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reading people's stuff
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Jul. 16th, 2008 @ 02:14 pm
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What ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sartorias was writing about genuinely good writing advice (here) got met thinking about critiques and beta readers and all that.
( what's in a reader? )
So what about the rest of you? Do you expect or want different levels of response at different times? Do you like giving critiques? Do you like receiving them? Does it depend? If so, on what?I feel...:  curious |
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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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synchronicity du style "les bonnes fees"
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Jun. 17th, 2008 @ 01:45 pm
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A number of people mentioned the new webzine Les Bonnes Fees, and when I went and looked, lo and behold, they had an article on spinning in fairy tales (by K. C. Shaw). It talks about spinning nettles, and all! I feel like my interests are in harmony with some portion of the LJ hive mind :-)
One of the poetry authors, Peggy Landsman, did the art that accompanies her poem--it's so pretty, and you can see it here (the poem is called "La Luna/The Moon"). dkolodji also has a poem in, with a very apt photo illustrating it. (Both poems are lovely; there's a third poem I haven't read yet.)
One weird feature of the zine, though, that mab_led mentioned, is that it has advertising links right in the text of the stories and poems. So for instance, the word "palm" in the story "Fairy Frogmother" leads to ads for... palm pilots. :-\
Otherwise, though, it's very pretty. Next break I take, I'll have to look at the fiction.I feel...:  busy |
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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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lots and lots of research materials
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Jun. 13th, 2008 @ 12:34 pm
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American Murder Ballads and Their Stories, by Olive (Olive?! All this time I assumed the author was a man!) Woolley Burt. (c) 1958, Oxford Univ. Press.
Just fascinating, and I'm only dipping in. It has Omie Wise in the first chapter.
A Treasury of New England Folklore: Stories, Ballads, and Traditions of Yankee Folk, ed. B. A. Botkin (c) 1947
Dense w/stuff. Tis LONG. How about this rhyme, apparently from Westport, Massachusetts
A swarm of bees in May
Is worth a load of hay
A swarm of bees in June
Is worth a silver spoon
A swarm of bees in July
Is not worth a fly
It also has counting-out songs and jump rope songs, which I love, like:
Last night and the night before
Twenty-four robbers came to my door.
When I went down to let them in,
They knocked me down with the rolling pin.
Ten ran east and ten rand west
And four jumped over the cuckoo's nest.
Folklore in the English & Scottish Ballads, by Lowry Charles Wimberly, a 1965 Dover reprint of a University of Chicago publication from 1928. ... YUMMY!
Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock Before the Plague, by Judith M. Bennett (c) 1987, Oxford Univ. Press
Medieval Households, by David Herlihy (c) 1985, Harvard Univ. Press
Does anyone remember any jump rope songs or clapping songs from their own childhood? I remember these:
Cinderella, dressed in yella,
Went downstairs to kiss her fella,
By mistake her girdle busted
How many people were disgusted?
ONE, TWO, THREE...<--at this point you're doing the jumprope super fast
Or its variant
Cinderella, dressed in yella
Went downstairs to kiss her fella
By mistake she kissed a snake
How many doctors did it take?
ONE, TWO (etc.)I feel...:  okay I hear...: Deus: Why |
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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 sovay.
Jun. 4th, 2008 @ 05:13 pm
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| » One way to enter the Other World |
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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.
May. 26th, 2008 @ 08:11 pm
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| » round three |
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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!
May. 13th, 2008 @ 11:20 pm
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| » 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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| » Children's authors = AWESOME |
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Children's authors continue to impress me with their friendliness and generosity. The healing angel has been enjoying the Percy Jackson series (Greek myth intersects modern-day life; lots of key events at a summer camp for the demigod offspring of the Greek deities). One day he was giving me a blow-by-blow of some background information, and he was so animated I thought I'd film him. (You can see it on Youtube here; embedding disabled because, well, I don't want the video showing up in weird locations, yanno?)
So anyway, I sent a message through the author's website to him to let him know about it. The guy is a best-selling author; I wasn't even sure he'd ever see the e-mail, let alone respond, but two days later:
Thank you for sharing the video! He did a good job. I'm very glad your son is enjoying the Percy Jackson books and I hope he'll like Battle of the Labyrinth when it comes out!
Best wishes,
Rick Riordan
How generous and awesome is that? And every single children's author I've had the pleasure to meet or communicate with has been similarly friendly, from the relatively obscure to the wildly famous.
Apr. 20th, 2008 @ 07:44 am
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| » a ballad and a painting |
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The amazing writer and painter haikujaguar has posted an evocative watercolor to illustrate the poem "Sir Rosalind Rides":
Sir Rosalind Rides
That poem is by ysabetwordsmith, and you can read it here. It's wonderful; go take a look!
Apr. 18th, 2008 @ 07:49 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 resolution |
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I'm going to rework "The Ballad of Comet Lake" so that it can be sung to a traditional tune. I may have to somewhat gut it, but that's what I'm going to do.
nineweaving's question about the tune, and dissatisfaction with realizing I had been lazy, and some encouragement from wakanomori, have made me resolve this.
ETA: I've chosen my tune: "The House Carpenter." I like its melody, and the verses come in groups of four. I really will have to rewrite the ballad to get it to work, but I don't mind. It will be fun to come out with something that can be sung.
Mar. 2nd, 2008 @ 09:51 am
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| » The Ballad of Comet Lake |
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watermelontail inspired me, at last, to try my hand at my own ballad. Apologies for the roughness of it...
The Ballad of Comet Lake
Onto the ice, the thin ice, of Comet Lake
For his fickle heart and his false ways
Onto the ice of Comet Lake I led him
Oh for his crimes I’ll see he surely pays
For when long twilight, summer’s twilight, lingered
It seemed he loved sweet Alison, my sister
For when long twilight lingered, he did call her
And all be-wrapped in twilight then he kissed her
Then when the leaves, the autumn leaves, did turn
As many shades there are of blood and flame
Then when the leaves did turn, so did his heart
No longer on his lips my sister’s name
A willow necklace, swaying willow, she wove
When breath like ghosts hung in the chilly air
A willow necklace, more costly far than gold
Bought with the life of Alison so fair
So in the heart, the frozen heart of winter
I smiled at him, with kisses won his trust
So in the heart of winter then I brought him
Onto the milky ice where die he must
And crack it did, the thin ice surely cracked
His face grew paler than fresh-fallen snow
And crack it did, and he then backward leapt
And fled to safety off the frozen floe.
And I it was, yes I who slipped beneath it
Upon the fragile ice no footing found
And I it was the deadly waters welcomed
And in their quiet darkness I who drowned.
Genuine ballads are far superior... but I had to give it a try. But this is why ballads come out of me as stories instead of poems or song. Okay, that's all the apologizing I'm going to do.
Mar. 1st, 2008 @ 06:54 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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