Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Bickering Blogfest!

Sooo, it turned out that I had fewer bickering scenes than I thought I did. At least fewer bickering scenes that didn't give away the entire farm, anyway. Thanks to Kristen for hosting this Bickering Blogfest of Awesome, and definitely go check out the other entries!

Set up: Mia and Jean hooked up at the wedding of Mia's sister to Jean's cousin, and in that controlled environment, they got along famously. Now, they are out in the real world of Paris, and it's a bit of a different story... I cut out the non-bickering middle. :)

[Excerpt removed]
I'm still on hiatus until July 16, and my comments for this blogfest might be a little bit slow, but I'll get there! I hope you enjoyed Mia's bickering :) And also I hope my French isn't too terrible.

Friday, June 25, 2010

An Award! Hooray!

Hello!

I'm going to have to be kind of unplugged and take the next couple weeks off of blogging. I know, I know-- it is going to be sad for me too! I will totally miss you guys. BUT I am going to be away for the next 12 days, and then I have some company coming from faraway lands. If I have time, or something big comes along, I'll post, but consider me scheduleless, and the posts to be bonus content until July 16th!

To sweeten the bitterness of my absence, I thought I'd build some goodwill by sharing an award!

Recently, I received the Fantasy and Sci Fi Blogger Award, from David J. West over at Nephite Blood, Spartan Heart. Thanks David! I'm kind of stoked about it, since I'm not sure there is another award of its ilk around. At least not that I know of. ANYWAY. It comes with rules! I must name five fantasy/sci-fi books or movies that have inspired me, then pass it on to five fellow bloggers!

Picking Five books or movies is hard. But! I will try to make it happen!

1) The Original Star Wars Trilogy. This is hands down number one in all things. I could have cheated and listed each of the three movies individually but... well. That would have been lame.

2)  The Rowan by Anne McCaffrey. I love Rowan. And I love, love, love Jeff Raven. And the entirety of the Talent series, actually! The Rowan is not the best book ever written by Anne McCaffrey, but the characters are so alive and the world so amazing that it really fired my imagination in a lot of ways.

3) Stranger in a Strange Land by R.A. Heinlein. It goes without saying that Heinlein is amazing, brilliant, and a founding father of modern science fiction. But I just said it anyway. This book, along with The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and I Will Fear No Evil and Friday really influenced me as a teenager.

4) Like I didn't just name four books in that last one... But, I have to say that the Dragonriders of Pern make my list, by Anne McCaffrey. Great world building without taking away at all from the characters and their development. She works with such a large cast of characters, but she weaves them together so well!

5) The Crystal Singer Trilogy (Yeah, okay, so I read a lot of Anne McCaffrey in my youth). Because I defy anyone to read Killashandra and NOT fall in love a little bit with Lars Dahl. He's so perfect for Killa. It's like Lois Lane and Clark Kent.

I didn't include comic books because I'm not sure I'm capable of limiting myself to one issue, one trade or one title, but comic books and superheroes have DEFINITELY been a huge influence on me. Though, that probably all goes without saying :)

Okay! I pass this award on to:

Valerie at As the Moon Climbs
Mia at My Literary Jam and Toast (Zombies count right?)
Monica Marier at Attack of the Muses
Matt Delman at Free the Princess
Kristen Yard at Take It As It Comes

Don't worry, I'll still be reading your blogs! And I will probably even be tweeting normally during this hiatus! HOPEFULLY, though, with the break from blogging and the vay-cay, I can get some serious progress made in Helen's rewrite, AND I will definitely be making a Cameo for a blogfest here or there. In Particular, the Bickering Blogfest hosted by Kristen on June 30th!

Have a fabulous weekend, friends and followers!

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Minoan Bull Dancing! (part two)

In the interest of procrastinating further on awardage, I give you PART TWO* of the Minoan Bull Dance post (click here if you missed part one)!
Image from Wikicommons, by SpinningSpark. Minoan Bull Leaper bronze group.

