Saturday was date night for me, a date with my notebook, favorite pen and iPod. We went to Borders, where I was happy to see Artful Blogging on the shelf, even though the official release date is August 1st. There were only three copies there, but they were right up front — I don’t know if they only had three copies to begin with (when there were 10 or so of the other new issues of Stampington pubs), or if it really is selling that fast. I’ll go back in a few days, I think, to investigate again. Of course, I’d like to think it was doing that well!

The writing, unfortunately, did not go all that well. I blame it on the fact that the only Kay book they had on the shelf was Ysabel. Not that I have anything against Ysabel, but I was planning on buying a fresh trade copy of A Song for Arbonne that night, my own mass market edition being old, falling apart and in storage. I also hoped that a little dip in Kay’s prose before I started writing would warm up my own pen; alas, it was not to be, and I spent the next couple of hours hopping between two works-in-progress and not getting very far on either.

I know a good part of the reason is that I’ve suddenly become hyper-conscious of one aspect of my writing, namely the blocking that goes around dialog. “Blocking” is a theater term, referring to the actions and movement that actors perform whilst saying their lines, but I’ve seen it used for prose as well. Recently, my style has been gravitating away from exposition and especially from the internal stream-of-consciousness of the viewpoint character; I want to show what’s going on in a characters head by what they say and what they do, not by what they’re thinking. The dialog comes easily for me, but I feel terribly deficient when it comes to describing what’s going on. But then, description has always been a bug-a-boo for me.

Back when I was playing on MUSHes — way before Castle Marrach — I actually got quite good at writing descriptions. Because there was quite a bit of freedom to build and create rooms and objects of my own (not to mention character descriptions), I could indulge in textural artistry without having to weave it into a dramatic scene. I don’t have any of these passages readily accesible, or I’d include a sample because (at least as I remember them) some where quite lovely. But their not the sort of thing you’d dump into the midst of a story (unless you’re Robert Jorden, from all reports). Also, it was only descriptions of things, not actions and interactions and reactions and all that must take place within the midst of a narrative scene.

What I’d like to do is delve into some good examples, and while I’m sure I have many, many good choices on my shelves, I find myself hesitant to pick up anything to read lately. Some of that is no doubt a hangover from the marathon Harry Potter reading, but I think mostly I’m afraid of another brain drain that will negatively affect my creative output. In fact, in the week-plus since finishing HP7 I’ve only read a few short stories in the Wizards anthology. I think that’s one reason I was so set on getting Arbonne — a well-beloved book isn’t going to short circuit my creative paths like I’m afraid something I’ve never read before will do. Oh, yes, I know I’m overthinking the whole problem, but I can’t seem to help myself.

At least I made up for Saturday night’s poor performance on Sunday by writing and submitting a flash piece to a contest at the Clarity of Night blog. The piece, Wizard in the Wood, was inspired by one of those Wizard stories, a piece by Gene Wolfe (a writer I never imagined I’d be inspired by myself) about Merlin and Viviane. I’m not sure if my two characters are Merlin and Viviane or not. You’ll have to decide for yourself. Also, be sure to check out some of the other pieces in the contest!

I am almost — almost — looking forward to working full time, once the girls are back in school in September. But I need to backtrack a little to explain why.

Last Thursday, the office was flooded by an errant toilet and my lobby-located desk was in the forefront of the flow (and to explain why my desk is in the lobby would be a further backtrack, which I won’t trouble you with). Clean up was well underway when I arrived, but as my desk was fairly inaccessible and surrounded by men vacuuming up water, and because we had no spare space I could hunker down temporarily (there’s a reason I’m in the lobby, I tell ya), I went home. On top of that, my mother was out of town for the week, visiting the other grandkids, so my work schedule was cut short in order to accomodate the various school and daycare schedules of the kids. All together, I ended up about 8 hours short for the week, which is a lot when you only work 20.

So, now that things are relatively back to normal, I’ve been trying to make up the lost time by staying at the office a couple hours each day. So, six hours, which isn’t really long enough to take a lunch break but is too long to suffer through without sustenance of some sort (at least it is if you’re me!). What I’ve done the past few days is take a long break, 15 or 20 minutes, and walked over to the park across the street. I’ve known about the park for months, but never made it over there before this week, since I don’t usually take long breaks.

It’s a quiet little place with a well-kept lawn and some trees, circled by a sidewalk. One side is bordered by a row of small townhomes and the other is a canyon and creek which is just begging for exploration with a camera. Far down at the other end of the park I can see a playground, and I suppose there’s a parking lot down there, but I don’t know. My breaks don’t give me much time to wander.

