Born Under a Bad Star ( a Trixi of the Fenidadd story )

Little bit of background: Trixi is the central character of several stories I've begun writing and discarded over the years. Her people have been called many things from Little People to Breen and now Fenidadd. Her companions have, excepting a few spelling adjustments, remained the same stalwart fellows over the years (Cuz, Caspian, Kate & Phil). Essentially they are Pixie sized forest people living on a temperate island. They have no family but each other, and they get it loads of trouble, usually because Trixi is bored and something dangerous and possibly stupid sounds like fun. They have fought giants, pirates, sorcerers, bigotry, and now a blood thirsty water cult.

The story of Trixi&co is very dear to my heart. I first hatched the shape of the idea in fifth grade when I ran around at recess with a gang of friends I wanted to help me explore ideas for a series of short fantasy adventure tales. I wrote the first complete draft of The War of the Giants, and surrounding events when I was in sixth grade (It received second at the ACSI Young Author's fair) and was the longest thing I'd ever written (If I remember correctly it was about 30/40 double spaced typed pages so I'd estimate about 10k words).

The second draft of War of the Giants was written my sophomore year in high school over the course of my thanksgiving break in a last ditch effort to finish nanowrimo in 5 days (I got to 16k before I ran out of time). That remains, in my mind the best week of my literary career. I was ecstatically proud of those 16k words. I had never been up to then or since, so prolific.

Of all the stories in my head, Trixi's is one that I genuinely wish I could figure out how to tell completely and share with others.

This latest incarnation draws more heavily on scotch gaelic/celtic and less on Sir Barrie/the Caribbean.

The coille shelters many things. The stature of the Fénidadd may be short but their memory is long and as far back as the elders of their people now remember, they have made their homes along the southern edge of the coille, the great forest. It is the mother of all, providing shelter, food, and inspiration.  

My Process, as flawed as it is, and oh, it is flawed

Unless you've run into me camped out at one of my regular coffee shops or down at the pub you probably don't know that I write the most when I write by hand. I find that writing first drafts on a laptop or desktop to a) be too much of a distraction b) an idea killer. Excepting a handful of short stories I almost never write straight into a computer. I always carry around a couple notebooks in my purse or backpack that are designated for various stories I'm working on at the moment. When I get a few pages done, I will then and only then type up what I have because I'm also obsessed with knowing my running word count lol.

I prefer to write in either small (5" x 7") journals or composition books. This past year comp books have been my material choice (pens are always Sarahsa's) and I've been needing a new one for a YA novel I started plotting this week but if you've been school shopping this year they are fucking expensive. We're talking $2.50 compared to a spiral notebook which clearances at about $0.99. So you can perhaps appreciate my absolute glee when I walked into a Moscow, ID Staples and found comp books being clearanced at $0.99!!! I just about squealed and did a little dance right there in the store. I bought 5 new notebooks and a graph paper one as well (because I have to take two research & stats classes this year and I hate doing math on plain lined paper, always have). I also got a new pack of my multi-colored pens for $5 (about a dollar off). All in all a very profitable trip :)

Re:Comments, housekeeping I suppose this might be called

Some lovely people have been giving me feedback about the excerpts which is AWESOME. I dont have a writing group so it's a relief to have people reading and leaving concrit. I've been fiddling with various Blogger hacks pertaining to REPLYING to comments so that people will be notified and I honestly cant judge my success. Theres a reason my fandom blog has lived exclusively on Livejournal since '03 and will never move and thats the fact that nuts and bolts features over there are so much more polished and logical.

My point is I think i'm pretty good about responding to every comment (or i try to be) and I dont want anyone to think that i'm not reading and responding to their comments just because Blogger frankly kind of sucks at stacking replies and layering discrete replies and actually notifying anyone. and also to ask if anyone is getting notifications from @[blogger userid] <----- style replies

What's the hardest part about writing for you?

I was reading an article about how to find a good balance of Narrative > Action > Dialogue and it helped me highlight (in my mind) the biggest problem with how I write: my "style" is much much too Action heavy. This bogs down the flow of my story, makes it difficult for me to figure out how people get from point B to point C to point D because I'm buried under the details of them eating lunch and opening doors and running down stairs.

The reasons my writing is hampered in this manner are basically 2 fold.

1. I purposefully made myself start writing like this several yrs ago after a second read-thru of Frank Herbert's Dune because if my memory serves his style is fairly action heavy in sections and I wished to emulate him (though I never did it more than very poorly). I also wanted to boost word counts and action description is a relatively simple and lazy way of doing just that.
2. Most of the time when I write I see the story like a film in my head. And my instinctive desire is to portray the story in much the same ways you might a film, ie with long camera pans setting up scenes, locations, viewing action without words to highlight character action, changes and development. Often I find myself trying to capture, with words, the play of light and atmosphere and sound that a film gives you.

So balancing Narrative & Action is the hardest challenge I face when writing and the biggest thing I need to work on. What about you?