To recap briefly: Bull Dancing is way awesomer than the modern day Bull Fight, so what happened?

Well. First of all, Crete fell and the Minoan civilization, such as it was, collapsed. (Perhaps because Theseus slayed a Minotaur?) The long and the short of it is, we have no real idea or evidence for what happened. Mycenae seems to have conquered them, and then not long after that we have the Dark Ages where we know absolutely nothing about what went on outside of the oral history of Homer's epics.

Not that we really have a lot of information on Mycenaean Greece, either, outside of the palace life, but the major point of all this is that Bull Dancing did not make the LEAP to the mainland of Greece whereby it might have been preserved and passed on to common culture. There's some stylistic art representing it--Mycenae stole a lot of art from the Minoans--but no evidence that it ever took place within Greece itself.

Except the bull dance isn't really dead. Cow-Leaping (aka Course Landaise) is still practiced in modern day France, and Bull-Leaping (aka Recortes) takes place in parts of Spain (seriously, there's pole vaulting involved! and the bull totally survives to be leapt another day!). Wikipedia even suggests that there's a practice of bull leaping in India as well--though I highly doubt it descends at all from the Minoans.

There are a few clips of bull-leaping in France online. That link will take you to some really crazy guys who tie their legs together before jumping. I'm not kidding. I wish I were. But this is maybe my favorite youtube video-- it's about 5 minutes long, but has some great information.




So there you have it! The modern Bull Dance! With all due respect shown to the bulls involved!

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Bad Boy Blogfest!

I have no idea what this is or where it's going (just wrote it yesterday for this fest from the prompt of the word Amok), but he seems like a very, very, bad man. So. That seems close to bad boy? Thanks to Tina Lynn for hosting this fabulous (and much more challenging than I had expected) blogfest! Make sure to follow the link and read the other entries!

The world roared with silence and despair, so loud that his laugh disappeared, like a pebble dropped into a pit that never stops falling. He cracked his knuckles, and she flinched at the pop of the joints. If she could have spoken, she would have screamed, but it wouldn't have mattered. No one would have heard her, either.

"I would apologize, but I know you'd prefer my honesty." He had a feral smile that would have been more at home on a wolf's face than a man's. "And the truth is, after what your husband did to me, this is really only fair. An eye for an eye, so to speak. He took my head, so I'll drive you out of yours."

She wrapped her arms around her knees and pressed herself harder against the wall, cold and unforgiving stone. It was always stone. Why was it always stone?

"Do you know," he went on, "I didn't expect it to be so easy. It kind of takes some of the fun out of it, now." He inhaled deeply through his nose, and exhaled with a sigh. "But I do love the smell of fear and agony. All these women who walk in beaten and walk out emptied of their entire reason for being. What is a woman, in this day and age, without the means to bear children?"

Tears streamed down her cheeks, but she couldn't even sob aloud. He had taken that from her, just as he had taken the wombs from the others. She would heal, of course, and in a week she'd be able to speak again, but for now, while he worked, the only noises she could make were the whisper of cloth against skin and the sweep of her bare heels against the tile floor.

He crouched before her, holding the white nodes in his fingers, strung with thin wires that she had not yet managed to snap quickly enough to stop the pain they caused. His eyes swept over her and then he smiled again and set them down on the countertop above her.

"You're not going to be good for me today, are you?"

She bared her teeth, her fingers curling into claws. He was too fast for her to hurt too badly. Somehow his hands always found her wrists before she could make him bleed.

He tsked and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, opening it up, white and clean. He didn't meet her eyes as he began to refold it on the diagonal. "Then I guess I'll have to do something about it."

She lurched away, but the stone wall and the cabinets served him now instead of her. What had been the safety of shelter now became a cage, and he dragged her out, laughing while she struggled, and bent her over the cold metal counter, her arms behind her back. Her wrists were trapped by his long fingers and he tied the handkerchief around them so tight her blood stopped flowing. The nodes rested just beyond the tip of her nose.