But I will have time, once I’m working full time and thus have the required hour break each day. I plan to stow a blanket in the trunk of my car, and whenever the weather is nice enough (and remembr, it’s southern California, so there will be plenty of nice enough days, even through the winter) I can go eat lunch in the park, read a book, write some words…just relax in the out of doors, which is just something I never give myself the time to do lately. I could even, heaven forbid, take a nice little nap in the dappled sunlight. Dreamy…almost enough to make me wish that school was about to start right now. Almost.

Images are freshly-carved stamps of mine; click to view the full proof sheet at Deviant Art. Keep hoping that I’ll actually make some art with these soon.

Look, maybe I am prejudiced, but I do believe my daughter has a streak of poetic genius in her, to go along with her ever-awesome drawing ability.

This was written in her summer school creative writing class. She’s ten (and a half — can’t forget the half) and will start 5th grade in a few weeks.

Swimming
Under the water
Do not swim too fast, or miss the beauty.
Tiny bubbles float
Up and up and up towards the surface.
The tiny ripples
And the light reflecting at the bottom.
It never lasts long.
Soon you must go to the surface to breathe.
But you can go back.
Under water, there is peace and quiet.
It is amazing.
Why must we breath air, and not the water?
You might wonder, too.
Why must we have to leave this paradise,
Under the water?
Why can’t we, too, have gills, fins, and flippers,
As all the fish do?
Swimming is all this. I wish it could last.

by Lucy W.

Why do we “blog” when we could be keeping an adversaria?

Adversaria

\Ad`ver*sa”ri*a\, n. pl. [L. adversaria (sc. scripta), neut. pl. of adversarius.] A miscellaneous collection of notes, remarks, or selections; a commonplace book; also, commentaries or notes.

These parchments are supposed to have been St. Paul’s adversaria. –Bp. Bull.

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

Summer’s more than halfway gone and I feel like I’ve accomplished so little, but it’s hard on a hot afternoon today, when you’ve not gotten enough sleep the night before because certain people on the other side of the globe insist on having interesting conversations about writing even though it’s midnight in your part of the world and you ought to go to bed…

Where was I? Oh yes, it’s hard to concentrate on stuff sometimes, when you’re tired. Even something as seemingly simple as a blog entry.

So while I have a partially written post all about “Story Values” waiting in the wings, and I ought to be filling your ears with all sorts of happy glee about how fabulous my magazine looks all printed and bound, all I’ve got for you right now is a couple of links and, yes…yes, I think I can manage to list a few recent books I’ve read.

We’ll start with the books, in fact, before I sending you off around the internet following my links. In reverse order:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling. (spoiler free, I promise!) While I did not attend any midnight parties, I did collect my copy (Target: $17.99) before noon on Saturday and spent the next 14 hours or so reading (counting interruptions to take care of those pesky kids and dogs). I finished at 2:08 in the morning, which is proof that Rowling has en enviable talent of being to drag a reader in and keep them engrossed in the story despite it’s length (759 pages — big type though). While I was totally caught up in the story while reading, and enjoyed a lot of moments on an individual basis, as a whole I have to say that it doesn’t bear a lot of close examination after the fact. It’s not a great piece of fiction, but it’s fun and ultimately that’s all that really matters.

I have to admit that my need to read the book the first weekend was for all the wrong reasons. I’m not an avid Harry Potter fan, and I’ve read fantasy fiction for so long that I can be infinitely patient when it comes to finding out what happens in the next book (Dance of Dragons, anyone?). I simply couldn’t stand not knowing what happens when sooooo many other people would know. Part of it was fear that I would inadvertently have the ending revealed before I got to read it for myself, but mostly it was a simple case of wanting to be on the inside of the circle of knowledge. Ending Envy, I suppose?

Title, by Someone. I mentioned previously a duology I was reading that sucked the creativity right out of my brain. I’m still protecting my karma by not mentioning that book by name in my blog, but if you want to know what it is I’ll be happy to share with you via email or IM. I’ll say this much — the first book was bad, the second was just boring.

The Privilege of the Sword, by Ellen Kushner. Now, THAT is a piece of writing. My only complaint about this book is that it is too short — the ending comes a little abruptly, and I would have liked to see the main character have more to do with the resolution. But seriously, one doesn’t read Kushner’s books for the plots; it’s all about character and dialog. Tasty stuff here (and no, I don’t just mean Alec and Richard!). This fired my writing mind like crazy, and I should probably go read it again just to shake the last vestiges of cobwebs caused by the previously unnamed book from my brain.

