the Red Hem Archer, whose arrows have square notches, such that "threads that bind a person to that which they love will catch in those notches and break; Red Hem shot the lover from her beloved, the businessman from his money, parent from child, drunk from drink."
Reminds me of these lines from "The Sisters of Mercy," by Leonard Cohen:
It's you who must leave everything
That you cannot control
It begins with your family
But soon it comes round to your soul
One day, I hope, watermelontail will finish his story and it will be published.
Apr. 29th, 2008 @ 05:35 pm
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| » The Oracle |
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Yes, I have oracles on the mind. The story I'm writing with an eye toward Coyote Wild's YA issue is about what happens when a young oracle comes out with an unpopular pronouncement.
I think it's going to end up a little long (judging by how many words I have so far), but I will write it until it's done, and then see about cutting down, if need be.
Just today I figured out how the end will work. I took Molly-the-dog and the umbrella crow for a walk to the post office, and on the way, it all came clear (and the secret lay in the oracular pronouncement, after all--as one might expect).
Gosling is the pet name for the oracle; it's what his family always called him before he was discovered to be the oracle. Five is his older sister, who is now his attendant at the temple of the spirits. Guess what her birth place was in the family. Whose futures depend on how Gosling's pronouncement is interpreted? Well, pretty much everyone in the kingdom known as Gate of the Mountain. Who else has an interest in it? The petitioning party from the Kingdom of the Plains, which is a much bigger kingdom and has an agenda.
I had better earn my keep, now, for a bit, however.
Apr. 28th, 2008 @ 10:10 am
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| » on the one hand, earthly remains, house sparrows |
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The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. It looks over and says, "Whaaaaaat are you doing?! Whaaaaaat are you doing? Are you nuts?"
And the left hand says, "Just chill. Weren't you doing something like editing? Just carry on. Everything's fine over here."
Which is just to say, a person can be rational, rational, rational and crazy, crazy, crazy simultaneously. Note to concerned public: the left hand generally does not quite manage to do anything crazy, but it's always trying to. The right hand, realizing that it can never be sure what the left is up to, has become a nosy busybody and is always slapping it down.
It's raining wet snow out there! This is depressing to most sane people, but I want time to go s-l-o-w-l-y, so I'm fine with it.
Sometimes the ground swallows people up and leaves only random bits of their clothing. I wrote a flash story on this topic and got some good suggestions for revisions from kythiaranos and seajules and their colleagues at Flash Me Magazine. I'm going to revise that story one day, and expand it.
Not today, though, today I'm editing, and if I'm not editing, I'm working on that last chapter of The Noon and Midnight Lands
However, yesterday I did see the only remains of some poor soul. I captured them on film:
Yesterday, too, I saw a house sparrow investigating this little hole as a possible place to live. I thought of anushsh's house sparrows in Bangalore.
Mar. 31st, 2008 @ 12:31 pm
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| » "A Crowd of Bone" |
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I'm so glad that, in wandering through this life, I happened to be so lucky as to read "A Crowd of Bone," by Greer Gilman. Reading it isn't like reading other things, it's like dreaming. You have to read it the way you'd dream a dream, and that's what it's like--a dream. But as you dream along, you realize it's a dream that makes sense. And then you read more, and you realize it's a dream that's truer than life.
So-called naturalistic fiction can be really dreary and grim. This tale gets at the ache and pain and soul-tearing-ness of human life, and yet is marvelous and mysterious and beautiful. But not fools gold beautiful. Nitty-gritty beautiful. Uncompromising, and poetry, at the same time. It doesn't tell you a single lie, and yet the whole thing is a legend. There's love in it, and danger, and death, and struggle, but hope, too. And lots of song.
"A Crowd of Bone," by Greer Gilman, in Trampoline, edited by Kelly Link, published by Small Beer Press, 2003.
Jan. 18th, 2008 @ 06:47 am
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| » Gallows Maiden, Newgate Calendar |
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This was a shattering story to write, and now I must go back to my paid work.
You know how Sesame Street is brought to you by the letter S and the number 3 (for example)?
Well, among the things that brought me the Gallows Maiden was the Newgate Calendar. I've mentioned it before--write-ups of the lives and deaths of criminals from the early 17th century to the early 19th century. Here was an amusing vignette about Isaac Atkinson, a highwayman who specialized in robbing lawyers (though in this vignette it's a parson he robs). ( vignette--from the Newgate Calendar, not from Gallows Maiden!-- under the cut )
Jan. 14th, 2008 @ 05:05 am
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| » The gallows maiden |
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A story with that name has just popped into my head. I think I might write it (it's a short story, not a long one) before I write the concluding chapter of The Noon and Midnight Lands, which currently is **99,000** or so words. Oh yeah, oh yeah!! Longest thing I've ever written.