He released her once she was bound, and she straightened, backing away. He paced after her, slow and easy. They both knew what came next. They both knew that he'd win, in the end.

"If you behave, maybe I'll tell you what happened to your child," he said, the wolf's grin stretching across his features when she froze. "You want to know, don't you? Why they made sure it wouldn't live?"

She pulled at the binding on her wrists, her nails digging into her palms, but there was no give. Cold sweat trickled down her spine. Kill him. She wanted to kill him. If he knew, he had been part of it; she understood that much by now.

"Oh, no," he said, picking up the nodes and stepping toward her. She didn't step back. "No, it wasn't me who ordered it, though I would have taken great delight in doing so if I had known what kind of trouble you'd be to me. I didn't even know you existed, then." He nodded to the chair, straight-backed and maned with wiring. "Sit down, and I'll tell you everything."

Her baby.

"That's it," he murmured, when she stepped forward.

The silence roared in her ears, an ocean pounding against a cliff face. She trembled at the sound, and the emptiness that would swallow her whole. He was near enough to touch her, to press the white nodes to her temples, her forehead. His fingers trailed along her jaw as he finished, then traced the shape of her lips.

She snapped at him, her teeth finding flesh and bone. He laughed, forcing his finger harder against her teeth.

"Go ahead," he said. "If you have it in you, after all I've done, I'll call it a success."

They stared at one another. The taste of copper and venom filled her mouth.

"Do it."

She spit out his finger and turned her face away.

He chuckled low and threw her into the chair. "Maybe you'll feel more cooperative tomorrow."

Tears blurred her vision and she closed her eyes. He tightened the straps of the chair around her ankles, and across her chest, still laughing to himself. She let the silence wash over her, the roaring ocean and the desperate agony.

Then fire ran through her, hot and fierce, and even without her voice, she still screamed.

If you prefer a more traditional badish boy, there's always Jean, though. Under the cut, so don't feel obligated unless you want something to wash the taste of evil out of your eye sockets!

Friday, June 18, 2010

The Minoan Bull Dance! (part one)

So, today's entry really should be about the gajillion awards I'm hoarding (Thanks everyone! I'm honored!)-- but I have a gajillion and three tabs open right now and half of them are about bull leaping from the Minoan to the Modern, and if I don't write this entry they're going to keep staring at me for days.

Unlike my usual research topics, this one isn't a direct result of one of my books. The Bull Dance has been on my mind, however, ever since I read Mary Renault's The King Must Die which spends a significant number of pages chronicling Theseus' life inside the bull ring during his time on Crete. She takes some artistic license with the Minotaur, and has a really fascinating interpretation of the labyrinth, but this isn't meant to be a review of that work, so I'll skip over the specifics for now.

The other day I was surfing the web when I came across this news article. Apparently a matador was arrested for fleeing from his bull in the ring. Now, I'm not really pro-bull fighting. When it comes down to it, it's a highly ritualized animal slaughter for the entertainment of those in the stands. Since, as a culture, we seem to frown on ANY kind of highly ritualized animal slaughter, even those for religious purposes (you'll notice that religions which require animal sacrifice have been forced to the fringe of society over the years), I'm not sure why we're still allowing bull fights. BUT, we do. And having just finished the second half of Mary Renault's opus on Theseus, it occurred to me that this might be a remnant, passed down, warped, evolved, and inherited from the Minoan Bull Dance.

Have you ever watched a Matador? The way they move? The way they dance with the bull, leading it and drawing it out, this way and that? Making the bull practically spin on a dime? But of course, the Minoan Bull Dance was never about the slaughter. It wasn't about killing the bull at all-- and that's a huge difference to set aside even after 3000 years.

 From Wikicommons, a fresco of Knossos, Crete. Wiki dates it anywhere from 17th-15th centuries BCE.