The Hallowed Hunt, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Set in the same world as her previous two fantasies (The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls) which I just love, love, love, but unfortunately this is not quite of the same caliber. Mind you, it’s a good book, just not quite as good as the other two. Still looking forward to the next in The Sharing Knife series, which I’ll buy on the next trip to the bookstore if I don’t opt to replace my copy of Kay’s A Song for Arbonne first.

Now, links. Really nothing spectacular here. First, a post from Storytellers Unplugged, which is titled Syllogistic Vs. Situational and while I thought it was interesting enough to save the link I honestly don’t remember (thanks to my week of brain fog) what it was about. I’ll have to go reread it myself.

Also, my new favorite castle. An awesome place — I’m not sure if I’d rather live there myself or just make up stories about the people who live here. Heck, why not both? Chris….?

That is about all I’ve got for you tonight. Which is probably enough because I can go on and on even when I don’t have much to say. Thank you for not complaining about that! And yes, an early bed is in the cards for tonight, so that I will be clear-headed enough on the morrow to polish up the draft of the 10Q post I’ve been working on, and maybe even smoosh together the poem that I stupidly put into the scene. You can bet that if the post doesn’t show up in the next two or three days, it’s that poem that’s holding me up…

And that, folks, is really all for right now.

I’ve discovered that two things really affect my creative output, both written and visual, in a negative way. One is general tiredness. I’ve been overcome with weariness the past few days, after several nights in a row of restless sleep. I can’t name any particular reason for the unrest except that my mother’s out of town, leaving me the sole caretaker of not just my two daughters but of her two enormous, attention-demanding dogs. You’d think that the extra responsibilities would give me good reason for a night of exhausted slumber, but no. One strike against is Anna, who feels the disruption in the household in her own six-year-old way, and after weeks of not waking me up in the middle of the night was back to climbing into bed with me the first and second nights my mother was gone. But it’s not all her fault; even before she woke me up I had roused myself several times beforehand, certain it was almost time for the alarm to go off only to discover that it had been less than an hour since the last time I checked the clock. I hate nights like that.

I think it’s the dogs, lurking outside my door in the darkness with the vain hope that I might, for no good reason, decide to get up and pet them or feed them in the middle of the night.

The other creative drain is reading a bad book. I’ve seen this happen to me before, and yet even so I am damnably stubborn about finishing things even when I know how bad they are for me. It’s a sad hope, I suppose, that there might be some redeeming factor before I get to the end. Something that makes me smile or gives me a moment of surprise or satisfaction; it doesn’t have to be a lot, really. Sadly, 576 pages later, I am unfulfilled and uninspired. I’m not going to tell you what book it is (since I’ve come to suspect it’s bad karma to bash other author’s works in a public forum), but just an indication I’ll tell you that at one point the heroine, a virgin, asks her love interest to have sex with her to save her from the mental sexual predation of the wizardly villain; he says no — not because he’s being noble, but because he’s irked that she didn’t ask him out of her own desire for him — and then promptly gets killed by the wizard. Yeah, the rest of it is really just as wacky. The only saving grace is that I didn’t actually buy the book; my mother lent it to me and I only wish she’d told me how disappointed she’d been in it before I started it, because she tends to be much less discriminating in her reading than I am, and if she didn’t like it, it’s pretty darn sure I wouldn’t.

So I’ve spent the last week limping through this book (two novels in one volume, actually) and I have felt the creative well drying up inside me all along, the slow drip coming to a complete block when compounded by my tiredness of the past few days. It seems incomprehensible to me that just ten days ago I had to force myself away from the keyboard and to bed at midnight, my fingers dripping words that (in the words of one friend) glittered, and now I can’t even string two lines of dialog together. And I stare at piles of paper and inkpads and uncarved rubber and cannot imagine even one thing to make. Creativity? What’s that?

The cure, of course, is sleep and reading. Good reading. Right now, it’s short fiction, the anthology Wizards (another, smarter purchase of my mother’s) with stories by Gaiman and McKillip and Card and Beagle and many, many other admirable writers, slowly refilling that well that’s been depleted this past week. And later today, Harry Potter. Oh, I know…maybe not the best writing out there, but I’m fairly certain it will refresh my withered creative muscles nonetheless. As in physical exercise, it’s probably better to warm up slowly, anyway. Besides, I refuse to be the only person in the world who doesn’t know what happens by the end of the weekend.

The sleep, of course, is not entirely in my control. There are still the girls to care for, of course, so I can’t just crawl into bed for the whole day, much as I might like to. And then there are the dogs…lurking, watching, following….