Impact of the Palouse Lentil Festival

I'm all for community activities. I quite enjoy going to Lakefair and the Thurston County Fair. The upside to these events is the fact that theyre accompanied by plenty of parking. I woudnt have a beef with the Lentil Festival in Pullman except for the fact that it closes down the two major streets with free parking around my coffee shop and attracts every single non-student who inevitable fill up the pub and/or make it almost impossible to get into my coffee shop.

I had planned to pop round for a nice relaxing manhattan and do some writing, instead i've secluded myself in the DG (Daily Grind) where i'm deafened by the raucous whir and grind of blenders (because heaven forbid people drink anything besides a terrible ice cream blended monstrosity q.q)

I'm vaguely worried I'm going to break down and end up watching Princess Diaries 2 on youtube instead of getting anything actually accomplished.

WHOA how has it been this long between posts?! <---- that's my first reaction to pulling up my blogger dashboard. Second reaction was OH YEAH, Hades Week.

In other words, I had the play DUH.

The play went pretty well. We made a little over $350 (our goal was to make enough to rent a real venue next yr and possibly afford script royalties so $300 was the average ballpark). I estimate that I brought in around $50 just from my friends and family that came haha so I did my part. Had the after party on our director's houseboat which was SWEET. I took a picture of the view of the capital from her deck which I might get around to posting a bit later.


In writing news I did manage to get about 300 words written between performances. And then this sunday I went out for drinks (before seeing Captain America in theatres) and got another 500 or so words written. These words went on both "open" scenes. I finished what I had planned out for chapter one though the opener needs to be cut out and either a new opening written or something else added in the first couple pages to flesh it out. I havent decided yet what I'm going to do there, I'm trying to just keep adding to my word count and hammering as much of it all out as I can.


Got back to Pullman yesterday. School starts in less than a week. Ordered my textbooks, now I just need to go pay my tuition. gah.

Amelia update finally!

Sat down and worked on the two "open" scenes I have going in Amelia (chapter 1 in the suite and chapter X their 'first time'). Wrote about 580 words altogether (not bad after a nine day absence). I think there's another 500-1000 words left to write for the 'first time' and that will probably close out that chapter (which i admittedly have not written the first half of, obviously). I'll need to consult my notes.

Boils down to what I said on twitter 'Breaking my writeresblock by writing the sex scenes.' >.> I say sex but it's really just going to be a tasteful R.

I had a moment today when I was working when I realized that despite this being fairly genre (firmly on the action end of Chick Lit, think Helen Fielding's Olivia Joules) I'm not actually sure what kind of market is out there for Gay Chick Lit? It's not as though I'm trying to make a statement with the character, I just wrote these characters down and there was insta-chemestry between her and Detective Kelly. She's a 2/3 on the Kinsey Scale I think, there's really nothing else to it, it just is.

I have more thinkey thoughts to say about this (probably, if I sat down to compose them) but now I'm late for play rehearsal. Will try to write more this evening, make it an even 1k writing day hopefully.

Quick Running Update

Ran tuesday & wednesday. Took yesterday off but spent 2+hrs painting scenery for the play + another 1-2hrs rehearsing so I figure that counts for something. Did not run today but did do a little bit of riding. Definitely plan on hitting the trail around Capital Lake tomo for a jog if the weather is nice.

No Amelia updates. Should probably set myself the goal of writing 5k on that this weekend. x.x

HEY HEY Look at me!

Look at me I went running! Ok, walk/jogging, but the point is today is monday and I dragged my tired, still!sore (went riding on Friday for the first time in like a bazillion yrs talk about OUCH this weekend, god I'm out of shape) ass out of the house and hit the road in my running shoes. Clocked 3.2km (or about 2 miles) averaging the epically slow pace of 6km/hr lols. Still I am proud of myself.

Tomorrow I plan to do an easy 30min walk and 15min of weight lifting.

I also bought some fresh fruits and veggies and a couple Odwalla bars to help scale back the amount of frozen burrito meals I've been having. Baby steps are still steps.

I'm tentatively planning to run a 5k in Spokane either end of September (hah! yeah I dont feel too confident about being ready in 7 weeks but we'll see) or middle of October (more likely though harder to find a close enough race). My goal this fall is to get my butt trained up so I can enroll in either a beginner sport class (like Futball) or weight lifting class at the UREC during spring semester and do a series of longer fun races throughtout the winter/spring (tentatively, I'd like to run a City Half Marathon next summer. I think that's feasible, maybe even a full marathon next Fall if I stay focused? We'll see.)

I've got a good idea what I want to get as a tattoo (a Sapphic fragment in the original Greek if I can find scans of the original papyrus or pot shards) but I've told myself I'm not allowed to get it until I run a 1/2 marathon (If I run a full marathon I'm going to get my motorcycle endorsement :D Yes I have to shamelessly motivate myself like that).


In writing news... well there really hasn't been any writing since my last post (what ten days ago? WOOPS). I wrote about 85 words last week. I've been rather discouraged though after talking to Meagan about why I'm discouraged I feel... not necessarily motivated but like I should suck up my insecurities anyways and get back to work.

I've been distracting myself from writing by tentatively working on my first Fanvid for Whedonland over on LJ >.> IDEK It's fun and diverting.

I'll leave you with some Editors