Mary Renault paints the Minoan Bull Dance as a cooperative showcase-- man and bull together in harmony. A team of men and women worked together to keep themselves alive in the ring while they leaped and allowed the bull itself to throw them into the air. The bull, after a time, would know the dance as well as the team. It was a performance of skill which required perfect timing and a relationship (I would even go so far as to say a relationship of TRUST) to the animal they worked with. There are no swords or spears featured in the information we have left of the Bull Dance, but there is plenty of evidence for acrobatics.

Historians suspect that the Minoan Bull Dance was an integral part of the religion of ancient Crete, but we honestly don't know why or what it was for, and it's all further complicated by the fact that the Minoans seemed to emphasize the worship of goddesses over male gods, though they had both. We know it was important because Bull Leaping iconography was everywhere and kind of a lot of it survived in frescoes, figurines, etc. But it could have just as easily been a rite of passage for youths, too, religious in nature or not.

(Side note: This is kind of where I think about how we have all these super hero action figures that will never decompose, and someday, someone is going to dig them up and think Superman was the center of our lives. But generally speaking, when there's this much evidence of something all these years later, before the days of mass production, it did figure pretty centrally in the culture, or so much work and sweat--not to mention resources--wouldn't have gone into it.)

I wish I could tell you more about Bull Leaping and Bull Dancing in Minoan Civilization, but in spite of the fact that I have at least 5 text books on ancient Greece and the Aegean Bronze Age at my fingertips, information on the Bull Dance itself is scarce. (Trust me, I just searched through all of them.) When it comes down to it, we just don't know. We have no real written records outside of linear a and b tablets from that time, and those weren't exactly treatises on religious rites or culture. The Bull Dance is very much still a mystery. Which of course makes it great sport for fiction.

In my next* post, I'll discuss the much more probable descendant of the Minoan Bull Dance-- and it isn't the Spanish Bull Fight.

*next being kind of relative. I'm sure I'll get there eventually, though!

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Character Interview Blogfest!

Thanks to Sangu at Echoes of a Wayward Mind for hosting this one! I'm looking forward to going around and getting a chance to meet everyone's characters! Head over to her blog to see the list of participants!

Against my better judgment, my interview was with Adam from The Book of Generations. He's... well. You'll see. I was trying to understand his motives a little bit better. In that regard, he was quite informative. Also, as usual, slightly obnoxious.

Me: So why did you go?

Adam: To give her my blessing, I suppose. To prove that I wouldn't interfere.

Me: That doesn't make any sense.

Adam: I needed her goodwill. You know as well as I do that there was no hope of getting any of the rest of what I wanted. She was pathetically in love with that man, and once she said her vows, once she chose to marry for love, there was no hope for anything else. If it had been another lifetime, I might have tried to take her, but holding Eve against her will isn't an easy thing to accomplish, and it would only have made her even more suspicious of me. Besides, the DeLeon's aren't a family to be trifled with. Maybe if she had been some poor Farmer's wife, it would have been different. But that family wouldn't have rested until she was found. And like I said, she was in love with him already. It wouldn't have mattered.

Me: You DID try to take her in another lifetime. When she was in love, and it didn't stop you.

Adam: That was before she was under the protection of that Norse oaf. The man she was married to… well, he made me look like the better option, no easy feat when she knew me for what I was. And the man she loved was dead.

Me: You couldn't have known that.

Adam: You'd be surprised how quickly word spread then. Rumor, of course, saw to that. The goddesses had more freedom then, and we all knew the story of Helen's abduction. Especially in Troy.

Me: Ah. Of course.

Adam: You think you wouldn't believe a goddess who stood before you in all her glory? Mistrust would have insulted her, and the punishment for that was fierce. You'd have listened too. You DO listen, too.

Me: That's different. And we're not interviewing me. We're interviewing you.

Adam: Are we?

Me: Yes. We are.

Adam: And yet…

Me: If you’re going to be difficult, I’m sure Thor would love to share his thoughts.

Adam: I’m sorry, what were you thinking earlier, about not believing a word spoken by gods and goddesses who entertain themselves with mortal lives?