There’s not much worse for an introvert like myself than to be invited to a wedding where you don’t know anyone but the bride and her two children. But because one of those two children is best friends with my daughter Lucy, I decided to put in an appearance anyway, if only for the girls’ sake. Look how beautiful they are, after all. How could I not? Of course I barely spoke to anyone the entire time, but they had a blast so I can’t be sorry I went. At least I used some of the time wisely by scribbling dialog on some index cards I’d stashed in my purse.

I’ve been carving rubber like crazy lately, and one of my latest designs turned out to be this lovely curved feather. It reminded me of the insignia of a certain RPG guild, so I had to try it out on some shrink plastic and see what I came up with. As you can see, not all the iterations went so well, but the last shows promise. It’s just a smidge under two inches, which I think makes it just the right size. I would like to get it looking a little less plastic, somehow, and of course I’ll need to find a pin back for it. Anyone else out there who wants one? I’ll be happy to pop for postage!

Of course, the girls got to play with some of the shrink plastic. These are Lucy’s Pokemon charms. Anna made a dog, but she already broke it in two.

The daycare my daughters attend is closed today, so I’m home this morning with the younger one (Lucy’s at summer school*). I have a couple stamps I want to carve, but since I’m out of carving material and the stores aren’t even open yet, I’m wasting some time playing on the computer (I could be writing, I suppose, but I’m not much good at anything first thing in the morning). I was looking at the stats for this blog, and discovered the map to the left, which shows where all the visitors come from (not those of you who read via LiveJournal, I’m afraid!). It’s kind of cool: if you click on the red pointers in the actual interface (not this screen capture) it gives you all the specifics about each visitor, like what browser they were using and so forth. Can you identify your pointer?

*Lucy’s summer school is an enrichment program — she’s taking violin, creative writing and courses called “Kings and Legends” and “Journey to Middle Earth.” She’s actually learning Sindarin, believe it or not! All the same, I think she’d rather be at the daycare with her sister, and playing Pokemon on her Nintendo DS.

Some links I’ve been collecting over the past few weeks:

Curious and curiouser:
The Storytellers: This link popped up in the G-mail ad sidebar and I had to click. It’s a business that uses storytelling models to help strengthen other businesses. The power of story knows no bounds. Though I do have to wonder that they can register “The Storytellers” as a trademark…

Worth remembering:
Why it matters: A collection of quotes about why fantastic literature is important, presented by Terri Windling at the Endicott blog.

On the same note:
The new sci-fi: An interesting piece from the Guardian about the current state of SF on television, and speculation on why it’s no longer just fringe group entertainment. One interesting quote: “Meanwhile, in the wider world, the event that has made sci-fi and fantasy palatable, and indeed positively appealing, to a mainstream audience is 9/11. 9/11 shook value systems and certainties, making the heretofore incredible seem not so outlandish. In a world in peril, we look to the fantastic for succour. The fin de siècle feeling that pervaded culture at the end of the 19th century, when the end was thought to be nigh, produced a burst of enduring science fiction and fantasy literature.”

Joy, Unadulterated:
This Place Looks Familiar: Did you know that right now, in New Haven, CT, they are currently filming the fourth Indiana Jones movie? Due out in May of next year, the same time as Prince Caspian is supposed to be released. What a double whammy! I’m overcome just thinking about it.

Back to thoughtful:
Endings: I didn’t watch The Sopranos, but I could sympathize the fans who didn’t like the non-ending, while at the same time understanding the reasons the creator might have chosen to end the series as he did. Gerard Houarner uses The Sopranos some interesting points in this Storytellers Unplugged column, about the implicit promises a story makes to its readers, and about defying established expectations.

And, since I was tagged by Bri, here are 8 random things about me:
1) I stopped tagging people in blog memes a while back, because I always feel bad when those tagged don’t follow through. Irrational, I know. Also, I don’t feel the need to follow the rules strictly, especially the part about posting the rules of the meme.
2) I only own one pair of shorts. I shrank out of all of them this past year, and I haven’t had a chance to buy more. It’s a bother right now, because of the current heat wave.
3) I had a summer internship with a film company in Hollywood, when I was in college.
4) I gave birth twice without any pain killers, and though I try not to look down on women who choose otherwise, I really do think they’re all a bunch of wimps.
5) I was born on my dad’s birthday, and we used to celebrate every year by having lunch together. Just us. Miss that a lot.
6) I have a 120 feeds in my bloglines feed reader. I cannot possibly read that much, can I? Well, I do get paid for some of it!
7) I’m an “innie”.
I’ve been doing a lot of my writing longhand, lately. For one thing, I can take it with me when I sit by the pool supervising the girls swimming. But I also think it helps free me from the inner editor, since I don’t get so caught up in editing what’s already on the page. I’ll use any paper I can get my hands on — I’ve got one notepad with two different stories running through alternating pages, which leaves me baffled sometimes when I’m ready to transcribe — but I’ve got to use a Uniball Jet Stream pen, in black or blue. It’s fast and smooth and utterly divine. I’m desperately afraid that they’ll stop making this pen, though, but I swear I’ll never go back to Bic.