"The Gallows Maiden" could have been a poem but I don't think I have the skilz to pull off the type of poem I'd like it to be, so it will be a story instead.
In other news, the fairy realm slid itself into the mundane world on trailing banners of mist this morning...
The person who caught it best, though, is heyes, especially in this beautiful shot.
Jan. 8th, 2008 @ 09:13 pm
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| » A trip to York |
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In June 1845, Anne and Emily Brontë went for a holiday to the city of York. Daphne du Maurier, in her biography of their brother, writes,
Anne did not speak of the holiday in her four-yearly birthday note, written a month later, but Emily did, saying nothing of sight-seeing, shopping or the Minster, only that they enjoyed themselves very much, and that during the excursion they were "Ronald Macalgin, Henry Angora, Juliet Augusteena, Rosabella Esmalden, Ella and Julian Egremont, Catharine Navarre, and Cordelia Fitzaphnold, escaping from the palaces of instruction to join the Royalists, who are hard driven at present by the victorious Republicans." This glorious feat of imagination on the part of Emily--twenty-seven the day before she wrote the note--shows that she ... moved joyously and freely in her own fictitious world.
Daphne du Maurier, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1961), 212-13.
What a feeling of recognition I had when I read that. High fives, Emily!
Dec. 31st, 2007 @ 03:49 pm
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| » Wraggle Taggle Gypsies |
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A friend was telling me about a song--an old (where "old"=hundreds of years old!) ballad called "The Wraggle Taggle Gypsies," and as he was telling me about it, I realized it was the same story as a song I'd heard recently called "The Gypsy Laddie."
Well, he gave me a link to a site where you can hear a midi of one version of the tune, and see the lyrics AND the terribly romantic and tragic story of two lovers whose story became associated with the song. Here is that link, but I'll also copy down the words of the ballad, because I can't resist! Check out the alternative tunes and words at the website--the lyrics for "Johnny Faa" are in Scots dialect and make reference to the story the website mentions, and the ones for "The Gypsy Laddie" include him abandoning the lady at the end.
( lyrics )
And then here is the story that came to be associated with the song, according to the website my friend found:
( the story )
Jun. 28th, 2007 @ 01:25 pm
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| » telling stories/物を語る |
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I think I fall in love by the grace of stories--or maybe it's that I'm in love with stories. ( Read more... )
And in semi-related news, Majestico is now more than 40,000 words!
Jan. 15th, 2007 @ 02:30 am
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| » the news from yesterday |
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I was falling asleep in the tub, and I heard this swishing noise, and it was my braid, which had been curled like a single quotation mark around my head, resting on the top of it, sliding back down the back of the tub and into the water. I woke up, finished washing, and am just going to post this before going to bed.
The morning started like this. ( daybreak )
The sunrise took my mind off the fact that I suspect the undiscovered country is about to disappear. The path into it has sticks, with little orange streamers tied to them, and numbers on the streamers, stuck into the ground at intervals. These items are the first sign that a place is about to be developed.
At lunch Little Springtime and the ninja girl had the leftover garlic soup--they hadn't had any last night because they were babysitting. They liked it! That means everyone liked it. It was very, very, very delicious. Great recipe, dream_wind; thanks for sharing it!
All day I remembered that in the evening I would have to take the healing angel to a special meeting at church to prepare for the third-grade mass on All Saints, which he's reading in. All day I remembered, until I started raking leaves and harvesting half my Jerusalem artichokes. So... I missed the meeting. I am such a hopeless idiot about those things. (What things? I'm not sure... certain obligations, no matter how many ways I try to remember them, end up slipping out of my head...) Well, the head of the religious ed program is in choir with wakanomori, not to mention the healing angel himself (and Little Springtime), so maybe wakanomori can make apologies for me... I will make apologies myself, too,but what's especially pathetic is that I phoned up to check the time, earlier in the week. If I were the religious ed teacher, I'd be pretty exasperated.
The Jerusalem artichokes, though! There is a huge abundance! I took some pictures...
( Read more... )
I cooked up about half of what I harvested today (there are still the ones in the back to harvest), using this recipe for rosemary Jerusalem artichokes, and they were **yummy**!
I love it when the earth just provides like this--it reminds me of what it was like in Eden.
When I wasn't going to church, and it was very dark out, the sun having set, I was dragging a tarp of leaves into the backyard, and to do this, I was running down the hill in the back, and the lights of the apartments on the other side of the swamp were shining through the leafless branches of the trees, and I got to thinking about a city that is only visible at night--its lights appear, in the distance--but people are never sure how to get there...
So maybe that will get into one of my stories. Now, off to bed.
Oct. 30th, 2006 @ 02:28 am
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