Me: Olympians. Thor is different. You know he is better than I do. And if he weren’t, Eve never would have loved him.

Adam: Just because he prefers to hand out justice rather than whim doesn’t make him different. He still interferes for his own reasons and to allay his own boredom. It passes the time. And good as she is, it’s no different for Eve. We all need distraction. Sometimes, if you meet the right person, you can even forget you’re going to have to watch fools make the same mistakes generation after generation. At least until that person dies and your left alone to contemplate your fate. Again.

Me: I thought you liked it.

Adam: The alternative is death by flame and lightning. And what waits for an immortal after death? What happens to a god when he dies? I don’t even think Thor knows – does he?

Me: It’s never come up.

Adam: Of course it hasn’t. He wouldn’t want to frighten you.

Me: But you’re not a god. If everyone else God made gets Heaven, why don’t you?

Adam: Who said?

Me: Said what?

Adam: Who said everyone else God made gets anything? God didn’t. I would know. And if you won’t trust Olympians, you can hardly trust Michael any further. Talk about having ulterior motives.

Me: What about Gabriel?

Adam: Gabriel does what he’s told. And says what he’s told to say. How much of that was ordered by Michael, and how much by God Himself is a mystery. But I, for one, won’t stake my life on any of it. And since this is, supposedly, an interview about me, I assume it is my life under discussion?

Me: I knew this was a bad idea.

Adam: You’ll be grateful later when all of this starts spinning stories in your head. And then I’ll be back, and you’ll be glad I didn’t try to shelter you from the truth.

Me: Gee. Thanks.

Adam: The least I could do.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

New Layout!

Also, a new About Me tab! Yes, I have finally learned how to give my blog pages! Hooray!

Unfortunately, the customization options as far as text colors go seem to lack the flexibility I desire. This will do for now, but one day, I aspire to having white text in the sidebar for ease of reading. For the time being, you can find all the sidebar "about me" information under the About the Writer tab, plus a little bit extra. So hopefully that will cover it for the moment...

I was kind of going for something Thor-friendly :P

Have a fabulous weekend, one and all!

Friday, June 11, 2010

A Friday Post, With Lots of History!

First of all, I have some important announcements.

1) My writerly friends on Twitter are AWESOMESAUCE.

2) Yesterday, I wrote the greatest query of my LIFE. If was for the wrong book, though.
GENERATIONS previously held the distinction of being the MS with my BEST QUERY LETTER EVER. The title has now been passed onto COST OF LIVING. (I'm not in love with the title for that MS at all. For the record. Mostly I just refer to it as Thairon's book, and pretend it has no title until pressed and even then I only give it up grudgingly. In fact, the filename of this awesome new Query is "Thairon BEST QUERY EVER.")

EDIT: I got a partial request this morning! Clearly my joy and pride was not misplaced!

 3) Oh My God, Chris Hemsworth is HUGE. Thank Goodness, because I wouldn't be able to sit through a movie with a wimpy, twig thing Thor. I think he's given Hugh Jackman a real run for his money in the bulking up department.

Now that those two things are out of the way, I can get to the real matters at hand. Namely, some awesome archaeological and historical finds! For starters, "they" have found the OLDEST LEATHER SHOE EVER in Armenia! (There is a LOT of capslock going on in this post, for which I apologize! It will stop now!)

Apparently the shoe is 5,500 years old, and so remarkably preserved you can see how it was formed to its owners foot. It's the equivalent of a women's size 7, for those of you wondering, but if you haven't clicked the link it is worth it just to see the picture of this shoe and how well it's preserved.

Now, it's not really the shoe itself that compelled me to report on this. I mean, sure it's cool to see how ye olden shoes were constructed. The thing that really gets my goat is the fact that it is 5,500 years old.

Allow me to do the math:
2,010-5,500= -3490

In 3,490 BCE somebody lost their shoe. Or purposely left it behind. Why? And why did they stuff it with straw first? To prevent odors? My friends, this was before Hieroglyphs were even developed in Egypt. JUST about the time when the wheel was invented! The idea of the wheel may not even have had time to MAKE it as far as Armenia! THAT is when this shoe is from. Just think about that for a minute.