As a side note, Nin mentioned she never saw the 10 Queens post I made a couple weeks ago — I wonder if there is anyone else who reads this blog through LiveJournal who saw it, or was there some sort of burble in the system? I wondered at the absence of any comments, is all.

Five years ago today, Edouard Ramos died.

Those of you who knew Edouard will have to bear with me while I explain it to the few readers of this blog who don’t know who I’m talking about.

Edouard was a character I played in the online RPG Castle Marrach. Marrach is a text game, not like World of Warcraft with flashy visuals and an empahsis on slaying things, collecting treasure and leveling your character; it’s a very story-centric world with many intriguing characters and intertwining plots. Edouard was an NPC (non-player character, for those uninitiated in gaming parlance); as one of the original design team, I played a lot of NPCs in the early years of the game, but Edouard quickly wormed his way into my heart as a particular favorite, despite the fact that he was one of the least appealing to me at the outset — or, more likely, it was because he didn’t appeal to me that I came to love playing him so much.

You see, as any actor will tell you, to play a part really well, you have have an in-depth understanding of what the character is all about. This goes double for someone writing about a character, and roleplaying is, at its best, a happy combination of acting and writing. Oh, it’s true I could have played Edouard to his designated surface qualities (passionate, fiery tempered, amorous, fickle) and served his purpoes well-enough in the game, but that’s just not the kind of player that I am. To enjoy playing Edouard, I had to find a way to relate to him, and that meant I had to really dig into his psyche to figure out what made him tick.

Now I have to confess that this post is not really a paean to a lost, beloved character (it is that, but only a little). What I really wanted to do was say how much my writing was affected (and hopefully improved) by the experience of playing him. It was in learning to love Edouard that I first truly came to understand the complexity of any individual character, all the layers and textures and details that go into making the whole. If you google “character development” you’ll probably turn up a lot of questionnaires that ask you to supply details about your character like eye color, day job, favorite tv show, what they usually eat for breakfast, etc. You might also find some good advice about building character strengths and flaws, along with motivation and goals. Useful knowledge and tools, all, but I could never stand filling out those questionnaires; it wasn’t just the seeming irrelevance of some of the questions (like what kind of car he drives, when most of my characters had never heard of cars), but the static nature of the information they recorded.

Character is fluid, and it is this very fluidity that makes storytelling enjoyable. If we could count on people acting the same way all the time, there would be no point in telling a story about it. My excavation of Edouard led me to see that he was someone in the process of change — we all are, aren’t we? — and my job as a storyteller was to give him a story that allowed that change to take place. Because that’s the whole purpose of storytelling, to show how people change, to provide a model for ourselves in the changes we must face in our own lives. I may have read this somewhere prior to my time in Castle Marrach, but I didn’t truly understand it until I’d experieced it telling Edouard’s story, and was able to practice ways to show that fluidity and process of change through dramatic means.

I killed Edouard off largely because I was planning to leave the game in the near future, and I knew I never would so long as he was around. But also, with the end of his story arc, he’d changed in all the ways I thought he could; at the time, I didn’t know what direction he could go in afterwards, so it wasn’t TOO difficult to let him go. But the guy still fills a remarkable portion of my brain-pan sometimes. I’ve got at least two Works-in-Progress with characters directly inspired by him (not copies of him, of course, but definitely influenced by). My friend Sol, who played Edouard’s wife, and I still play the game of “what might have been” — to excess, sometimes.

I’m not sure I really expressed here everything I had in my head when I started (but really, if I use the word really one more time I’m really going to kill myself), but I’m at work and it’s nearly time to leave, and I don’t know if I’ll have time to do it later in the day so I have to post now. I really wanted to post an update to Promise, the site where I have archived some of the collected logs from Ed’s story, but every time I sit down to convert the files to HTML, I just end up reading and reading. Maybe, later tonight, I’ll find some time to squeeze it in. In the meantime, you’ll just have to make due with this digital portrait I did last year, when I was feeling particularly artistic. Draw yourself a flagon of ale, and enjoy!