Tell me that doesn't blow your mind a little bit.

Happy Friday!

Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Useless Dialogue

I really love this dialogue, but I can't use it. Or I haven't figured out how to use it. It's part of a scene that I had to backtrack and rewrite, but I couldn't bring myself to delete it because I liked the exchange too much. So. I'm posting it here so that other people can enjoy the ridiculousness. It isn't part of any book. It's just some gratuitous crap I've been working on for myself. And when I say for myself, I mean for my personal entertainment.

The man, Donnar, who Hannah's talking to is, of course, Thor (taken roughly from the old German and modernized). I guess he's trying to keep a low profile. Hannah is in Iceland with a, uh, friend, when Donnar shows up-- the friend, Jake, has no idea who Donnar is, but Hannah knows. In the first bit, Jake is annoyed that Hannah is going to ditch him for Donnar. In the second bit, Donnar becomes involved in the conversation after Jake makes the mistake of attempting to literally shake some sense into her.

I sighed and looked up. "Look, Jake, I'm sorry. But we both knew that whatever this was, it wasn't going to last."

"No," he said, his face hardening into lines I didn't like. I had never really liked his face, but when he laughed, when he was talking, it was easy to forget. His charisma overpowered you. Except when he was angry. Then it was just frightening. "This was my chance. Our chance. After all this time. Now you're going to just throw it away for some pro-wrestler-looking idiot?"

"You really shouldn't call him that," I mumbled.

"Yeah, well, he can grind my bones to make his bread if he's offended."

I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing. Because it was true and ludicrous and Jake didn't even realize what he was saying. The lines in his face were deep grooves, now. He wouldn't have found it funny if I started laughing.

Donnar smiled. An altogether different expression from the one he had shown me earlier. This one was dark and smug and threatening, like a wolf stalking prey. He didn't have to say anything. Jake stepped back.

"It is one thing to treat a woman the way she likes to be treated," Donnar said, his voice low. "And quite another thing to manhandle her without respect. Touch her in anger again, and I'll rip out your throat."

My stomach turned to ice. "Donnar!"

"It's all right, Hannah. I'm sure that Jake understands my meaning."

"You can't just go around threatening people with death," I murmured.

Donnar turned to me, one eyebrow raised, and I realized very suddenly that he absolutely could. We stood on his lands. And even if we hadn't, there was very little he could not do.

I took his hand and drew him away. "What you can do, and what you should do are two different things," I said. "And I let him treat me this way. Punish me, not him, for the result."

Donnar smiled, smoothing the frown from my forehead. "I will be many things for you, anything you wish me to be, but not your judge. I am not your god."

"You aren't his, either."

Donnar glanced back at Jake, and I saw what he did. Red hair and enough height that he would have been tall beside anyone else. Anyone but a god. "Viking Irish, I would guess."

"Then only half yours. Let him go."
So yeah. This is me selfishly preserving words I can't even justify keeping in my writing when I'm not writing for anyone else.  For my own amusement. Feel free to disregard!

Are there any awesome one-liners or exchanges that you had to cut from your WIP that you wished desperately you could have kept? Or throw a party with the muse when you can squeeze them back in? And uhm... am I the only one who writes gratuitous crap just for themselves with no intention of ever making it into something publishable?

Tuesday, June 08, 2010

And The Winner Is....

Thanks so much to everyone who participated in the Dream Sequence Blogfest! I had a great time reading everyone's entries, and you guys made it so much more successful than I ever dreamed it would be! (ha ha. ahem. sorry.)

But I promised one lucky participant an Amazon Gift Certificate in the amount of 10 dollars, and through the random number generation skills of my husband (who did not see the sign up sheet, since he doesn't read my blog. Seriously. At all. I have to pull up the page and make him sit down on my computer if I want him to read stuff), a winner has been chosen!

As stated on the original Dream Sequence Blogfest post, the winner had to have posted a scene, signed up, and commented on the Dream Sequence Blogfest Announcement post. I made my husband generate numbers until one of them matched that criteria.

So without further ado, The Winner!

STUART SHARP!

Please shoot me an email or comment with your email address, and I will e-mail you an Amazon Gift Certificate! 

I hope that everyone learned a little bit about what makes a dream sequence work by reading the other entries and through the comments on your own! I know that I learned a few tricks, and got some good suggestions for my own scene! Thanks so much to everyone who left me a comment-- I couldn't respond individually this time, but know that I totally appreciated all your crits, suggestions, and kind words!! (Yeah, I know. I have an exclamation point problem... :P )

Oh! If by some chance I missed your Dream Sequence post and you didn't get a comment from me, PLEASE let me know so that I can go read it!

Friday, June 04, 2010

DREAMFEST HOOOO!

Welcome One and All to the Dream Sequence Blogfest! 

I am thrilled to host this event for you all! Hopefully we all got to challenge ourselves a little bit, by writing a good sequence, and hopefully we can all learn about what works and what doesn't from the posts of our fellow participants! Please do get around to comment on everyone's posts, and offer them some feedback so that we can all write bigger and better dream sequences in the future!

Thanks so much to everyone who is participating! I'm heading out to read all your posts right now! You can find all the blogs who are participating on the Mr. Linky!



[excerpt removed]

Thanks for stopping by, for commenting, and for participating!! You guys are awesome! The winner of the Amazon GC, drawn randomly, will be announced on the blog on Tuesday!

Thursday, June 03, 2010

Dream Sequence Blogfest REMINDER!

IT IS TOMORROW!

SIGN UP HERE.
(Don't forget to leave a comment if you want to be entered to win the Amazon GC.)

I'm looking forward to reading everyone's posts! (one early entry here that I've seen so far! Another early post here!)

DREAMFEST GO!

Er. At midnight, I mean. :)

Tuesday, June 01, 2010

It's Tuesday!

I need to post about something today, but the Theseus letter is a hard act to follow, especially since I was away all weekend. You'd think it was some kind of holiday or something. (I feel a little bit guilty making that joke because Memorial Day is serious business, but I am equally determined not to do a Memorial Day post, so, I guess that's that.)

So what am I posting about today? I haven't been doing a lot of research recently-- I was once again derailed by a side project from Helen and didn't get the reading done on Theseus that I meant to this weekend, so I have nothing to report in that regard. I've been looking up a lot of French for the side project that is so awesome at derailing me. For some reason, I like latching onto secondary and tertiary characters and giving them stories of their own. Obviously this involves a lot of French because I like to torture myself with languages I don't speak. (Oh, Icelandic! Someday! I promise you! French means nothing to me! It's just a fling!)

But here's the thing. Sometimes, you just have to write it. Sometimes, a character comes along with a voice that grabs you, and you just have to listen. Sometimes that means putting aside the project you're working on and getting it out of your system. Sometimes repressing the voice just makes it shout that much louder, and makes it that much harder to keep working on what you're determined to work on. Sometimes, you just have to do what you have to do.

Which brings us to this guy. He quit his job, and decided to just walk across the United States. Because he can. Because it seemed like the thing to do. Because he just wanted to do it. This guy should be an example to all of us who write, all of us who are pursuing some goal that seems outrageous or impossible or bizarre, that doesn't make sense to anyone else outside of ourselves. We should all be like this guy, and not let the fact that people don't get it, get in our way. Because you know what the best part of this guy's story is? All the people he's met on his journey who DO get it, and want to help him move forward.

No matter what you're trying to do, no matter what story you want to tell, need to tell; no matter how impossible it seems, how insurmountable the industry might appear; there are people who are interested, people who want to know, people who are willing to help and willing to lend you an ear or a moment of support. And most of all, it can be done. You can do it. Just like this guy. So.

I'm just writin'.

What about you?